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

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

There’s a cautionary message then in the madness: stop or perish; the choice is entirely ours.

| Jul 10, 2024

In Alex Garland's tense film, journalists risk everything to document the US at war with itself.

| Jun 24, 2024

It's very powerful.

| Apr 24, 2024

Clamorously making its claim on viewers’ attention by subject matter alone, rather than by artistry or world view, the film is a kind of advertisement for itself.

| Apr 23, 2024

Look at it as a movie for posterity, and it becomes a worthwhile movie to savor, but nothing else—and you’ll survive. Admire Civil War as an amazing film of imagination and cinematic verve but nothing else—and you will, too.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 22, 2024

The script’s dispassion is what gives the film its oxyacetylene-like power as prophecy.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 22, 2024

Alex Garland’s film is a fascinatingly empty meditation on journalism and our political divides.

| Apr 19, 2024

This may mark an intellectually leaner effort from the filmmaker, but there’s still meat on the bone for the viewer to chew on. That is, if they can stomach anything after watching its brutal violence on American soil.

| Original Score: B+ | Apr 19, 2024

Isn’t Civil War conducting its own Turing Test? Only the examination isn’t about determining whether a machine is capable of exhibiting human behavior… it’s about whether a journalist is capable of exhibiting human behavior.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Apr 19, 2024

When the fire created by Civil War goes out, it’s easy to feel you’ve been manipulated. Like a house was burned down to the ground just to provoke a reaction. Nothing more.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Apr 17, 2024

As a dramatic action film about journalists covering a war, this is good... But it's silly [to say it's not political].

| Apr 17, 2024

Civil War is both a more ambitious picture and an act of grim entertainment. But it’s also sodden with its own importance, as if it thinks it’s saying something truly important -- something we don’t already know -- about the real America.

| Apr 15, 2024

In a way, you can understand the thrill. The combat sequences are executed with a full-throttle savagery; deft editing conveys the grim satisfaction of catching a moment of photographic truth amid the carnage.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 15, 2024

Purposeful though it may be, Garland's squishiness can read only as a failure of nerve. A more successfully political movie wouldn't be so wary of aiming at real targets.

| Apr 15, 2024

Because we don’t know what’s at stake, Civil War skirts the real questions of journalistic impartiality -- how much does that ideal actually hold up under pressure? -- and contradicts its own assertions.

| Apr 15, 2024

As laudable as numerous aspects of the production may be, Garland’s Civil War remains a vexing mixed bag.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Apr 13, 2024

Once you understand that Civil War isn’t about what you think, you can appreciate it for what it actually is: a searing meditation on what happens when political orders collapse and violence takes on a sinister logic of its own.

| Apr 13, 2024

Alex Garland’s “Civil War” is essentially a horror movie, one in which the horrors feel uncomfortably close to home.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 13, 2024

Civil War is here for the carnage, and Garland captures the chaos with an unflinching eye, just as his journalistic protagonists do.

| Original Score: C+ | Apr 13, 2024