Armageddon Time is the rare case where the bitterness overwhelms sweetness, and true enlightenment comes from rejecting nostalgia at every turn.

Preteen drama is amplified by robust and fairly obvious musical choices, but more interesting is the sound design: the city is everywhere, grumbling and fractious, the sound of a short fuse burning out.

Gray’s latest, Armageddon Time, is a flawed work. But it sees the filmmaker at his most vulnerable, as he twists the camera back on himself and asks: of all the paths that brought me here, how many were carved out by my own privilege?

As a snapshot, though, Armageddon Time vividly evokes a young man’s sobering, bittersweet realization that [the] world is always bifurcated into the virtuous and the venal.