Sitting in an abandoned parking lot amid the echoes of gunfire, Lee, a seasoned war photographer, reflects on her life in dismay. “Every time I survived a war zone, I thought I was sending a warning home: don’t do this,” she says to Sammy, an older reporter, in an early scene from Civil War. “But here we are.”

“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'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.”

RogerEbert.com