A clearer stance would have made [the film] more controversial...and thus, more interesting. [Full review in Spanish]

| Feb 11, 2025

An invitation to connect the dots between the U.S. today and a dystopian story about journalists caught in a war between rebels and an authoritarian government.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 9, 2025

Maybe labeling ‘Civil War’ a dystopian horror story is more apt.

| Original Score: B+ | Jan 7, 2025

Civil War is filled with the terrible mayhem of war brought home to the United States. Brilliantly conceived, it shoots a barrage of ideas straight towards your brain and assaults your senses with sound and furious urgency. Will you listen?

| Jan 1, 2025

Civil War is not a film about why extreme division happens; it’s about the personal impact of division at its worst.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Dec 8, 2024

A staggering and frequently brilliant film looking at a hopefully just fictionalized version of America destroying itself from within.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Nov 23, 2024

Garland seems poised to be make political points, to show how our current political dysfunction could lead to something far worse… but he never follows through.

| Original Score: C+ | Oct 5, 2024

This violent tale of anaesthetised reporters is just a war yarn with a twist.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 17, 2024

This easy digital fakeness is there to get the audience used to it...

| Sep 17, 2024

Rather than glorifying war, the film is artful and meditative, making us feel the pointlessness of this violence, how unglamorous and exhausting and unheroic it is.

| Aug 6, 2024

It’s not always subtle, and in some cases it’s even frustrating with some of its narrative decisions, but nothing can deny its uncanny ability to leave you horrified by how war, civil or otherwise, can be truly monstrous from any humanist angle.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 5, 2024

The film isn’t very deep, but it does paint the grimmest picture possible of a divided nation with bodies bodies bodies everywhere.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 3, 2024

With a career best performance from Kirsten Dunst and a pulsating sound design, Civil War is a thrilling body of work that should be talked about in journalism circles.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 28, 2024

Garland's decision to forego any narrative antecedent makes the predictable ending that much more of a bummer. Civil War is a more muscular film than Men. Like that movie, however, it mistakes broad brush strokes for insight.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 27, 2024

Audiences expecting a meticulously-crafted backstory for how this war started and who the players are will be sorely disappointed.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Jul 27, 2024

This is another war-is-awful movie, tracing the experiences of a team of photojournalists who throw themselves into the firing line. And even without much of a point, it's rivetingly well-made.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 23, 2024

Garland uses violence as a means to a much larger end that should leave moviegoers disturbed and, at times, sickened; that should leave us challenged to think rather than feeling any kind of welcome catharsis. The final shot ... is stunning in its irony.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jul 21, 2024

The film seems caught between wanting to be exciting and devastating, as it threatens to turn its captivating story into another generic shoot-them-up war film, just on a grander scale.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 19, 2024

Civil War is not a polemic, but it is a mirror to the USA’s political crisis.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Jul 17, 2024

If beauty is the sole standard for their work, then the film’s view of war photography is as an aesthetic death cult.

| Jul 15, 2024