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Filmmakers, the better ones, don’t make movies about their childhoods because they know how they feel about what happened. They do it because they’re trying to figure it out in hindsight, with a camera.

In James Gray’s autobiographical Armageddon Time, the friendship between a white Jewish boy and his Black classmate grates against the backdrop of race and class tensions in 80s New York.

Today, workplace drug tests are commonplace, but they provide little information about how well a worker will actually perform their job.

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…