nytimes movie review air

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors.

Now streaming on:

“Air” bristles with the infectious energy of the man at its center: Sonny Vaccaro, who’s hustling to make the deal of a lifetime.

Of course, we know from the start that the former Nike executive succeeded: Michael Jordan became a superstar and arguably the greatest basketball player in the history of the game. And the Air Jordan, the shoe that gives the film its title, became the best-known and most-coveted sneaker of all time.

So how do you tell a story to which we already know the outcome? That’s where the deceptive brilliance of Ben Affleck ’s directing lies. His fifth feature is much in the same vein as the previous movies he’s helmed: “ Gone Baby Gone ,” “ The Town ,” “ Argo ” (which earned him a best-picture Oscar) and “Live By Night.” He makes the kind of solid, mid-budget movies for grown-ups that are far too rare these days. Affleck emphasizes strong writing, veteran performers and venerable behind-the-scenes craftspeople. His choice in cinematographer, longtime Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino collaborator Robert Richardson , is a prime example.

With “Air,” it all comes together in an enormously entertaining package—one that’s old-fashioned but also alive and crowd-pleasing. Working from a sharp and snappy script by Alex Convery , Affleck tells the story of how Nike nabbed Jordan by creating a shoe that wasn’t just for him but of him—the representation of his soon-to-be iconic persona in a form that made us feel as if we, too, could reach such heights. This probably makes “Air” sound like a two-hour sneaker commercial. It is not. If you love movies about process, about people who are good at their jobs, then you’ll find yourself enthralled by the film’s many moments inside offices, conference rooms, and production labs.

The interactions within those mundane spaces make “Air” such a joy, starting with the reteaming of Affleck and Matt Damon . It’s a blast watching these longtime best friends, co-stars, and co-writers playing off each other again, provoking and cajoling, more than a quarter century after “ Good Will Hunting .” Damon stars as Sonny Vaccaro, the Nike recruiting expert who recognized the young North Carolina guard as a once-in-a-generation talent and pursued him relentlessly to keep him from Converse and Adidas cooler brands. Affleck is Nike co-founder and former CEO Phil Knight, an intriguing mix of Zen calm and corporate arrogance. He walks around the office barefoot, yet he drives a Porsche he insists is not purple but rather grape in hue. Vaccaro, as his friend and colleague from the company’s earliest days, is the only one who can speak truth to power, and the affection and friction of that camaraderie shine through.

The year is 1984 (boy, is it ever—more on that in a minute), and Nike’s basketball division is an afterthought within the Oregon-based running shoe company. Nike is also an also-ran among its competitors. Vaccaro, a doughy, middle-aged bulldog in various puddy-colored Members Only jackets (the on-point work of costume designer Charlese Antoinette Jones ), knows Jordan can change all that, and most “Air” consists of him convincing everyone around him of that notion. That includes director of marketing Rob Strasser ( Jason Bateman , whose mastery of dry, rat-a-tat banter is the perfect fit for this material); player-turned-executive Howard White (an amusingly fast-talking Chris Tucker ); Jordan’s swaggering agent, David Falk ( Chris Messina , who nearly steals the whole movie with one hilariously profane telephone tirade); and finally, Jordan’s proud and protective mother, Deloris ( Viola Davis , whose arrival provides the film with a new level of weight and wisdom). Character actor Matthew Maher , who always brings an intriguing presence to whatever film he’s in, stands out as Nike’s idiosyncratic shoe design guru, Peter Moore.

“Air” is a timeless underdog story of grit, dreams, and moxie. In that spirit, Vaccaro delivers a killer monologue at a crucial moment in hopes of sealing the deal with Jordan (whom Affleck shrewdly never shows us full-on—he remains an elusive idea, as he should be, but an intoxicating bit of crosscutting reveals the legacy he’ll leave over time). Still, Affleck very much hammers home the fact that we are in the mid-1980s. Sometimes, the evocation of this period comes in subtle and amusing ways, as in a throwaway joke about Kurt Rambis that made me chuckle. (You don’t have to know anything about basketball in general or this era in particular to enjoy the film, but there are many extra pleasures if you do.) More often, though, Affleck aims to create nostalgia with nearly wall-to-wall needle drops and overbearing pop culture references. As if the lengthy opening montage consisting of Cabbage Patch Kids, Hulk Hogan , the “Where’s the Beef?” ad, President Reagan, Princess Diana, and more weren’t enough, he randomly throws in a Rubik’s Cube or a stack of Trivial Pursuit cards as a transitional device. And the soundtrack of ‘80s hits is such a constant it becomes distracting, from the Violent Femmes and Dire Straits to Cyndi Lauper and Chaka Khan to a truly baffling use of Night Ranger’s “Sister Christian” as Knight is simply pulling into the Nike parking lot.

Still, this is a minor quibble about a movie that, for the most part, is as smooth and reliable as one of Jordan’s buzzer-beating, fadeaway jumpers.

Now playing on Prime today, May 12th.

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

Now playing

A Bit of Light

Peyton robinson.

Accidental Texan

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire

You Can Call Me Bill

Clint worthington.

Mary & George

Cristina escobar.

Little Wing

Marya e. gates, film credits.

Rated R for language throughout.

112 minutes

Matt Damon as Sonny Vaccaro

Ben Affleck as Phil Knight

Jason Bateman as Rob Strasser

Marlon Wayans as George Raveling

Chris Messina as David Falk

Chris Tucker as Howard White

Viola Davis as Deloris Jordan

Julius Tennon as James Jordan

Damian Young as Michael Jordan

Matthew Maher as Peter Moore

Gustaf Skarsgård as Horst Dassler

Barbara Sukowa as Kathy Dassler

Jay Mohr as John Fisher

• Ben Affleck
• Alex Convery

Cinematographer

• Robert Richardson
• William Goldenberg

Latest blog posts

Ned Benson, Lucy Boynton, and Justin H. Min Want to Play The Greatest Hits for You

Until It’s Too Late: Bertrand Bonello on The Beast

O.J. Simpson Dies: The Rise & Fall of A Superstar

Which Cannes Film Will Win the Palme d’Or? Let’s Rank Their Chances

Find anything you save across the site in your account

Tread Softly

By Anthony Lane

Product placement is over. It’s so lame. Why smuggle an item of merchandise into a movie, like contraband, and have people snicker at the subterfuge, when you can declare your product openly and lay it on the table? Why not make a film about the merch? That was the case with “ Steve Jobs ” (2015), which unfolded the creation myth of Apple; with “ The Founder ” (2016), which did the same for McDonald’s; with “Tetris,” now on Apple TV+; with the upcoming “BlackBerry,” which is not, alas, about the harvesting of soft fruits; and with “ Joy ” (2015), which gave us our first chance—pray God it not be our last—to watch Jennifer Lawrence trying her hardest to sell mops.

The latest example of a ready-branded film is “Air,” the product on this occasion being the Air Jordan. The movie is written by Alex Convery and directed by Ben Affleck, who also appears onscreen as Phil Knight, the co-founder and C.E.O. of Nike. The company, of course, was named for a Greek goddess, which may explain why Affleck is decked out with a beard and a hair style that fell out of fashion in 438 B.C. He also gets to drive a purple Porsche and to wear pink running pants, perilously loose around the crotch. Any looser and he’d risk an NC-17 rating. Whether or not Affleck is atoning for the shame of playing Batman, in the DC franchise, it’s pretty sporting of him, in his own film, to set himself up as a comprehensive jerk.

Not that this is a sports movie. It’s not even a shoe movie. It’s a heroic saga of the marketing of a shoe. The action starts in 1984, heralded on the soundtrack by Dire Straits’s “Money for Nothing” (which actually came out the following year). Gloom prevails at Nike headquarters, in Beaverton, Oregon; basketball-shoe sales have been cornered by Converse and Adidas, leaving Nike with a meagre seventeen per cent. The task facing Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon), who has been charged with turning things around, is to find three players who could front a new campaign. But Vaccaro doesn’t want three players. He wants one player, and that’s Michael Jordan.

The joke is that, by every measure of human grace, the hunter and the hunted are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Jordan is Jordan, whereas Vaccaro, as incarnated by Damon, is puffing, paunchy, and clad in such anonymous tones of beige and gray that he could die at his desk, on a cloudy afternoon, and nobody would notice. Yet he does have the knack of perseverance. Thus it is that, to the Krakatoan fury of Jordan’s agent, David Falk (Chris Messina), Vaccaro shows up uninvited at the home of Jordan’s parents, James (Julius Tennon) and Deloris (Viola Davis), in North Carolina, and pleads with them to consider Nike for their son. They graciously oblige; the interested parties convene in Beaverton; the deal is done.

Give Affleck a clear story and, as he demonstrated in “The Town” (2010) and “Argo” (2012), he will stick to the beat. (Too much ambiguity unnerves him; witness the sullen bafflement of “Gone Girl,” in 2014.) “Air” is pacy, adept, and entertainingly well drilled, and his cast, which includes Jason Bateman, Chris Tucker, and Marlon Wayans, has a clubbable warmth. The scenes between Affleck and Damon, longtime friends offscreen, have a barbed geniality that finds its own rhythm; they’re most likable when they needle each other. At one remove from the club is Matthew Maher, as Peter Moore—Nike’s in-house genius, who designs the Air Jordan over a weekend. Unrushed and diffident, Moore thinks solely of the shoe, even though, as he realizes, it’s a pawn in the marketing game.

Step back from “Air,” however, and you begin to grasp how profoundly weird it is; weirder, I suspect, than Affleck knows. Observe Damon, Bateman, and Maher as they gaze upon the finished footwear, bathed in its mystical glow. They’re like shepherds in a Rembrandt Nativity, lit by the natural radiance of the Christ child. And they’re looking at a shoe . As yet, we are forbidden to see it for ourselves; the holy of holies must be guarded from our eyes. Likewise, although Michael Jordan is played by Damian Young, we never glimpse his face. He keeps his back to the camera at all times, the implication being that no mortal actor could hope to enshrine such a being. (Needless to say, there is no attempt to reconstruct Jordan’s moves on court; instead, we get vintage clips of the real thing, on TV.) You may or may not have believed in Will Smith, when he took the title role in “Ali” (2001), but at least you didn’t have to spend two and a half hours watching him from behind.

What is it with “Air,” then? “Like the old religious fetishism, with its convulsionary raptures and miraculous cures, the fetishism of commodities generates its own moments of fervent arousal.” So says the French philosopher Guy Debord in “ The Society of the Spectacle ,” his jeremiad of 1967. It is, I admit, unlikely that every viewer of Affleck’s movie will race home and dive into neo-Marxist analyses of cultural homogenization; some folks will go out for a plate of ribs and a beer. But they might, as they digest, reflect with a frown on the dramatic centerpiece of the film—a speech delivered in the interests of justice by Deloris Jordan, over the phone, to Vaccaro. Because she is played by Viola Davis, a matchless purveyor of moral determination, you can’t help recalling the sequence, in “Doubt” (2008), when Davis went head to head with Meryl Streep over the future prospects of another young man. If anything, the sequence in “Air” is yet more intense, because Davis is filmed in the tightest of closeups. And what is Deloris demanding? That her son be given a percentage of the proceeds from every Air Jordan that is sold. Believe in him, and there will be no doubt.

This movie, in short, kneels at the altar of high capitalism. It even comes with a prophecy. In Beaverton, Vaccaro tells Michael Jordan, in person, that he will be brought low, assailed, and then raised up again, because, unlike everybody else in the room, he is immortal. (Some of those tribulations are displayed in a speedy montage of flash-forwards.) The executives and agents who surround Jordan are like priests, with no visible family or home life; Vaccaro and Falk are both seen dining alone. Only once do we catch a whiff of something troubling in “Air,” when a character mentions that many of Nike’s shoes are manufactured in Taiwan and South Korea. So, does Affleck conclude his film with a wide shot of a factory floor, and of those who toil, on paltry pay, to make basketball shoes? Like hell. Rather, he ends with the revelation that Nike sold a hundred and sixty-two million dollars’ worth of Air Jordans in the first year. Hallelujah.

The new Owen Wilson film, “Paint,” is set in the present day, but only just. Written and directed by Brit McAdams, the movie takes place in and around Burlington, Vermont, and tells the tale of Carl Nargle, who is played by Wilson with a curved pipe, an explosion of frizzy blond curls, and an aura of invincible gentleness. When a friend says that her Uber has arrived, Nargle replies, “I don’t know what that is.” He hosts a show titled “Paint” on a local public-television station; daubing away, and addressing the camera, he deftly completes his pictures live on air. Most of them—and eventually all of them—depict Mt. Mansfield, the loftiest peak in the state. There’s nothing wrong with returning obsessively to one theme; could it be that Nargle is drawn toward his mountain as Bonnard was to his wife, luminously untouched by time, in the bath?

No. Nargle is not a fraud, but his creative powers are of the tiniest. And he’s a fool. Also, as it turns out, he’s a predator. Over the years, most of the women who work at the station, such as Katherine (Michaela Watkins), Wendy (Wendi McLendon-Covey), and Beverly (Lusia Strus), have slipped into his clutches—specifically, into his van, better known as the Vantastic. All of this lends a fresh and menacing overtone to the mantra with which he signs off at the end of his show: “Thank you for going to a special place with me.” What’s peculiar about McAdams’s film is the mildness of Nargle’s comeuppance. Sure, he loses his job, his spot being taken by a younger painter named Ambrosia (Ciara Renée), but it’s not too long before he rediscovers love. So dreamily forgiving is the atmosphere of the plot, in fact, that I found it downright creepy. Maybe all the characters are stoned. That would explain a lot.

“Paint” will win few friends in the arena of public broadcasting—which, the film suggests, is staffed by the semi-competent and enjoyed primarily by smiling seniors in retirement homes and boozers slumped in bars. Yet McAdams does have an eye, and an ear, for the minutiae of melancholy and provincial politesse. Listen to two lovers breaking up on CB radio (“It’s over. Over”), or Katherine wistfully pondering a change of career: “Albany has a ton to offer,” she says. “I-90 and I-87 go right through the middle of it.” As for Nargle, he seems like a refugee from a Christopher Guest film, and I can imagine him, say, as an artist-in-residence among the folksingers of “A Mighty Wind” (2003). Whether he merits a movie to himself is another matter. ♦

New Yorker Favorites

Why facts don’t change our minds .

The tricks rich people use to avoid taxes .

The man who spent forty-two years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool .

How did polyamory get so popular ?

The ghostwriter who regrets working for Donald Trump .

Snoozers are, in fact, losers .

Fiction by Jamaica Kincaid: “Girl”

Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker .

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

By John Cassidy

By Kristen Roupenian

By Rebecca Mead

By Michael Schulman

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Trouble logging in?

By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.

Email not verified

Let's keep in touch.

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

• Upcoming Movies and TV shows
• Trivia & Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
• Media News + More

By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.

OK, got it!

Movies / TV

No results found.

• What's the Tomatometer®?
• Login/signup

Movies in theaters

• Opening this week
• Top box office
• Coming soon to theaters
• Certified fresh movies

Movies at home

• Fandango at Home
• Netflix streaming
• Prime Video
• Most popular streaming movies
• What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

• Civil War Link to Civil War
• Monkey Man Link to Monkey Man
• The First Omen Link to The First Omen

New TV Tonight

• The Sympathizer: Season 1
• Our Living World: Season 1
• Under the Bridge: Season 1
• The Spiderwick Chronicles: Season 1
• Conan O'Brien Must Go: Season 1
• Orlando Bloom: To the Edge: Season 1
• The Circle: Season 6
• Dinner with the Parents: Season 1
• Jane: Season 2

Most Popular TV on RT

• Fallout: Season 1
• Ripley: Season 1
• 3 Body Problem: Season 1
• Parasyte: The Grey: Season 1
• Shōgun: Season 1
• Sugar: Season 1
• We Were the Lucky Ones: Season 1
• Baby Reindeer: Season 1
• X-Men '97: Season 1
• A Gentleman in Moscow: Season 1
• Best TV Shows
• Most Popular TV
• TV & Streaming News

Certified fresh pick

• Fallout Link to Fallout
• All-Time Lists
• Binge Guide
• Comics on TV
• Five Favorite Films
• Video Interviews
• Weekend Box Office
• Weekly Ketchup
• What to Watch

Best Movies of 2024: Best New Movies to Watch Now

25 Most Popular TV Shows Right Now: What to Watch on Streaming

What to Watch: In Theaters and On Streaming

Awards Tour

Fallout : What It Gets Right, and What It Gets Wrong

CinemaCon 2024: Day 3 – Disney Previews Deadpool & Wolverine , Moana 2 , Alien: Romulus , and More

• Trending on RT
• Play Movie Trivia

2023, Drama/Sports, 1h 52m

What to know

Critics Consensus

A fact-based drama that no one will dunk on, Air aims to dramatize events that changed the sports world forever -- and hits almost nothing but net. Read critic reviews

Audience Says

Ben Affleck and a terrific cast score with Air , which is much more entertaining than any movie about a long-ago business deal has any right to be. Read audience reviews

You might also like

Where to watch air.

Watch Air with a subscription on Prime Video.

Rate And Review

Super Reviewer

Rate this movie

Oof, that was Rotten.

Meh, it passed the time.

It’s good – I’d recommend it.

So Fresh: Absolute Must See!

What did you think of the movie? (optional)

You're almost there! Just confirm how you got your ticket.

Step 2 of 2

How did you buy your ticket?

Let's get your review verified..

AMCTheatres.com or AMC App New

Cinemark Coming Soon

We won’t be able to verify your ticket today, but it’s great to know for the future.

Regal Coming Soon

Theater box office or somewhere else

By opting to have your ticket verified for this movie, you are allowing us to check the email address associated with your Rotten Tomatoes account against an email address associated with a Fandango ticket purchase for the same movie.

You're almost there! Just confirm how you got your ticket.

Air   photos.

From award-winning director Ben Affleck, AIR reveals the unbelievable game-changing partnership between a then-rookie Michael Jordan and Nike's fledgling basketball division which revolutionized the world of sports and contemporary culture with the Air Jordan brand. This moving story follows the career-defining gamble of an unconventional team with everything on the line, the uncompromising vision of a mother who knows the worth of her son’s immense talent, and the basketball phenom who would become the greatest of all time.

Rating: R (Language)

Genre: Drama, Sports

Original Language: English

Director: Ben Affleck

Producer: Ben Affleck , Matt Damon , David Ellison , Jesse Sisgold , Jon Weinbach , Madison Ainley , Jeff Robinov , Peter Guber , Jason Michael Berman

Writer: Alex Convery

Release Date (Theaters): Apr 5, 2023  wide

Release Date (Streaming): May 12, 2023

Box Office (Gross USA): $52.4M

Runtime: 1h 52m

Distributor: Amazon Studios

Production Co: Skydance Media, Amazon Studios, Mandalay Pictures, Artists Equity

Sound Mix: Dolby Digital

Aspect Ratio: Flat (1.85:1)

Cast & Crew

Sonny Vaccaro

Ben Affleck

Phil Knight

Jason Bateman

Rob Strasser

Viola Davis

Deloris Jordan

Chris Messina

Gustaf Skarsgård

Horst Dassler

Marlon Wayans

George Raveling

Chris Tucker

Howard White

Jessica Green

Katrina Sainz

Peter Moore

Julius Tennon

James Jordan

Alex Convery

Screenwriter

David Ellison

Jesse Sisgold

Jon Weinbach

Madison Ainley

Jeff Robinov

Peter Guber

Jason Michael Berman

Dana Goldberg

Executive Producer

Don Granger

Kevin Halloran

Michael Joe

Drew Vinton

John Graham

Peter E. Strauss

Jordan Moldo

Robert Richardson

Cinematographer

News & Interviews for Air

Awards Leaderboard: Top Movies of 2023

Golden Tomato Award 2023 Winners Give Thanks To Critics & Fans

The Most Anticipated Movies of 2023

Critic Reviews for Air

Audience reviews for air.

There are no featured audience reviews for Air at this time.

Movie & TV guides

Play Daily Tomato Movie Trivia

Discover What to Watch

Rotten Tomatoes Podcasts

clock This article was published more than  1 year ago

‘Air’ shoots and scores, with story, character, catharsis and depth

We all know how the tale of michael jordan and nike ends up, but ben affleck’s film about it is a smart and entertaining delight.

“Air,” Ben Affleck’s funny, moving and surprisingly meaningful tale of how Nike came to create Air Jordan basketball shoes, might have been a real snore. We all know how the story ends, and do we really need a movie that perpetuates yet another David-and-Goliath myth about a world-dominating corporation?

Apparently, the answer is yes: Working from a well-judged script by first-time screenwriter Alex Convery and enlisting a superb cast of appealing ensemble players, Affleck has created something that Hollywood has seemed incapable of making in recent years: a smart, entertaining movie that, for all its foregone conclusions and familiar beats, unfolds with the offhand confidence of the most casually impressive layup.

The key to any story, especially one the audience already thinks it knows, is choosing the right donkey — the person who will not only lead us through the plot but make us care. Enter Matt Damon as Sonny Vaccaro, a Nike talent scout who, as the movie opens, is working college games and nursing a compulsive gambling habit. “Air” begins in the 1980s, shortly after the company has gone public; although co-founder Phil Knight had attained a 50 percent market share in the athletic shoe market, in basketball he was trailing behind Converse and Adidas. During the era of Rolodexes, Rubik’s Cubes, Reagan and rappers — all of which are name-checked in “Air’s” snappy opening montage set to Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” — Nike’s hippest product was tracksuits, not sneakers.

Sonny’s colleagues at Nike, including marketing executive Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman), field rep Howard White (Chris Tucker) and Knight (Affleck), seem to have accepted their lot as also-rans when Sonny suggests betting their entire sponsorship budget on the young North Carolina phenom Michael Jordan. What ensues might best be described as “Jerry Maguire” meets “King Richard,” as Sonny goes head to head with his bosses, Jordan’s fast-talking agent (Chris Messina), and the ultimate decision-maker and toughest negotiator of them all: Jordan’s mother, Deloris.

Affleck has said in interviews that Michael Jordan had only one stipulation in the making of “Air”: that Viola Davis would play Deloris. Affleck granted that request, and when Davis enters the proceedings, the weather changes. Up until her appearance, Damon, Bateman, Tucker and Affleck — who as Knight drives an absurd purple Porsche, wears goofy running get-ups and spouts corny New Age aphorisms — keep the balloon afloat with pacey jocularity and a slick, fast-moving business story. Once Sonny goes to North Carolina to meet Deloris and James Jordan (the latter is played by Davis’s real-life husband, Julius Tennon), “Air” transforms from a worthy if conventional underdog tale to the chronicle of a seismic cultural shift.

“Air” is that rare sports movie that is virtually guaranteed to appeal to both hardcore NBA fans and people who don’t know a three-point line from a field goal (thanks, Wikipedia!). The key, of course, is the human factor, here channeled through consistently relaxed, irresistibly likable performances, especially from Damon at his most relatably chunky, Davis at her most serenely commanding, Bateman (alternately quippy and disarmingly sincere), and Affleck, who between this and 2021’s “The Last Duel” might deserve an honorary acting Oscar for being willing to make himself look utterly ridiculous for the greater good.

As a director, he’s also willing to indulge the audience’s craving for pleasure, whether by way of “Air’s” thoroughly rewarding plot or delicious period-piece touches, which include an ’80s-tastic soundtrack and the re-creation of Nike’s Beaverton, Ore., headquarters, where smoking corners and sundae bars are the order of the long-bygone day. (He also wisely shoots the actor playing Jordan only from behind, avoiding inevitable and distracting comparisons.)

Spouting his own aphorism, at one point Sonny reminds his colleagues that “you’re remembered for the rules you break.” Affleck doesn’t break rules with “Air” as much as restore them, obeying principles that have seemed mortally endangered in recent years — about sound structure, recognizably human characters, satisfying catharsis, authentic but not overreaching depth. The modest but gratifying gifts of “Air” lie in its seeming effortlessness, reassuring viewers that a good movie can still be a good story, well told. It’s a movie that shoots and scores. And, miraculously, it turns out that’s still enough.

R. At area theaters. Contains strong language throughout. 112 minutes.

Review: Ben Affleck’s entertaining Michael Jordan-Nike drama is more than hot ‘Air’

• Show more sharing options
• Copy Link URL Copied!

One of the pleasures of the movies is the way they can complicate and undermine the idea of history as destiny, taking unbeatable sure things and reminding us that they were once untested, unknown quantities. It’s not, admittedly, the easiest thing for a filmmaker to pull off. Too often the clarity of hindsight can become the enemy of real drama; the more phenomenal the legend, the more inevitable and even circumscribed their success can seem. There’s a moment near the end of “Air,” Ben Affleck’s shrewd, hugely enjoyable and fitfully ruminative new movie, that deftly gets at this point, when a basketball fan opines that “everybody knew” from the beginning that Michael Jordan would be an all-timer — never mind that, sometime earlier, said fan could be heard declaring precisely the opposite.

Not that “Air” treats Jordan as some kind of underdog, or even as its central subject. An NBA rookie when the movie opens, he’s already marked for greatness — a greatness of such untouchable, godlike proportions that, beyond some TV footage of the real Jordan on the court, the movie dares not even show his face. (Damian Delano Young, the actor who plays him, appears only briefly and is almost always filmed from behind.) No, the truer underdog here — and the other legend in the making — is Nike, the upstart Oregon-based footwear company with the swoosh logo, the “just do it” slogan and an initially lackluster profile in the basketball sneaker market. That last part will change forever, of course, once Nike manages, through a campaign of extraordinary savvy and daring, to outbid and outmaneuver its deeper-pocketed rivals, Adidas and Converse, and hitch its own fortunes to Jordan’s meteoric rise.

A new film about Air Jordans almost benched a Black Nike exec. Enter Chris Tucker

The actor talks about scripting his ‘Air’ character, Howard White; the prospects for ‘Rush Hour 4’ and returning to ‘Friday,’ and more.

April 3, 2023

Boasting a punchy, phone-slamming, expletive-hurling, heavily Aaron Sorkin-indebted script by Alex Convery, “Air” is an ode to the art of the landmark celebrity-endorsement deal . It’s also something of a feature-length Nike commercial, albeit a deft and entertaining one. Mostly, it’s a tribute to classically American values like branding and publicity, ambition and swagger, wealth and more wealth (the Air Jordan line has earned billions and counting) and good, old-fashioned competitive cunning. Like “Argo” (2012), Affleck’s Oscar-winning hit about how Hollywood helped rescue six Americans amid the turmoil of the Iran hostage crisis, the movie dusts off decades-old headlines and invests them with the breezy urgency of a comic heist thriller, one with far lower human stakes but an incalculably higher payout. The year may be 1984, but any hint of Orwellian gloom here is dissolved in a wave of merry capitalist brinkmanship.

The mastermind is Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon, paunchy and polo-shirted), the sharpest, most stubborn mind in Nike’s flailing basketball division. Possessed of a keen understanding of the game and its players, he also has a gambler’s streak that loses him more than it earns. (His talent-scouting trips tend to detour through Las Vegas, where the script establishes his risky impulses and drops a sly beaut of a Kurt Rambis joke.) It’s Sonny who grasps and articulates the singularity of Jordan’s brilliance a few crucial beats before everyone else does. And it’s Sonny who argues that Nike, rather than dividing its annual $250,000 basketball budget among three or four lower-ranked players, should offer the whole pot to Jordan and tailor an entire shoe line to the athlete, rather than the other way around. (Matthew Maher, so good in last year’s “Funny Pages,” steals a few scenes as Nike shoe wizard Peter Moore, who designs the Air Jordan in all its prototypical Chicago Bulls red-and-black glory.)

It’s a potentially game-changing proposition — and a potentially business-killing gamble. Sonny has a lot of skeptics to convince, including Jordan, a die-hard Adidas fan, and (more importantly) Jordan’s mother, Deloris, the solid rock and gently guiding hand behind his every career move. Deloris is played, superbly, by Viola Davis, whose soft-toned, gravel-edged voice is authority itself. (In a nice touch, Davis’ husband, Julius Tennon , plays Michael’s father, James Jordan.) Two of the movie’s most beautifully written and played scenes find Sonny approaching and later negotiating with a thoughtful, quietly unyielding Deloris, setting the pattern for a story in which nearly every turning point is structured as a two-way conversation — a one-on-one master class in the art of persuasion.

How a $6.6-million baseball card paved the way for Magic Johnson’s business empire

When it comes to the surprising history of athlete endorsements, Nike’s pursuit of Magic Johnson in ‘Winning Time’ only scratches the surface.

April 17, 2022

Sonny’s many sparring partners include Jordan’s potty-mouthed agent, David Falk (Chris Messina, a scream), and Nike’s good-natured but beaten-down marketing director, Rob Strasser (an effective Jason Bateman). Strasser gets a poignant if overly calculated heart-tugger of a speech that kicks “Air’s” already solid dad-movie cred up several notches; he also gets one of the script’s few moments — an oblique reference to Nike’s use of Asian sweatshop labor — that puncture the feel-good corporate vibes.

Most of those vibes emanate from the company’s affable, Zen-minded CEO, Phil Knight, a wearer of track suits and spouter of Buddhist koans played by Affleck himself as the risk-averse yin to Sonny’s reckless yang. Unsurprisingly, the well-worn Matt-and-Ben screen rapport gives Sonny and Phil an instantly readable, affectionately combative dynamic, as well as an understated emotional core.

It’s not the only time Affleck uses casting to suggestive, even subversive ends. On the surface, “Air” may look like an unrepentant valentine to the ’80s, from the amusing overkill of its extended opening montage (President Reagan and Princess Diana , Ghostbusters and Cabbage Patch Kids) to its steady stream of Violent Femmes/Cyndi Lauper/Bruce Springsteen needle drops to the simultaneously spot-on and comically exaggerated ugliness of its offices, all dim greenish lighting and chunky computer hardware. (The grubbily ancient production design is by François Audouy, the cubicle-panning cinematography by Robert Richardson.) But in some ways, the movie is also carrying on a subliminal, more subtly nostalgic conversation with the ’90s , the decade that transformed Affleck and Damon into household names and saw some of their key supporting players here first rise to prominence.

The latter include Marlon Wayans, delivering a charming cameo as George Raveling, the Olympic basketball coach who would prove instrumental in persuading Jordan to sign with Nike; and Chris Tucker , funneling his motormouthed comic gusto into the smart suit and warm, welcoming vibes of Howard White, the future vice president of the entire Jordan brand. In ways that sometimes register more potently than the action or dialogue, “Air” is haunted by the specters of these actors’ career highs and lows; this is Tucker’s first movie in seven years. It’s also haunted by the sight of Affleck and Damon, two aging Hollywood golden boys who at times seem to be confronting their own mortality alongside their characters. They’ve made a movie about the ravages of time, the fleeting, sometimes arbitrary nature of fame and the general rule of failure to which success proves an all-too-rare exception.

This meta-melancholy subtext rises to the surface late in the movie, when Sonny delivers a deal-clinching, throat-tightening boardroom speech about how few legacies endure and how few legends are remembered. It’s a message that consoles and stings, not least for the way it seems to knock even movie royalty down a few pegs. Success and fame on the level of a Michael Jordan, Sonny reminds us, has a way of throwing even great accomplishments into perspective.

“Air” comes by these ideas honestly and thoughtfully, and they’re rich enough that you sometimes wish Affleck and Convery had given them freer, unrulier reign, rather than shoehorning them (so to speak) into all the story’s busily, efficiently moving parts, its blue Slurpee sight gags and Adidas-skewering Hitler jokes. Crucially, it’s in the scenes with Wayans, Tucker and Davis that the movie engages meaningfully, if too briefly, with the role of race in the overlapping arenas of sports, celebrity and social progress, and especially the question of what Black athletes are owed by an industry that uses their names, likenesses and talent to invest a product with meaning.

Unsurprisingly, it’s Deloris who brings these issues to the fore — and also cuts through them with clean, unerring logic — when she argues for a fundamental shift in the balance of power between her son and Nike, and by extension between all athletes and the companies seeking to trade on their fame. The movie is on her side — or rather, it pivots to her side at just the right moment, pulling the rug out from under Sonny and his colleagues and also, perhaps, from under itself. In these earnest, cheer-worthy moments, “Air” almost convinces you that it’s more than just a feel-good celebration of capitalism and corporate power, that it has its eye not just on the prize but on the entire game — and that it’s looking out for all the underdogs as fervently as it wants you to believe.

'Air'

Rating: R, for language throughout Running time: 1 hour, 52 minutes Playing: Starts Wednesday in general release

Watch L.A. Times Today at 7 p.m. on Spectrum News 1 on Channel 1 or live stream on the Spectrum News App. Palos Verdes Peninsula and Orange County viewers can watch on Cox Systems on channel 99.

More to Read

How the LAPD took down a sneaker heist ring that stole millions worth of Nikes

Feb. 25, 2024

Ben Affleck and the DunKings debut full pop song after viral Dunkin’ Super Bowl spot

Feb. 14, 2024

Why Ben Affleck and his film editor rough cut scenes on set for the ‘Air’ actors

Jan. 8, 2024

Only good movies

Get the Indie Focus newsletter, Mark Olsen's weekly guide to the world of cinema.

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

More From the Los Angeles Times

In trying to hedge its politics, ‘Civil War’ betrays its characters — and the audience

April 15, 2024

Entertainment & Arts

‘Civil War’ unites moviegoers at box office

April 14, 2024

On ‘Saturday Night Live,’ Ryan Gosling can’t stop cracking up as guest host

April 13, 2024

Review: ‘Blackout,’ a new take on one of horror’s oldest myths, is claws for celebration

April 12, 2024

Accessibility Links

Air review — Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s reunion is box-fresh

Challenge yourself with today’s puzzles.

★★★★☆ During the stirring boardroom climax of this backroom business drama, Matt Damon’s impassioned marketing executive Sonny Vaccaro gestures towards his colleagues at Nike, including the boss, Phil Knight (Ben Affleck), and grandly announces that in the future “everyone around this table will be forgotten”. It’s the cornerstone of Sonny’s pitch to the rising basketball star Michael Jordan (Damian Delano Young), who is sitting, unimpressed, before him. It’s 1984 and Nike’s basketball shoe division is floundering, so Sonny is hoping to land a lucrative endorsement deal with Jordan by contrasting the sporting immortality that awaits the young athlete with the anonymity of the bland corporate drones. These include the director of marketing, Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman), the designer Peter Moore (Matthew Maher) and the sports

Related articles

• Entertainment

‘Air’ review: Affleck entertains with assists from top-brand talent

Movie review.

At the end of “Air,” director and co-star Ben Affleck, bafflingly bewigged as Nike CEO and co-founder Phil Knight, lies back on his office couch and utters a single word: “equity.” It’s a bit of a cheeky callback to something that happens even before the movie starts: the appearance of the production logo for Affleck’s new company, Artists Equity, which produced “Air,” and which seeks to shake up business as usual in Hollywood, in the same way that Nike and the Jordan family shook up business as usual in the sneaker industry.

Artists Equity is a company designed to share profits with the craftspeople who make the movie, alongside the top-billed stars and producers. This ethos about sharing the wealth among talent also forms the crux of the main argument in “Air,” which is delivered passionately in a climactic speech by Viola Davis, playing Deloris Jordan, Michael Jordan’s mother, who knew — and demanded — her son’s worth.

“Air,” written by Alex Convery, becomes Affleck’s treatise on the film industry and the perils of celebrity, shoehorned into a biopic of a brand: It’s the story of a jogging shoe company courting the greatest player of all time with a signature sneaker, resulting in an unprecedented deal that continues to garner $400 million a year in passive income for Michael Jordan. It’s somewhat of a miracle that “Air,” a film about the iconic Air Jordan sneaker, works as well as it does, considering that most viewers already know the outcome of this movie, which revolves around a single meeting held in Beaverton, Ore., in 1984. This is a story that on paper doesn’t have a shred of suspense, but Affleck applies just the right elements to make it sing.

The first crucial component is Davis as the steely Deloris, delivering the aforementioned three-pointer of a speech, and the second is Affleck’s best friend and business partner, Matt Damon, playing Nike basketball guru Sonny Vaccaro with the kind of sincerity and determination that Damon makes look easy. As Knight, Affleck takes on the erudite weirdo role opposite Damon’s earnest schlub, much like in the last movie they made together, the underrated medieval epic “The Last Duel,” another meta text that used a period setting to comment on contemporary issues.

Affleck surrounds himself, Damon and Davis with a quartet of actors doing absolutely riotous character work and hitting every wild shot. Jason Bateman plays Nike marketing exec Rob Strasser as perpetually bothered and snarky, making a full-course meal out of every tiny reaction; Chris Messina is at full froth as Jordan’s agent David Falk, spewing soliloquies of florid filth on the phone while ensconced in a black and chrome office, sometimes casually twiddling a large knife. Chris Tucker plays affable Nike talent relations exec Howard White, who builds a cultural bridge between a Black family from North Carolina and a crew of Oregonian sneaker heads. Matthew Maher rounds out the team as designer Peter Moore, an oddball philosopher of footwear who turns the Air Jordan into an objet d’art, a reflection of the individual player designed for mass market consumption.

The style is busy, Affleck laying a heavy hand on the ’80s references and music cues, Robert Richardson’s cinematography mimicking the amateurish style of someone with a brand-new camcorder. But the pace flies, and the actors make the film wildly engaging. With Davis as the quietly powerful Deloris jockeying for her son’s best interest, and Damon’s Sonny offering inspirational speeches about immortality and the rise and fall of celebrity, it almost feels like buying Jordans is a virtuous act. But remember, that’s just the genius of marketing, and movie magic. “Air” might not be the movie that makes Ben Affleck immortal the way the Air Jordan did for Michael, but it’s an entertaining representation of his new, industry-disrupting company, an enterprise that hopefully has a lasting impact.

With Matt Damon, Viola Davis, Ben Affleck, Jason Bateman, Chris Messina, Chris Tucker, Matthew Maher. Directed by Affleck, from a screenplay by Alex Convery. 112 minutes. Rated R for language throughout. Opens April 5 at multiple theaters.

Most Read Entertainment Stories

• Remlinger Farms' new music venue has small Carnation concerned
• Kidnapping of California woman that police called a hoax gets new attention with Netflix documentary
• Lost tapes from major musicians are out there. These guys find them
• Move over, Fabio. Romance novels have changed — and so has the community
• 5 Seattle places for dinner-and-a-show — and what we think of them

Review: 'Air' is a movie classic in the making that you don't want to miss

Big news: Ben Affleck directs the first all-star Oscar contender of 2023.

Big news: Ben Affleck directs the first all-star Oscar contender of 2023. And that's something for a financially angled tale about creating a sneaker. Not just any sneaker, it's the Air Jordan, named after then-hoops rookie Michael Jordan, that sparked a culture revolution in 1984.

Now in theaters in advance of its streaming debut on Prime, "Air" stars Affleck as Nike CEO Phil Knight, a profit-obsessed Buddhist (even he laughs at the contradiction) faced with pressure from the publicly traded Nike company when Adidas and Converse leave it in the dust.

Enter a livewire Matt Damon as Sonny Vaccaro, a sweaty schlub in charge of Nike's flailing basketball division. Sonny wants to blow his entire marketing budget on signing Jordan. In hindsight, it's a eureka moment. Back then, Sonny was laughed at by Nike honchos Howard White (Chris Tucker), Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman) and George Raveling (Marlon Wayans).

It's a kick watching Affleck and Damon, Oscar-winning besties for writing "Good Will Hunting," go at each other on screen. Though they've appeared together in nine movies, "Air" marks the first time that Affleck has directed his boyhood chum from Massachusetts. And it speaks volumes about their relationship that Damon gives one of his best ever performances.

In fact, all the actors are dynamite in roles large and small, a sign of a gifted director. Affleck won a best picture Oscar for 2012's "Argo," though the Academy snubbed him for directing. That can't happen again. As Phil and Sonny fight it out over Jordan, they build a team in which every player is essential, just like in basketball, just like in movies.

MORE: Review: 'Hustle' radiates love for the game in every frame

Getting Phil's OK is nothing compared to watching Sonny take on Jordan's agent, David Falk (Chris Messina making hostility a hoot), and then drive from Nike's Oklahoma offices to North Carolina to meet Jordan's parents unannounced and clearly unwelcome.

Deloris Jordan, Michael's mother, bristles at even the hint of compromising her son's talent and integrity for a shoe deal. Jordan himself insisted that only one actress could play his mom -- EGOT winner Viola Davis. Smart choice since the triumphant Davis is a primal force who powers the role of Deloris by nailing every nuance with maternal fire and feeling.

"Oh man, here we go," laughs James Jordan (a warm and wonderful Julius Tennon, Davis's off-screen husband) when his wife negotiates beyond a flat fee for a piece of the Air Jordan profits in perpetuity, a decision that would change celebrity product endorsements for keeps.

It's a good thing that Davis embodies the mother-son bond since we see nothing of Jordan himself in the movie, except in archival footage. And don't look for on-court fireworks. The dynamics here are focused on what made the shoe a phenom, including Peter Moore (a terrific Matthew Maher), who created the famous Air Jordan 1 silhouette.

Kudos are due to screenwriter Alex Convery, a relative kid at age 30, who was about the same age as Affleck and Damon were on "Good Will Hunting" when he started a spec script for "Air" that became his first produced screenplay. Except for a quick mention of sweatshop exploitation, the screenplay goes easy on Nike. But Convery comes up aces by packing laugh-out-loud fun and nailbiting suspense into every frame.

"Air" deserves comparison to 2011's classic "Moneyball," which dialed down on actual baseball in favor of the deal-making that fed the roar of the crowd. "Air" is a basketball movie like "The Social Network" is a Facebook movie, meaning it isn't. Both are about gamesmanship and the compromises reached in the name of winning.

So what ranks "Air" as something more than a sports-adjacent origin story about mostly white guys trying to monetize the success of a young Black athlete -- Jordan was just 21 at the time -- who became the GOAT? It's all in the teamwork, not just among the Nike crew, but among the filmmakers who chose to bring that crew's story to the screen.

Sentimental? Maybe. But tough when it needs to be. Deloris taught her son to know his own worth, and that lesson lands behind and in front of the camera in "Air." It's significant that Affleck and Damon recently started Artists Equity, a production company that operates on a profit-sharing model to create better deals for all contributors.

MORE: Review: 'M3gan' is a miracle of modern horror cinema that leaves you reeling

Affleck knows that you can't buy the kind of greatness that Jordan represents, but you can be deeply inspired by it. He knows stepping into Air Jordans, as millions have done, is more than just a business hustle. As Sonny says, the Air Jordan is going to make us all "want to fly."

And fly this movie does over the traps of deal-making and into the challenge of staying human. This is what makes the outrageously entertaining "Air" a movie classic in the making. This you don't want to miss.

Screen Rant

Air true story: 7 biggest changes to what really happened.

Air is the true story of Nike attempting to sign Michael Jordan before Adidas, and while entertaining, it takes a lot of creative liberties.

Air tells the true story of Nike signing Michael Jordan on a five-year sneaker contract, but the movie takes many creative liberties. The Ben Affleck-directed movie takes place in 1984, a time when Jordan was just 21 years old and was wanted by all the top sneaker companies, and when Nike only had 17 percent of the sneaker market in the U.S., which was led by Adidas and Converse. But in a David vs. Goliath-type story, Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon), a Nike marketing executive, achieves the impossible by beating the other sports brands to sign the greatest basketball player of all time.

Air received overwhelmingly great reviews from audiences and critics, as it has a strong 95 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. That isn't bad for a movie originally planned to be immediately available on Amazon Prime Video without a theatrical release. But despite the critical acclaim and the copious number of awards for which it'll undoubtedly be nominated, the film has drawn several criticisms for the many creative flourishes writer Alex Convery has taken. However, given that so many different Nike employees have tried to take credit for the success of the Air Jordan shoe line, it's almost impossible to say what the Air true story really is, or how much the movie gets right. It's certainly clear some things were changed...

7 Air True Story: How Long Nike Pursued Michael Jordan

The exact Air movie timeline isn't clear, as the dates aren't indicated. However, based on how the characters talk about meetings and potential deals being just days away, the movie couldn't take place over more than one or two weeks, and the bulk is simply based on a weekend. But according to The Dan Patrick Show, Nike spent a painstaking three and a half months pursuing Michael Jordan (via NBC Sports ). So while Air made it look like Sonny's most stressful week of work, the true story reveals it was actually the most stressful quarter of a year.

6 Nike's Budget To Sign Michael Jordan

Air makes it abundantly clear that Nike had a budget of $250,000 for sponsoring a basketball player. That had to be spread across three or even four players. This number is crucial because it catalyzes the entire narrative and Nike CEO Phil Knight's (Ben Affleck) battle with Sonny over expenses. However, it was $2.5 million (via Pop Sugar ). In fairness, that was spread across five years, but $500,000 per year is still double. It's easy to see why this was changed, as a much lower number properly establishes that Nike was so close to bankruptcy at the time, which is entirely true.

5 The True Story Of When Sonny Vaccaro & Michael Jordan First Met

Sonny drives to North Carolina in an attempt to speak with Jordan directly, putting his entire career on the line. But he's blocked by a gatekeeper in the form of Jordan's mother, Deloris Jordan. It isn't until the Air movie ending when he has to deliver the most important pitch of his life that Sonny meets Michael. However, in real life, Sonny met Jordan long before that and even before he met Deloris. Sonny met Michael almost immediately after the 1984 Summer Olympics and was introduced by George Raveling (who is played by Marlon Wayans in Air ), who coached the U.S. Olympic basketball team (via Pop Sugar ).

4 Deloris Jordan's Input With Michael's Nike Deal

Air depicts Michael's mother, Deloris (Viola Davis), as the person in his life who makes all the deals and is a master negotiator, but that isn't completely true. Deloris Jordan was certainly business savvy, as she did encourage Michael to take the meeting with Nike, accompanied him to the meeting, and convinced Michael that he could earn more money with Nike than with Adidas. But her role in the deal was played up (via Time ). Though, it was a change for the better, as it was a clever way to keep the movie from focusing on Michael.

Michael Jordan isn't in Air because Affleck didn't want to focus on the athlete, and he didn't think audiences would believe anybody in the role. Making Deloris a prominent figure expertly distracted audiences from trying to get a glimpse of the basketball player. And when Affleck met with Michael Jordan, the athlete divulged that his mother was an influential figure in his life (via Dexerto ). So the change from real life stems from a genuine part of Michael's life. And that truthful relationship is shown in the credits with a tear-jerking speech about his mother from the real-life basketball player.

3 Sonny Vaccaro's Trip To North Carolina

As Jordan's manager, David Falk (Chris Messina), refused to tell Jordan that Nike had put an offer on the table, Sonny put his entire career on the line by traveling to North Carolina himself. In fairness, this change is as Hollywoodized as Air gets, and it's a simple road trip. Lesser movies based on true stories throw in ridiculous car chases and stunts, but this is as wild of a change as there is in Air . Nevertheless, it's still totally fabricated (via Radio Times ), and while the real-life Sonny might have been adamant that Jordan was " the one ," he still wouldn't have risked his job by going behind agents' backs.

2 The True Story Of The Creation Of The Air Jordan Name

In the movie, Falk and Nike's creative director, Peter Moore (Matthew Maher), who designed the Air Jordan shoe, each separately think of the name Air Jordan. Falk randomly conjures up the two words when screaming at Sonny over the phone, and Moore spends days thinking about it. This causes a rift in the film about who thought of it first. In reality, Falk and Moore came up with the name together during a creative meeting between them and Nike marketing director Rob Strasser (via Collider ), whereas they don't even know each other in the film. Though, Falk is convinced that he said the name first (via Insider ).

1 Who Convinced Michael Jordan To Sign With Nike

The true story of Air is fundamentally focused on who convinced Michael Jordan to join Nike, Sonny Vaccaro. Sonny even has a five-minute monologue where he predicts the whole of Jordan's future in the meeting scene. But in real life, everyone in that meeting room has a different account of what happened and who should get the credit. Not even Jordan himself credits Sonny and thinks the person who convinced him most was George Raveling (via USA Today ), who ironically has just one scene in the film. Jordan believes the second most influential person in the deal was Rob Strasser, who barely said a word during the meeting in the movie. Either way, Jordan has made billions from Air Jordans .

• Entertainment
• Celebrities
• Ticket Sales
• Promoted: What to Watch on Prime Video

Recommended

Johnny Oleksinski

‘civil war’ review: a torturous, overrated movie without a point.

• View Author Archive
• Get author RSS feed

Thanks for contacting us. We've received your submission.

Running time: 109 minutes. Rated R (strong violent content, bloody/disturbing images and language throughout). In theaters.

All director Alex Garland had to do was title his new movie “Civil War” for it to instantly be deemed Very Important by tastemakers.

Who cares that the script is lousy? Or that the acting is monotonous? Or that the story amounts to a series of gruesome killings that you’d rather not sit through?

Doesn’t matter. It’s essential!

The gnarly film is about a modern-day domestic war in America and is, therefore, a prescient warning to us all, we’ve already been told with conspicuous enthusiasm by lefty newspaper op-eds.

They insist: You, too, could soon be tied up at a roadside gas station and tortured by dudes with Southern drawls.

But really Garland’s movie is no more vital to the discourse than “ The Purge ,” and is about 1% as entertaining.

“Civil War’s” shtick is that it’s not specifically political.

For instance, as the US devolves into enemy groups of secessionist states, Texas and California have banded together to form the Western Forces. That such an alliance could ever occur is about as likely as Sweetgreen/Kentucky Fried Chicken combo restaurant.

Still, one deadly encounter with a soldier played by Jesse Plemons leaves no doubts about what actual party he is supposed to represent.

The Western Forces are duking it out with the loyalist states who follow the president (Nick Offerman) — a fascist in an illegal third term — as well as the Florida Alliance and the New People’s Army.

Lest you arrive expecting cool battles, the fights are mostly just three or four guys shooting three or four other guys until a slightly bigger clash at the end. All we get are tiny tussles in a war supposedly affecting 350 million people.

Garland, with his incessant vagueness, is clearly aiming to keep the story universal rather than divisive. 

However, considering his movie is set in a land of folks who love to discuss and argue about the news, it’s odd that none of the characters ever give concrete details about what’s going on. How did this conflict start? What does anybody stand for? Who knows?

Avoiding the elephant (and donkey) in the room makes the whole shebang feel fake, with the help of some lethargic actors.

Our guides through this not-believable hellscape are a quartet of unlikable war journalists whose lives we barely learn about beyond their resumes. 

Kirsten Dunst plays Lee Smith , a hardened frontline photographer for Reuters who’s become numbed to violence and danger over the years.

Joel (Wagner Moura) is her reporter sidekick, who gets a thrill out of the battlefield … until he doesn’t. Moura’s performance, by the way, leads me to believe his numbskull journo couldn’t convince a telemarketer to talk to him.

Stephen McKinley Henderson is an aging New York Times writer named Sammy, who’s just about had enough. And Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) is a young, aspiring fotog who worships Smith and tags along for the ride. 

They embark on a road trip from New York City — which is being bombed — to Washington, DC, in an attempt to interview the press-hating president who is hiding out in the White House.

The plot plods along — they drive a bit, guy gets shot, they drive some more, guy gets shot — and the dialogue is bottom of the barrel.

At one point, Joel walks into a clothing store in an eerily calm small town and says, “Are you guys aware that there’s a pretty big civil war going on all across America?” 

This is what the New York Times called “a terrifying premonition of American collapse”!

Dunst is the best of the four performers , but a bitter, been-there-done-that reporter is such an old cliche. She adds nothing new to the archetype except her name.

A movie about a fictional second civil war isn’t a terrible idea, I’ll grant.

But how about instead of torturing viewers with a parade of point-blank executions, Garland tries making a well-executed film?

Share this article:

Advertisement

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

Civil War review – Alex Garland’s delirious dive into divided US society

Fratricidal warfare has exploded in North America, and war photographers including Lee (Kirsten Dunst) are eager to capture the money shot in this violent action thriller

W riter-director Alex Garland stages a spectacular if evasively apolitical “civil war” in this futurist-dystopian action thriller, involving hundreds of extras lying on the road next to upturned blackened cars with CGI-mutilated buildings in the smoky distance. The film’s fence-sitting reluctance to name any of the issues that might actually result in a civil war arguably means that the film can be enjoyed by the widest possible audience base. But the whole thing does finally snap into shape for a Call of Duty melee in the heart of American democracy, an ugly denouement possibly riffing on the January 6 Capitol attack, in which something seems to be clearly at stake and which (belatedly) gives us a glimpse of believable horror and delirium.

The scene is an America whose evident but unspecified divisions have exploded into open fratricidal warfare. The states of Texas and California are now ruled by the rebellious secessionists, the Western Forces, or WF, making massive advances on Washington DC, a situation about which the president ( Nick Offerman ) is in denial, making delusional TV addresses about how well he’s doing.

A group of photojournalists now plans to make the terrifyingly dangerous journey in a press SUV behind WF lines, possibly hoping to tag along with their advance on the capital, each secretly dreaming of the ultimate money shot: the capture or execution of the commander-in-chief. Veteran war photographer Lee is played by Kirsten Dunst with a permanently sorrowful and disapproving schoolteacherly expression of dismay; her buddy is Reuters reporter Joel (Wagner Moura) who is a warfare-adrenaline junkie, euphoric after each scary shoot up. (“Holy fuckin’ shit! What a fuckin’ rush!”) Ageing veteran Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) is a New York Times reporter, the voice of wisdom. Just-out-of-college newbie Jessie, played by Cailee Spaeny, cheekily sweet-talks Joel into letting her ride along in their grownups’ car and almost overnight turns from a callow student into a cool wiseacre. They have conversations, in the time honoured manner of fictional war journalists, about subjects like whether journalism makes a difference and what they would be prepared to photograph – but weirdly don’t talk about what has caused this civil war.

It is clearly a reasonably diverse group, although it is this very diversity that gives us an easier task of guessing which of them is going to make a self-sacrificial gesture of courage to save the others. For their journey, Garland gives them freaky and surreal episodes and encounters, underscored by interesting and emphatic musical choices that mimic their dissociative trauma, although sometimes these episodes will be suddenly curtailed. At one stage they’re pinned down by a sniper in an abandoned outdoor play area with Christmas music bizarrely playing … the next thing we know they’re safely back in the car. How? It’s a strange, violent dream of disorder, drained of ideological meaning.

after newsletter promotion

• Peter Bradshaw's film of the week
• Alex Garland
• Kirsten Dunst
• Science fiction and fantasy films
• Action and adventure films

Most viewed

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Netflix's 'Good Times': An explicit revival which feels calculated to offend

Eric Deggans

The Evans family in Netflix's Good Times: Jay Pharoah as Junior, Marsai Martin as Grey, Yvette Nicole Brown as Beverly, Gerald Anthony "Slink" Johnson as Dalvin and J.B. Smoove as Reggie. Netflix hide caption

The Evans family in Netflix's Good Times: Jay Pharoah as Junior, Marsai Martin as Grey, Yvette Nicole Brown as Beverly, Gerald Anthony "Slink" Johnson as Dalvin and J.B. Smoove as Reggie.

Netflix's animated series revival of Good Times seems almost genetically engineered to snark off critics like me.

With an opening image that reads Good Times (Black again) , it's packed with the kind of stereotypical characters and imagery which seems sure to anger fans of the original series, which was a groundbreaking, '70s-era sitcom revered for the way it challenged presumptions about a poor Black family "scratchin' and survivin'" in a Chicago housing project.

Described by Netflix as a "spiritual sequel," the animated Good Times features the fourth generation of the original series' Evans family living in a Chicago housing project.

This new show opens with the patriarch, a bombastic, not-too-smart cabbie named Reggie Evans, singing part of the original Good Times theme in a duet with a cockroach (he's such a soft touch, he has trouble earning a living because fares keep stiffing him). Matriarch Beverly Evans can tell when her baby is around because her breasts lactate and leak through her shirt.

The baby, Dalvin, has been kicked out of the house because he's a pistol-packing drug dealer with studs in his ears. And when his militant older sister Grey decides to go on a hunger strike in protest, she gets emaciated and has flies swarming around her face like a child suffering in an African famine.

It's a universe where, when Reggie takes his artistic son Junior to a broken-down medical center for a prescription to help him focus in school, a gunfight breaks out. And when baby Dalvin leaves their apartment after a visit, Beverly makes sure he doesn't forget his handgun. Sigh.

Edgy content brings criticism

Yvette Nicole Brown voices Beverly in Good Times. Netflix hide caption

Much of it plays like one of the most jacked-up editions of Adult Swim I've ever seen, littered with images that sometimes feel like stereotypical cartoons exhumed from the worst online Reddit conversations. Taking advantage of the freedom provided by animation, the show provides trippy scenes that sometimes verge on the fantastical — sometimes this works, and sometimes it just feels oddly creepy. There's even one chunk of dialogue cheekily cloned straight from the pilot episode of The Cosby Show .

Already, the show's trailer has drawn criticism from the NAACP. Kyle Bowser, senior vice president of the civil rights organization's Hollywood bureau, wrote in a guest column for The Hollywood Reporter that it's clear Netflix made a choice "to market the show based on an interpretation of Black life as an 'otherized' experience, replete with abhorrent beliefs and behaviors." A Change.org petition urging viewers to boycott the show has more than 3,700 signatures.

But I'm wary of delivering the expected critique of such jarring imagery — in part, because there are interesting messages buried beneath them. In the episode where he and his dad visit a run-down clinic, Junior struggles over why he needs to take medication to build up his mental focus in school at the expense of his creativity – not sure why he has to choose between the two – and Grey learns to shake off the shame she feels after having her first menstrual period, finding liberation from patriarchy in the process.

Norman Lear's TV shows pioneered depictions of Black families, but it's complicated

Part of the issue here is the connection to the original Good Times — celebrating its 50th anniversary this year — which was considered the first TV show centered on a two-parent Black family, humanizing folks who live in poor, Black neighborhoods. As a kid watching the show who didn't have a father in the house, I found it inspirational to see John Amos' character James Evans as a stern but loving paternal presence in a home with Esther Rolle's quick-witted matriarch Florida, BernNadette Stanis' earnest daughter Thelma, Ralph Carter's studious son Michael and Jimmie Walker's borderline-stereotypical artist son J.J.

Yvette Nicole Brown plays Beverly and JB Smoove voices Reggie in Good Times. NETFLIX hide caption

Yvette Nicole Brown plays Beverly and JB Smoove voices Reggie in Good Times.

After a multitude of references to the original in the first episode, the new show doesn't seem particularly tethered to that old template, which can make watching it a tough experience for longtime fans. And it doesn't have the same mission as the old series, though it eventually depicts a family that loves each other through all of the craziness. (It also bleeps out usage of the n-word, but doesn't bleep profanities like s*** or f***. Hmmm.)

In a way, it would have been better to just craft this as an original series without all the baggage and expectations of reinventing a TV classic – but then, Netflix wouldn't have gotten all the headlines and attention from the shocked reactions.

This is a project with a pedigree. Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane and basketball star Steph Curry are executive producers, alongside original Good Times executive producer Norman Lear, who worked on the show before his death in December at age 101. Ace talent like J.B. Smoove, Jay Pharoah, Yvette Nicole Brown and Wanda Sykes voice characters.

Still, for this longtime Good Times fan, the new show feels too much like a different program twisted into something vaguely resembling the old show, but without the sense of mission and pride that made the original series such a television landmark.

Story edited by Jennifer Vanasco .

Advertisement

Supported by

‘Arcadian’ Review: Take Two as Needed for Postapocalyptic Pain

Nicolas Cage defends his family against a paranormal siege in this derivative, low-budget creature feature.

• Share full article

By Calum Marsh

An important plot point in “Arcadian,” a domestic postapocalyptic drama bearing a close resemblance to “A Quiet Place,” revolves around medicine: people needing it, others hoarding it and so on. What kind of medicine is it? What is it for? The movie doesn’t say. It comes in an aspirin bottle, and the characters just call it “medicine,” and we have to take it on faith that it’s important.

“Arcadian” is fashionably oblique, implying more than it explains. (An improvement over the expository whiteboard in “A Quiet Place,” which offered bullet-form creature data like a PowerPoint presentation.)

The story is told in a cursory way: Paul (Nicolas Cage) lives on a remote farm with his teenage sons, Thomas (Maxwell Jenkins) and Joseph (Jaeden Martell). By day they forage and scavenge to survive; at night their fortified home is besieged by feral beasts, which (it is faintly suggested) are the mutated victims of an epidemic that wiped out most of humankind.

The director, Benjamin Brewer, uses many tried-and-true tricks to conceal budgetary limitations, obscuring his monsters in shadows or putting them behind doors, banging, to make the movie feel bigger than it is. He builds tension in brief pockets of silence, and when we do see the monsters, they look quite good — sticky and spindly in a tactile way, like the aliens in John Carpenter’s “The Thing.”

But a competent director can do only so much with a poor script, and “Arcadian” is littered with shortcuts and screenwriting clichés. It is vague to the point of careless, and often seems to be inventing rules for its monsters as it goes along. We hardly need everything to be detailed. But at the very least, it would have been nice to know more about that medicine.

Arcadian Rated R for graphic violence and disturbing imagery. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters.

Explore More in TV and Movies

Not sure what to watch next we can help..

Even before his new film “Civil War” was released, the writer-director Alex Garland faced controversy over his vision of a divided America  with Texas and California as allies.

Theda Hammel’s directorial debut, “Stress Positions,” a comedy about millennials weathering the early days of the pandemic , will ask audiences to return to a time that many people would rather forget.

“Fallout,” TV’s latest big-ticket video game adaptation, takes a satirical, self-aware approach to the End Times .

“Sasquatch Sunset” follows the creatures as they go about their lives. We had so many questions. The film’s cast and crew had answers .

If you are overwhelmed by the endless options, don’t despair — we put together the best offerings   on Netflix , Max , Disney+ , Amazon Prime  and Hulu  to make choosing your next binge a little easier.

Sign up for our Watching newsletter  to get recommendations on the best films and TV shows to stream and watch, delivered to your inbox.