Review: In the wrenching 'Armageddon Time,' a filmmaker powerfully confronts his own privilege

It's fitting that "Armageddon Time," James Gray's quietly anguished movie about events from his own childhood, begins with a kid arriving at a school and ends with him departing another. In between those bookending images, 11-year-old Paul Graff (Banks Repeta) receives an education of a cruel and costly order, though he isn't the one who ultimately bears the cost — or the cruelty. Set in Queens, New York, in the autumn of 1980, with an uneasy chill in the air and the first Reagan administration on the horizon, the film is an epic of boyhood disillusionment, what you might call a coming-of-rage story, in which Paul's eyes are opened to the hard realities of systemic injustice and his own silent complicity.

That might make this movie, Gray's eighth feature as a writer-director, sound like a predictable exercise in liberal hand-wringing — a chance