★★★1/2 The cast, let’s clarify, includes more names and surprises (Taylor Swift, Robert De Niro) but not everything fits. As the whole plot does not fit in this review: basically three people who became very close friends in the First World War meet again fifteen years later and find themselves involved in a crime and a political conspiracy. David O. Russell, the director, does not exercise here for the first time his taste for comic chaos: it is almost a style of the house, sometimes simpler (American Hustle) sometimes decidedly esoteric (I love Huckabees). But it is the first time that he puts everything: from the strange romance of The Light Side of Life to the political irony of Three Kings. As if Amsterdam were a summary that, incidentally, seeks to be interpreted as a metaphor for today. But behind it we can think that there is something else: a director remembering what made him happy (the past of the characters in that idyllic Amsterdam) and why today it cannot be. He wonders – and it is likely that his answer, however comical it may be at times, is wrong, and he knows it – what is the point of making movies today. The result is closer to a collage in which everything happens fast and luxurious, but without us knowing exactly where we are standing. Perhaps this is, after all, an exercise in nostalgia tinged with despair: a sign of the times.
