movie review usa

The 50 best films of 2021 in the US: the full list

Our countdown of the best films released in the US during 2021 reaches No 1 with Jane Campion’s menacing western about two warring brothers

• Read the UK Top 50 films here
• More on the best culture of 2021

This list is compiled by the Guardian film team, with all films released in the US during 2021 in contention. Check in every weekday to see our next picks, and please share your own favourite films of 2021 in the comments below.

The First Wave

Overwhelmingly emotional documentary shot inside a New York hospital at the start of the Covid pandemic, a remarkable film that feels like it could become a time capsule. Read the full review.

Extraordinary film that follows a team of volunteers as they infiltrate the dangerous al-Hawl camp in Syria to liberate Yazidi women trafficked as sex slaves. Read the full review.

Michael Keaton excels as the lawyer tasked with allocating funds for those who lost someone during the terrorist attacks in 2001, a story brought to the screen with sensitivity and care. Read the full review.

Boiling Point

Dizzying single-take drama featuring a potent lead performance from Stephen Graham as a chef enduring a nightmarish evening. Read the full review.

Last Night in Soho

Thomasin McKenzie, Anya Taylor-Joy and Matt Smith star in Edgar Wright’s horror-thriller that takes a trip to the sleazy heart of London’s past and toxic 60s glitz. Read the full review.

Julia Ducournau’s follow-up to her smart 2016 debut, Raw , is a freaky Cronenbergian body-horror that facetiously explores identity with yucky flair. Read the full review.

State Funeral

The eerie last rites of Stalin’s Soviet Union are enacted as massed mourners hail the dictator’s flower-clad body in a film that gives long-lost footage, assembled by In the Fog director Sergei Loznitsa , a new and unnerving lease of life. Read the full review.

Writer-director Emma Seligman’s debut about a young woman running into her sugar daddy at a family event is an amusing, transparently personal piece, a black comedy festival of excruciating embarrassment. Read the full review.

C’mon C’mon

Written and directed by Thumbsucker’s Mike Mills , this coming-of-age heartwarmer, shot in classy monochrome and starring Joaquin Phoenix, oozes prestige as it tackles weighty themes. Read the full review.

The Reason I Jump

This documentary inspired by the bestselling book of the same title is an empathic study of nonverbal autism that takes us into the world of young neurodivergent people across the world. Read the full review.

Director Michel Franco leaves no room for sympathy or redemption in this violent, cynical thriller, a brutally unforgiving attack on Mexico’s super-rich that delivers a vivid warning against the consequences of inequality. Read the full review.

A familiar revenge thriller setup with Nicolas Cage hunting for a stolen animal turns into something quieter and stranger with an unusually restrained performance from its outsize star. Read the full review.

Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard brim with nervous energy in this bizarre musical collaboration between Leos Carax and the Sparks brothers, which kicked off this year’s Cannes film festival. Read the full review.

A woman working as a film censor in the 80s is shocked to discover a horror movie that recreates a traumatic incident from her childhood in Prano Bailey-Bond’s disturbing descent into video nastiness. Read the full review.

Never Gonna Snow Again

A mysterious masseur visits a dysfunctional gated community in this absorbing fairytale from Polish film-maker Małgorzata Szumowska, resulting in a rich brew of strangeness in an unsettling vision of suburbia. Read the full review.

About Endlessness

Swedish auteur Roy Andersson ’s mesmerising odyssey to the heart of existence is a masterpiece of the human condition, ranging from the evils of war to the redemptive power of love. Read the full review.

34 The Velvet Underground

Todd Haynes’ documentary about the celebrated art rockers, with insights from former members and friends, takes its job seriously and gets under the band’s skin. Read the full review.

House of Gucci

True-crime fashion-house drama directed by Ridley Scott as a pantomimey soap following a stylish Lady Gaga, as Patrizia Reggiano, as she plots to kill her ex, Maurizio Gucci. Read the full review.

I Care a Lot

Rosamund Pike is exquisitely nasty in J Blakeson’s toxic thriller, playing a black-hearted con artist who drains the bank accounts of well-off elderly patients after gaining legal guardianship of them. Read the full review.

The Tragedy of Macbeth

Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand hit top form in Joel Coen’s austere, noirish reimagining of Shakespeare’s Scottish bloodbath. Read the full review.

Rose Plays Julie

Uncanny and transgressive film from writer-directors Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor about a young woman who tracks down her birth parents is the film-makers’ best work yet. Read the full review

Robert Greene’s extraordinary documentary follows the stories of six men abused as children by Catholic priests in Kansas City with remarkable care and creativity. Read the full review.

tick, tick … BOOM!

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s heartfelt tribute to Broadway features Andrew Garfield as Rent composer Jonathan Larson, in his early years, in a sugar rush of showbiz highs and lows. Read the full review.

The World to Come

Katherine Waterston and Vanessa Kirby play two wives who fall in love amid the grinding exhaustion and violence of pioneer life in a tale of secret passions in frontier-era America. Read the full review.

The Killing of Two Lovers

A humiliating marital breakdown triggers a riveting portrait of male rage in Robert Machoian’s thought-provoking thriller, starring Clayne Crawford and Sepideh Moafi. Read the full review.

The Worst Person in the World

Joachim Trier’s captivating and witty study of a young Oslo woman struggling with who she is, and who she should be with, featured a fantastic breakout performance from Renate Reinsve, who was rightly rewarded with the best actress prize at Cannes. Read the full review

Bergman Island

Mia Hansen-Løve’s ruminative drama, stars Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth as a film-maker couple who visit Fårö, the Swedish island where Ingmar Bergman famously lived and worked.

Identifying Features

First-time director Fernanda Valadez conjures up a vision of real evil in her story of the horror and heartbreak faced by migrants into the US in Mexico’s borderlands. Read the full review.

Rebecca Hall ’s directing debut is a stylish and subtle study of racial identity, starring Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga as friends who are both “passing” for what they are not, in an adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel. Read the full review.

A Cop Movie

Arresting Mexican docudrama from Alonso Ruizpalacios that starts off as an addictive cop show, breaks the fourth wall and then rebuilds it in a film bristling with ideas. Read the full review.

Sean Baker’s follow-up to Tangerine and The Florida Project is a vivid study of a washed-up porn star, another lo-fi comedy about lives at the margin of US society. Read the full review.

Heart-rending portrait of refugees stranded in Scotland that announces Ben Sharrock as a master of atmospheric film-making, in a stirring drama about a Syrian migrant. Read the full review.

Summer of Soul

Questlove’s magnificent documentary of the forgotten 1969 Harlem cultural festival gives moving context to rediscovered footage of Stevie Wonder, Mahalia Jackson, Nina Simone et al. Read the full review.

Getting Away With Murder(s)

David Nicholas Wilkinson’s epic investigation into the Nazis who escaped a postwar reckoning is a powerful call for Holocaust justice and lays out the difficulty of prosecuting a technocratic atrocity. Read the full review.

Quo Vadis, Aida?

Through the eyes of a translator moving between the different ethnic factions, director Jasmila Žbanić musters real tragic power and clear-eyed compassion revisiting the Srebrenica massacre 25 years on. Read the full review.

No Time to Die

The long-awaited 25th outing for Ian Fleming’s superspy James Bond has Daniel Craig saying goodbye to 007 in a weird and self-aware epic with audacious surprises up its sleeve. Read the full review.

The French Dispatch

Wes Anderson’s ode to print journalism has amazing visuals, lots of laughs and an A-list cast – including Bill Murray – making it a real treat. Read the full review.

The Souvenir Part II

Joanna Hogg’s autobiographical study of a young film-maker is less detached, more emotionally engaging, as we enter Julie’s world for a second time in a superb sequel. Read the full review.

Excruciating drama deals with a school shooting’s aftermath as two sets of parents meet up years after the devastating tragedy, in a difficult and impeccably acted film about forgiveness and blame. Read the full review.

West Side Story

Steven Spielberg’s thrilling remake of Stephen Sondheim’s Romeo & Juliet-inspired musical delivered smart, subtle updates as well as a pitch perfect cast of diverse actors singing and dancing memorable songs back into the multiplex. Read the full review .

Kenneth Branagh’s euphoric eulogy to his home city stars Jamie Dornan and Judi Dench in a scintillating Troubles-era coming-of-age tale in which nightmarishness meets nostalgia. Read the full review.

The Lost Daughter

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s accomplished directing debut makes humid, sensual cinema of Elena Ferrante’s psychodrama of a novel, and boasts a superb central performance from Olivia Colman. Read more .

Unnervingly subtle drama from Andreas Fontana, about a Swiss private banker visiting clients in Argentina during the period of the military junta and “disappearances”. Read more .

Stephen Karam’s Tony-winning play makes the leap to film with ease. A masterly drama that is an extraordinarily well- acted, uncomfortably intimate look at a family at Thanksgiving. Read more .

7 Licorice Pizza

Paul Thomas Anderson’s funniest and most relaxed film yet, a romance about a teenage boy wooing an older woman starring two extraordinary newcomers and stuffed with fabulously hammy A-list cameos. Read more .

Denis Villeneuve’s awe-inspiring take on the sci-fi classic starring Timothée Chalamet, Oscar Isaac and Zendaya has been given room to breathe, creating a colossal spectacle and an epic triumph. Read more .

Thrilling documentary made with a blend of animation and archive footage tells an immensely powerful tale of a gay Afghan survivor, a remarkable story with heart and audacity. Read more

Drive My Car

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi reaches a new grandeur with this engrossing adaptation of a Haruki Murakami short story about a theatre director grappling with Chekhov and his wife’s infidelity. Read more .

Petite Maman

A spellbinding ghost story from Portrait of a Lady on Fire’s Céline Sciamma. A girl meets her mother as a child in the woods in a moving tale of memory, friendship and family. Read more .

The Green Knight

Dev Patel rides high in the director David Lowery’s sublimely beautiful quest, which conjures up visual wonders and metaphysical mysteries from the anonymously authored 14th-century chivalric poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Read more .

The Power of the Dog

Jane Campion’s superb gothic western is a mysterious and menacing psychodrama about two warring brothers ( Benedict Cumberbatch and Jesse Plemons) on a ranch in 20s Montana. Read more.

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Jordan Peele’s ‘Us’ Will Haunt You

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

It’s scary as hell, and that’s just for starters. But Us , the new mesmerizing mindbender from writer-director-producer Jordan Peele , also carries the weight of expectation. Get Out , Peele’s smashing debut from 2017, was a brilliantly caustic satire of race division in America that won Peele an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay (he’s the first African-American to triumph in that category) and became a phenom with critics and audiences. How can Peele top that? Short answer: he can’t and doesn’t. In interviews , Peele insists that Us is a straight-up horror show. Not really. Leave it to Peele to blaze a trail by putting a black family smack in the middle of a commercial thriller-diller. That’s more than a novelty, it’s a quiet revolution. And Peele’s hints at the larger conspiracies of race, class and social violence festering inside the American dream resonate darkly. Ding Peele all you want for taking on more than he can comfortably handle, but this 40-year-old from New York who started as one half of the sketch-comedy team of Key & Peele is now shaping up as a world-class filmmaker. Flaws and all, Us has the power to haunt your waking dreams. You won’t be able to stop talking about it.

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Critics, in mortal fear of the spoiler police, need to shut the fuck up. Or at least tread carefully as Peele introduces the Wilson family of sunny California. Mom Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o), dad Gabe (Winston Duke) and their two kids — Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex) — are on vacation in Santa Cruz. Gabe has an unspoken competition with his friends the Tylers (Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker), a white couple with twin daughters given to conspicuous consumption. Everyone is up for a fun time, especially dad (the excellent Duke — looking much like Peele — gets laughs in the unlikeliest places). But Adelaide is not feeling it. In a chilling prologue, set in 1986, we see Adelaide as a child getting majorly freaked out by a trip to a beachside funhouse containing a hall of mirrors. Now the grown Adelaide is back on the same beach where she was traumatized as a child, and she’s taking her own children along. You can cut the foreboding with a knife — or a pair of gold scissors.

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Scissors figure prominently when the Wilsons are confronted in their driveway by unexpected visitors. Since the scene is included in the film’s trailer, I’m not giving away anything to note that these home invaders — clad in red — are exact doubles of the four Wilsons. And the scissors these zombie-like doppelgängers carry are meant to slit throats. “What the hell are you?” asks Gabe. The answer is croaked out by Adelaide’s evil twin (the only double who speaks) in a voice that induces shudders: “We’re Americans.”

The political implications of that genuinely creepy setup are tantalizing, as are the film’s allusions to Hands Across America — the 1986 event in which a human chain of millions was formed to help alleviate poverty and hunger — and the thousands of miles of empty tunnels that run under the continental United States, including the Underground Railroad that symbolizes African enslavement. Is Peele referencing the Sunken Place of the Trump era in which the new gospel preaches fear of the other? If so, the theme remains frustratingly undeveloped. Yet Peele, the supreme cinema stylist, is on a roll. The violence is unnerving as the doubles set out to untether themselves from their human counterparts. By necessity,the Wilsons become a family that kills together. Even the Tylers get invaded. Kudos to Moss, who takes a small role and runs with it. The scene in which her character’s wild-eyed double smears on lip gloss is an unforgettable blend of mirth and menace.

Still, the acting honors in Us go to Nyong’o, who is actually playing two roles, one as protective mother and another as predator. She is superb as both. And what she does with her voice as Adelaide’s double is impossible to shake. Nyong’o, already an Oscar winner for Twelve Years a Slave , should be in the running again for delivering one of the great performances in horror movie history, right up there with Sissy Spacek in Carrie and Jack Nicholson in The Shining .

Peele, an unapologetic horror fanatic, nods to those films and dozens more in Us , including Invasion of the Body Snatchers , Jaws and Michael Jackson’s Thriller . Yet his style is completely his own, as assured as it is ambitious. With the help of cinematographer Mike Gioulakis, up to his It Follows mischief, and a score by Get Out composer Michael Abels that is built to shatter your nerves, the action never lets up. The Beach Boys anthem “Good Vibrations” is featured in the mix, as is “I Got 5 On It” by the hip-hop duo Luniz. You’ll never be able to hear those songs again in the same way.

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There are times when Us plays like an extended and exceptional episode of The Twilight Zone , the 1950’s TV series revived next month on CBS All Access and hosted by Peele in Rod Serling mode. But Peele can’t stop himself from reaching higher and cutting deeper. The twisty road he takes us on opens itself to many interpretations. There are times when the film grips us with such hallucinatory terror that you may think it’s another of Adelaide’s PTSD-induced nightmares. Maybe it is. Or maybe it’s a ghastly reflection of the way we live now. Peele uses a Biblical quote from Jeremiah 11:11 that suggests even God has turned his back on us. What is never in doubt is that Peele is using the scare genre to show us a world tragically untethered to its own humanity, its empathy, its soul. If that’s not a horror film for its time, I don’t know what is.

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Review: ‘Civil War’ shows an America long past unraveling, which makes it necessary

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The sharp crack of a snare drum, shuffling along at an insistent martial clip, is what first kicks “Civil War” into gear. The beat is joined by some menacing electronic bloops and nervous muttering, and while you may assume this is the work of some promising young bedroom producer, it’s actually a 1968 track, “Lovefingers,” by the radical duo Silver Apples.

Somehow, the music matches the nervous, revolutionary energy on screen: the unlikely sight of an angry Brooklyn patrolled by troops, hundreds of people clashing in the streets, a suicide bomber putting an abrupt punctuation to it all. “Civil War” will remind you of the great combat films, the nauseating artillery ping of “Saving Private Ryan,” the surreal up-is-down journey of “Apocalypse Now.” It also bears a pronounced connection to the 2002 zombie road movie scripted by its writer-director Alex Garland, “28 Days Later,” a production that straddled the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and arrived in theaters scarred by timeliness.

It’s the nowness of “Civil War” that will be much discussed. The movie takes place in an America that’s been amplified from its current state of near-insurrection, but only slightly, a distance that feels troublingly small. An autocratic third-term president ( Nick Offerman ) practices a pompous speech in front of a teleprompter. California and Texas have seceded, becoming unlikely allies in a campaign to retake the capital. The suburban landscape is strewn with bombed-out malls, vicious intolerance and, most spookily of all, an occasional town in which everything seems normal, where a blasé salesclerk can be aware of the country falling apart one state over but still put up a personal wall. “We just try to stay out,” she says.

To the British-born Garland, a maker of thematically rich sci-fi films that play more like broken mirrors ( “Ex Machina,” “Annihilation” ), apathy is the real enemy. “Civil War” shudders with doleful fury. It’s not a “fun” fascist dystopia like John Carpenter ’s immortal “Escape from New York” or the Garland-scripted 2012 “Dredd,” but one in which we’re meant to feel the irrevocable loss of something bigger with each frame.

Accordingly, Garland makes his heroes a pair of photojournalists, one hard-nosed, the other, a budding junkie. As played by an unusually grave and commanding Kirsten Dunst, Lee knows from many a rubble-strewn hot spot and seems long past the irony of discovering one at home. Jessie (Cailee Spaeny, emerging from the soft passivity of “Priscilla” ) only wants some action. If colleges still existed, she’d be graduating from one. Instead, she hopes to sneak into the school of Lee’s fearlessness. The elder newshound looks at this unwanted disciple with weary eyes that recognize a shared curse. “That’s a great photo,” she tells Jessie, sadly.

They, along with Lee’s writer colleague Joel (the fine Brazilian actor Wagner Moura ) and a veteran journalist, Sammy ( Stephen McKinley Henderson ), who works for a much-diminished, perhaps criminalized New York Times, are making a run from New York City to Washington, D.C., where they hope to interview the president, bunkered in the White House and on the brink of surrender. “It’s the only story left,” insists Joel, even as we hear that press members have a tendency to get shot on the South Lawn.

“Civil War” then becomes a thrillingly dark road trip, studded by moments of explosive tension and dangerous misjudgment that play less like bite-size episodes of “The Last of Us” than signposts of an overall political condition. (If you love post-apocalyptic journeys, buckle up — the tank’s full.) Some of Garland’s imagery is overly familiar, like the line of abandoned cars that stretches to the horizon. He also leans hard on some overaesthetized slo-mo pageantry that, combined with the occasional indie-guitar strums on the soundtrack, threaten to turn his concept into a Statement.

But the scenes that work will get you thinking. Garland is strongest with impressions: chirping birds over bloody lawns, the laconic humor of exhausted soldiers on a stakeout, a quick shot of Lee deleting some of her own photos, a private mode of self-care. In one scene, a frighteningly calm xenophobe with a rifle (Jesse Plemons) menaces from behind red-tinted lenses.“What kind of American are you?” he asks, finger on the trigger, the movie sharpening into something unbearable.

Kirsten Dunst and Cailee Spaeny on the nightmarish ‘Civil War’: ‘No nation is immune’

Writer-director Alex Garland’s controversy-courting political fable about a violently divided America brings together two generation-defining actors.

April 4, 2024

For some, those glasses will be bait enough, a MAGA hat to coastal bulls. But for the most part, what Garland is after is less accusatory and more provocative, detached from the kind of red-state-blue-state binary that would trap “Civil War” in amber before it had a chance to breathe. Do we deserve a democracy if we can barely speak to each other? This is a film set in a future when words no longer matter. Even the final words of power-grabbing leaders disappoint.

At some point, the hugeness of modern-day military hardware, much of it digitally rendered, sweeps in, the pounding rotors of helicopters and urban street-clearing machinery orchestrated into an overwhelming last act. The shock of watching tanks roll down Pennsylvania Avenue is a disquieting vision best experienced in a multiplex, not real life. But the takeaway isn’t exhilaration; the unease is what makes Garland’s film valuable. You watch it with your jaw hanging open.

What of our heroic journalists? Dunst and Spaeny continue a long-telegraphed transfer of status, both actors digging for expressions beyond stunned, but this isn’t a chatty film. Its main purpose is to turn us into observers ourselves. And regardless of what may come ahead — at the movies and beyond — there won’t be a more important film this year.

'Civil War'

Rating: R, for strong violent content, bloody/disturbing images, and language throughout Running time: 1 hour, 49 minutes Playing: In wide release Friday, April 12

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In trying to hedge its politics, ‘Civil War’ betrays its characters — and the audience

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Joshua Rothkopf is film editor of the Los Angeles Times. He most recently served as senior movies editor at Entertainment Weekly. Before then, Rothkopf spent 16 years at Time Out New York, where he was film editor and senior film critic. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Sight and Sound, Empire, Rolling Stone and In These Times, where he was chief film critic from 1999 to 2003.

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Movie Review: In Alex Garland’s potent ‘Civil War,’ journalists are America’s last hope

This image released by A24 shows Kirsten Dunst in a scene from “Civil War.” (A24 via AP)

This image released by A24 shows Kirsten Dunst in a scene from “Civil War.” (Murray Close/A24 via AP)

This image released by A24 shows a scene from “Civil War.” (A24 via AP)

This image released by A24 shows a scene from “Civil War.” (Murray Close/A24 via AP)

This image released by A24 shows Cailee Spaeny, left, and Kirsten Dunst in a scene from “Civil War.” (A24 via AP)

This image released by A24 shows Wagner Moura in a scene from “Civil War.” (A24 via AP)

This image released by A24 shows Wagner Moura, left, and Kirsten Dunst in a scene from “Civil War.” (Murray Close/A24 via AP)

This image released by A24 shows Cailee Spaeny, left, and Wagner Moura in a scene from “Civil War.” (Murray Close/A24 via AP)

This image released by A24 shows Cailee Spaeny in a scene from “Civil War.” (Murray Close/A24 via AP)

This image released by A24 shows Nick Offerman in a scene from “Civil War.” (Murray Close/A24 via AP)

This image released by A24 shows Stephen McKinley Henderson in a scene from “Civil War.” (Murray Close/A24 via AP)

This image released by A24 shows promotional art for “Civil War.” (A24 via AP)

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The United States is crumbling in Alex Garland’s sharp new film “ Civil War, ” a bellowing and haunting big screen experience. The country has been at war with itself for years by the time we’re invited in, through the gaze of a few journalists documenting the chaos on the front lines and chasing an impossible interview with the president.

Garland, the writer-director of films like “Annihilation” and “Ex Machina,” as well as the series “Devs,” always seems to have an eye on the ugliest sides of humanity and our capacity for self-destruction. His themes are profound and his exploration of them sincere in films that are imbued with strange and haunting images that rattle around in your subconscious for far too long. Whatever you think of “ Men ,” his most divisive film to date, it’s unlikely anyone will forget Rory Kinnear giving birth to himself.

In “Civil War,” starring Kirsten Dunst as a veteran war photographer named Lee, Garland is challenging his audience once again by not making the film about what everyone thinks it will, or should, be about. Yes, it’s a politically divided country. Yes, the President (Nick Offerman) is a blustery, rising despot who has given himself a third term, taken to attacking his citizens and shut himself off from the press. Yes, there is one terrifying character played by Jesse Plemons who has some pretty hard lines about who is and isn’t a real American.

But that trailer that had everyone talking is not the story. Garland is not so dull or narratively conservative to make the film about red and blue ideologies. All we really know is that the so-called Western Forces of Texas and California have seceded from the country and are closing in to overthrow the government. We don’t know what they want or why, or what the other side wants or why and you start to realize that many of the characters don’t seem to really know, or care, either.

This choice might be frustrating to some audiences, but it’s also the only one that makes sense in a film focused on the kinds of journalists who put themselves in harm’s way to tell the story of violent conflicts and unrest. As Lee explains to Cailee Spaeny’s Jessie, a young, aspiring photographer who has elbowed her way onto their dangerous journey to Washington, questions are not for her to ask: She takes truthful, impartial pictures so that everyone else can.

“Civil War” a film that is more about war reporters than anything else — the trauma of the beat, the vital importance of bearing witness and the moral and ethical dilemmas of impartiality. Dunst’s Lee is having a bit of an existential crisis, having shot so many horrors and feeling as though she hasn’t made any difference — violence and death are still everywhere. She’s also a pro: Hardened and committed to the story and the image. Her colleague Joel (Wagner Moura) is more of an adrenaline junkie, chasing the gunfire and drinking himself into a stupor every night. There’s Jessie (Spaeny), the wide-eyed but ambitious newbie who is in over her head, and the aging editor Sammy (the great Stephen McKinley Henderson), wise and buttoned up in Brooks Brothers and suspenders, who can’t imagine a life outside of news even as his body is failing him. All are self-motivated and none of them have a life outside of the job, which might be a criticism for some movie characters but not here (trigger warning for any journo audiences out there).

The group must drive an indirect route to get from New York to Washington as safely as possible, through Pittsburgh and West Virginia. The roads and towns are set-dressed a little bit, but anyone who knows the area will recognize familiar sights of dead malls, creaky off-brand gas stations on two lane roads, boarded up shops and overgrown parking lots that all work to provide an unsettlingly effective backdrop for the bleak world of “Civil War.”

Dunst and Spaeny are both exceedingly good in their roles, effectively embodying the veteran and the novice — a well-written, nuanced and evolving dynamic that should inspire post-credits debates and discussion (among other topics).

Dread permeates every frame, whether it’s a quiet moment of smart conversation, a white-knuckle standoff or a deafening shootout on 17th street. And as with all Garland films it comes with a great, thoughtful soundtrack and a Sonoya Mizuno cameo.

Smart, compelling and challenging blockbusters don’t come along that often, though this past year has had a relative embarrassment of riches with the likes of “Dune: Part Two” and “Oppenheimer.” “Civil War” should be part of that conversation too. It’s a full body theatrical experience that deserves a chance.

“Civil War,” an A24 release in theaters Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “strong, violent content, bloody/disturbing images and language throughout.” Running time: 119 minutes. Three stars out of four.

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‘Us’ Review: Jordan Peele’s Creepy Latest Turns a Funhouse Mirror on Us

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‘Us’ | Anatomy of a Scene

Jordan peele narrates a sequence from his film..

“I’m Jordan Peele. I’m the writer, producer, and director of the movie “Us.’” “There’s a family in our driveway.” “So here we have the scene where the tethered family arrives at the Wilson house for the first time. Jason, of course, says “there’s a family in our driveway.” A line designed, giddily, to attempt to be an iconic line, like “they’re here” from the “Poltergeist” movie and sort of help congeal this sense of an Amblin-esque predicament with a black family in the center of it.” - [heavy breathing] “What?” “Zora, give me your phone.” “I’m not on it.” “Zora!” “This is the point in the movie where I want the terror to really kick into a new gear for the audience. One of the techniques that I utilized to get that terror was that all of a sudden we go into real time. The movie before this has been going from some time dashes here and there. When we get into this moment where the four family members are standing holding hands outside, then we go into this sort of fluid — we use a lot of the Steadicam with very few edits. Really trying to subliminally signal to the audience that this sort of relentless, real time event has begun and is taking place.” “Wait, wait, wait, just one sec — Gabe.” “So we see Gabe leave. He goes out. He’s the dad, he’s got to deal with it. This is kind of like — probably pulled from my own anxieties of being a father and realizing, yeah, you got to man up sometimes.” “Hi. Can I help you?” “One of the things in this scene that really inspired me was the scene in “Halloween” where Michael Myers has the ghost sheet over him. And no matter how many questions he’s asked, he just doesn’t respond. The less response you get, the more impending and physical, I think, the threat gets. Probably after the second time someone doesn’t respond, you know one of you’s got to go down. [laughing] “A’ight, I asked you nice. Now I need y’all to get off my property.” “One of the pieces of this scene that works really well is we’ve got Winston to this spot where he’s code switching. You know, he goes back to some of his roots, as it were, to try and intimidate this mysterious family out there. That maybe if sort of reasoning with them doesn’t work, a good old fashioned low register, throwing some bass into his voice, coming out with a little swagger and a bat might work.” “O.K., let’s call the cops.” “Winston is just remarkable in this scene, and the audience really I think is in this tug of war between feeling the tension ratcheting up and the fear of what’s to come and the little bit of a comic relief of watching this kind of goofy dad who’s in over his head.” “Gabe.” “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. All right.” “Gabe!” “I got this.”

By Manohla Dargis

• March 20, 2019

Jordan Peele’s new horror movie, “Us,” is an expansive philosophical hall of mirrors. Like his 2017 hit, “Get Out,” this daring fun-until-it’s-not shocker starts from the genre’s central premise that everyday life is a wellspring of terrors. In “Get Out,” a young black man meets a group of white people who buy — at auction — younger, healthier black bodies. What makes “Get Out” so powerful is how Peele marshals a classic tale of unwilling bodily possession into a resonant, unsettling metaphor for the sweep of black and white relations in the United States — the U.S., or us.

“Us” is more ambitious than “Get Out,” and in some ways more unsettling. Once again, Peele is exploring existential terrors and the theme of possession, this time through the eerie form of the monstrous doppelgänger. The figure of the troublesome other — of Jekyll and Hyde, of the conscious and unconscious — ripples through the story of an ordinary family, the Wilsons, stalked by murderous doubles. These shadows look like the Wilsons but are frighteningly different, with fixed stares and guttural, animalistic vocalizations. Dressed in matching red coveralls and wielding large scissors (the better to slice and dice), they are funhouse-mirror visions turned nightmares.

The evil twin is a rich, durable motif, and it winds through “Us” from start to finish, beginning with a flashback to 1986 at a Santa Cruz, Calif., amusement park. There, a young girl (the expressive Madison Curry) and her parents are leisurely wandering the park. The girl is itsy-bitsy (the camera sticks close to her so that everything looms), and she and her parents maintain a chilly, near-geometric distance from one another. She’s clutching a perfect candied apple, a portentous splash of red and a witty emblem both of Halloween and Edenic forbidden fruit. Movies are journeys into knowledge, and what the girl knows is part of the simmering mystery.

The Wilsons, a family of four headed by Adelaide (a dazzling Lupita Nyong’o) and Gabe (Winston Duke), enter many years later, introduced with an aerial sweep of greenery. The bird’s-eye view (or god’s-eye, given the movie’s metaphysical reach) evokes the opener of Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” a film Peele references throughout. A true cinephile, Peele scatters “Us” with nods and allusions to old-school 1970s and ’80s movies including “Goonies,” “Jaws,” “A Nightmare on Elm Street.” (One disturbing scene suggests that he’s also a fan of Michael Haneke.) But “The Shining” — another story of a grotesquely haunted family — serves as his most obvious guiding star, narratively and visually.

[Read about Lupita Nyong’o and her work on the movie.]

Peele likes to mix tones and moods, and as he did in “Get Out,” he uses broad humor both for delay and deflection. There’s a cryptic opener and an equally enigmatic credit sequence, but soon the Wilsons are laughing at their vacation home. It’s a breather that Peele uses for light jokes and intimacy (Duke’s amiable performance provides levity and warmth) while he scatters narrative bread crumbs. There’s a beach trip with another family, this one headed by Kitty (a fantastic Elisabeth Moss) and Josh (Tim Heidecker), who have teenage twin girls (cue “The Shining”). At last, the movie jumps to kinetic life with the appearance of the Wilsons’ doubles, who descend in a brutal home invasion.

The assault is a master class of precision-timed scares filled with light shivers and deeper, reverberant frights. Working within the house’s tight, angled spaces — soon filled with fluid camerawork and bodies moving to dramatically different beats — Peele turns this domestic space into a double of the funhouse that loomed in the amusement park. After much scrambling and shrieking, the Wilsons and their weird twins face off in the living room, mirroring one another. Adelaide’s shadow, Red (the actors play their doubles), takes charge and splits up the Wilsons, ordering her husband, daughter and son to take charge of their terrified others while she remains with Adelaide.

[ Read Jason Zinoman’s essay on why this is the golden age of grown-up horror. ]

A vibrant, appealing screen presence, Nyong’o brings a tremendous range and depth of feeling to both characters, who she individualizes with such clarity and lapidary detail that they aren’t just distinct beings; they feel as if they were being inhabited by different actors. She gives each a specific walk and sharply opposite gestures and voices (maternally silky vs. monstrously raspy). Adelaide, who studied ballet, moves gracefully and, when need be, rapidly (she racks up miles); Red moves as if keeping time to a metronome, with the staccato, mechanical step and head turns of an automaton. Both have ramrod posture and large unblinking eyes. Red’s mouth is a monstrous abyss.

The confrontation between Adelaide and Red testifies to Peele’s strength with actors — here, he makes the most of Nyong’o’s dueling turns — but, once Red starts explaining things, it also telegraphs the story’s weakness. “Us” is Peele’s second movie, but as his ideas pile up — and the doubles and their terrors expand — it starts to feel like his second and third combined. One of the pleasures of “Get Out” was its conceptual and narrative elegance, a streamlining that makes it feel shorter than its one hour 44 minutes. “Us” runs a little longer, but its surfeit of stuff — its cinephilia, bunnies of doom, sharp political detours and less-successful mythmaking — can make it feel unproductively cluttered.

Peele’s boldest, most exciting and shaky conceptual move in “Us” is to yoke the American present with the past, first by invoking the 1986 super-event Hands Across America. A very ’80s charity drive (one of its organizers helped create the ’85 benefit hit “We Are the World” ), it had Americans holding hands from coast to coast, making a human chain meant to fight hunger and homelessness. President Reagan held hands in front of the White House even while his administration was criticized for cutting billions for programs to help the homeless.

In “Us,” the appearance of unity — in a nation, in a person — doesn’t last long before being ripped away like one of the movie’s masks. Peele piles on (and tears off) the masks and the metaphors, tethers the past to the present and draws a line between the Reagan and Trump presidencies, suggesting that we were, and remain, one nation profoundly divisible. He also busies up his story with too many details, explanations and cutaways. Peele’s problem isn’t that he’s ambitious; he is, blissfully. But he also feels like an artist who has been waiting a very long time to say a great deal, and here he steps on, and muddles, his material, including in a fight that dilutes even Nyong’o’s best efforts.

Early on, Peele drops in some text about the existence of abandoned tunnels, mines and subways in the United States. I flashed on Colson Whitehead’s novel “The Underground Railroad,” which literalizes the network of safe houses and routes used by enslaved black Americans, turning it into a fantastical subterranean passageway to freedom. In “Us,” Peele uses the metaphor of the divided self to explore what lies beneath contemporary America, its double consciousness, its identity, sins and terrors. The results are messy, brilliant, sobering, even bleak — the final scene is a gut punch delivered with a queasy smile — but Jordan Peele isn’t here just to play.

Us Rated R for horror violence, featuring scissors and a pesky boat motor. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes.

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Whatever you expect from an Alex Garland movie, he always gives you something else."Civil War" is something else again. It premiered in the US hours before I published this and it's already divisive. I look forward to reading all of the arguments for and against, even though both early raves and pans seem to be operating under the reductive assumption that it's one of three things: (1) an alternative future history of a divided United States that's intended as a cautionary tale; (2) a technically proficient but empty-headed misery porn compendium that derives much of its power from images redolent of genocide and/or lynching, but ducks political specifics so as not to offend reactionaries; or (3) a visionary spectacular with ultra-violence that might or might not have something important to say but will definitely look and sound great on an expensive home entertainment system.

As it turns out, "Civil War" is mainly something else: a thought experiment about journalistic ethics, set in a future United States, yet reminiscent of classic movies about Western journalists covering the collapse of foreign countries, such as " The Year of Living Dangerously ," " Salvador ," " Under Fire ," and " Welcome to Sarajevo ." 

How utterly bizarre, you might think. And in the abstract, it is bizarre. But "Civil War" is a furiously convincing and disturbing thing when you're watching it. It's a great movie that has its own life force. It's not like anything Garland has made. It's not like anything anyone has made, even though it contains echoes of dozens of other films (and novels) that appear to have fed the filmmaker's imagination.

Specifically, and most originally, "Civil War" is a portrait of the mentality of pure reporters, the types of people who are less interested in explaining what things "mean" (in the manner of an editorial writer or "pundit") than in getting the scoop before the competition, by any means necessary. Whether the scoop takes the form of a written story, a TV news segment, or a still photo that wins a Pulitzer, the quest for the scoop is an end unto itself, and it's bound up with the massive dopamine hit that that comes from putting oneself in harm's way. The kinds of obsessive war correspondents who rarely come back to their own countries don't care about the real-world impact of the political realities encoded within the epic violence they chronicle, or else compartmentalize it to stay focused.  

The main characters of "Civil War" are four journalists. The film introduces them covering a clash in New York City between what appear to be police forces from the official government and violent members of the opposition (we have to infer a lot because Garland drops you right into the deep end, as Haskell Wexler did in " Medium Cool ," about a news cameraman covering the 1968 protests in Chicago). Kirsten Dunst plays Lee, a legendary white female photojournalist in the mold of her namesake Lee Miller. She's partnered with a South American-born reporter named Joel ( Wagner Moura ). Both work for Reuters news agency and are fond of Sammy (veteran character actor  Stephen McKinley Henderson ), an older African-American journalist who writes for “what’s left of the New York Times ,” as Joel puts it; he walks slowly on a cane, definitely a liability when covering protests and battles. 

The group gains a fourth member, Jessie ( Cailee Spaeny , the title character of " Priscilla "), a kind of junior version of Lee who idolizes her. Jessie charms the hard-drinking, on-the-prowl Joel and ends up joining the trio as they drive to Washington, D.C. in hopes of interviewing the president ( Nick Offerman ) before he surrenders to the military forces of something called the WA, or Western Alliance. The WA consists of militias from California and Texas (with secondary support from Florida, which is apparently a different separatist group that shares the WA's values). 

The first full-length trailer for "Civil War" got picked apart as if it were the movie itself rather than an advertisement for it (a weird regular occurrence in "film discourse," such as it is). But the actual movie turns out to be more politically astute and plausible than early reactions said, even though it's likely that Garland's "you already know the story" approach (like the way the overall arc of the US occupation of Vietnam was depicted in " Full Metal Jacket ") will seem to validate the gripes for the first hour. Yes, it's true, Texas votes Republican in national elections and California votes Democratic, but as of this writing, Northern California is  increasingly controlled by libertarian-influenced tech billionaires , and much of central and eastern California leans Republican and loathes California Democrats so much that they've advocated " divid(ing) parts of coastal California, including the Bay Area, from California to become an independent country." The president is referred to as a fascist. I’m not sure how literally we’re supposed to take that because both Trump and Biden have been called that by people who don’t like them.

But if you had to make a list of what "Civil War" is trying to do, "diagnosing what ails the United States of America" might not crack the Top 5. Yes, if you wanted to treat the movie so reductively, you could. But if you pay attention to what the movie is actually doing rather than cherry picking elements that validate whatever take you brought in with you, it won't be easy. I went into "Civil War" with arms folded, expecting to hate it, because so many contemporary films about US politics by foreign filmmakers seem to have cribbed their worldview from New York Times editorials and bad Tweets. It upended my preconceived notions.

As far as "future shock" goes, Garland, an Englishman, isn't cynically avoiding specifics or talking out of his behind. He's burying the text under subtext, in the name of creating a compelling but credible experience, until said text explodes through the screen via Jesse Plemons , who has a cameo as a soldier who might or might not be a Western Front officer but is surely a parasite on the remnants of the body politic. This soft-voiced, smirky hellion interrogates the terrified group of journalists (which consists of two white women, a native-born Black man, and a South American emigre, plus an Asian-American and a Chinese immigrant who joined them on the road) with all the delicacy of Gene Hackman's racist white cop Popeye Doyle terrorizing Black people in " The French Connection " for kicks.

A terse line of dialogue reveals that Lee became famous for taking a prize-winning photo of something called the "Antifa massacre" when Jessie was very young. "Antifa massacre" is initially tossed off in a way that makes you wonder if Garland is hoping progressives will assume it was anti-fascists who were murdered by reactionaries, but reactionaries will assume it was the reverse. Thanks to Plemons' demonic showstopper and the thunderous, ultimately chilling finale (set during the attempted coup in Washington) I think it's clear what happened. But your mileage will vary.

Nevertheless, these characters aren't constantly exposition-ing to each other and explaining the world to the viewer because that's not what people would do in real life, whether they were trying to survive mass extinction in Gaza or Ukraine or endure a military dictatorship in Argentina or Myanmar. Indeed, one of the most fascinating (or if you don't like it, perplexing) aspects of "Civil War" is that it often plays like an artifact warped into our world from some future popular culture that has decided it's finally time for a "big statement" movie in the vein of " Apocalypse Now " or "Full Metal Jacket," but for people who remember an American Civil War and have enough perspective to consider buying a ticket to a blockbuster about it.

Garland is known as mainly a science fiction storyteller. He wrote "28 Days Later," "Sunshine" and "Dredd," adapted " Never Let Me Go " from Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, and wrote and directed " Ex Machina " and " Annihilation ," all of which had an intense and believable physicality on top of dealing in metaphors and visceral experiences. (He also did the gender essentialist horror flick " Men ," which some people defend but that I consider his only failure.) "Civil War" isn't science fiction, exactly, nor could it be described mainly as "speculative fiction," although it falls under that umbrella. The world-building is masterful. But the world-building is not the movie. 

I appreciated it as a story about journalists whose own country is cratering but who keep chasing the story and are determined to catch it even if it kills them. Would they have embedded themselves with Hitler's army if they'd somehow survived behind enemy lines in Germany in the 1940s and been given the opportunity? I wouldn't rule it out. They will probably come across as unlikable, or at least off-putting, to most viewers—the New York Times and other supposedly "neutral" mainstream outlets have come under fire in recent years for seeming to give the rise of American fascism the "both sides" treatment, and when their reporters are called out, they often say that their only duty is to tell the story. Certain members of certain professions have that code. Other members disagree. Both factions are represented in "Civil War," but in a fictionalized context that asks "Is the storyteller's highest obligation to tell what happened or choose a side?" and then lets the audience fight over the answer. A case could be made that the title is not just about the civil war in the future US, but within contemporary journalism. 

I've purposefully avoided describing a lot of the story in this review because I want people to go in cold, as I did, and experience the movie as sort of picaresque narrative consisting of set pieces that test the characters morally and ethically as well as physically, from one day and one moment to the next. Suffice to say that the final section brings every thematic element together in a perfectly horrifying fashion and ends with a moment of self-actualization I don't think I'll ever be able to shake. 

This review was filed from the SXSW Film Festival. It opens on April 12th.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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Civil War (2024)

109 minutes

Kirsten Dunst as Ellie

Wagner Moura as Joel

Cailee Spaeny as Jesse

Stephen McKinley Henderson as Sammy

Jesse Plemons

Nick Offerman as President

Karl Glusman

Sonoya Mizuno

Jefferson White

• Alex Garland

Original Music Composer

• Geoff Barrow
• Ben Salisbury

Director of Photography

• Jake Roberts

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Speak No Evil

A family invited to spend a weekend in an idyllic country house, goes from a dream vacation to a psychological nightmare. A family invited to spend a weekend in an idyllic country house, goes from a dream vacation to a psychological nightmare. A family invited to spend a weekend in an idyllic country house, goes from a dream vacation to a psychological nightmare.

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McFarland, USA

Where to watch.

Watch McFarland, USA with a subscription on Disney+, rent on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV, or buy on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV.

What to Know

Disney's inspirational sports drama formula might be old hat, but McFarland, USA proves it still works -- especially with a talented director and eminently likable star in the mix.

Audience Reviews

Cast & crew.

Kevin Costner

Maria Bello

Cheryl White

Morgan Saylor

Julie White

Michael Aguero

Damacio Diaz

Sergio Avelar

Victor Puentes

Best Movies to Stream at Home

Movie news & guides, this movie is featured in the following articles., critics reviews.