Civil War

Alex Garland spent two decades as the most cerebral voice in British genre filmmaking — first as the writer of 28 Days Later and Sunshine, then as the director of Ex Machina, Annihilation and Men. Civil War, his fourth feature, produced by DNA Films with A24 and premiered at SXSW in 2024, is his largest canvas and his most direct: a road movie through an America that has turned its weapons on itself, told from the point of view of the people paid to photograph it.

Kirsten Dunst plays Lee Smith, a war photographer hollowed out by years of conflict abroad, now documenting one at home. Wagner Moura is her reckless, adrenaline-hungry colleague Joel, Stephen McKinley Henderson the old newspaperman who insists on coming along, and Cailee Spaeny the young photographer who idolises Lee. Garland pointedly withholds the politics of the war — the alliance of Texas and California is presented as a fact, not an argument — and concentrates instead on the ethics of looking. Rob Hardy's cinematography cuts between the fluid movement of the convoy and the frozen stills its passengers shoot, while the sound design turns every gunshot into a physical event.

Released in an election year, the film became A24's biggest opening weekend up to that point and one of its most debated releases, praised for its craft and argued over for its refusal to take sides. It won BIFAs for its effects and sound, and has come to stand as the defining portrait of American dread made from outside Hollywood.