Filmmaker James Gray has arguably been trying to avoid himself and his past these last few years, perhaps in order to create something new. A filmmaker who has spent much of his time exploring America and his roots in New York, with humanistic, moral, and family stories about class within the genre of crime (“Little Odessa,” “The Yards,” “We Own The Night”), in the last few years of his filmmaking career, Gray has seemingly gone as far away from New York as possible, into the jungles of the amazon for “The Lost City Of Z” (2014) and into the far reaches of outer space for “Ad Astra” (2019).  And while those films have expanded the palette of his preoccupation, “Ada Astra” in particular tackling ideas of American exceptionalism and its myths, perhaps both films—still centered on class, family, fatherhood and more— demonstrated, as far as he travels, the filmmaker cannot escape himself or his human obsessions and concerns.

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