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      ‘Civil War’ Review: We Have Met the Enemy and It Is Us. Again.

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      In Alex Garland’s tough new movie, a group of journalists led by Kirsten Dunst, as a photographer, travels a United States at war with itself.A blunt, gut-twisting work of speculative fiction, “Civil War” opens with the United States at war with itself — literally, not just rhetorically. In Washington, D.C., the president is holed up in the White House; in a spookily depopulated New York, desperate people wait for water rations. It’s the near-future, and rooftop snipers, suicide bombers and wild-eyed randos are in the fight while an opposition faction with a two-star flag called the Western Front, comprising Texas and California — as I said, this is speculative fiction — is leading the charge against what remains of the federal government. If you’re feeling triggered, you aren’t alone.It’s mourning again in America, and it’s mesmerizingly, horribly gripping. Filled with bullets, consuming fires and terrific actors like Kirsten Dunst running for cover, the movie is a what-if nightmare stoked by memories of Jan. 6. As in what if the visions of some rioters had been realized, what if the nation was again broken by Civil War, what if the democratic experiment called America had come undone? If that sounds harrowing, you’re right. It’s one thing when a movie taps into childish fears with monsters under the bed; you’re eager to see what happens because you know how it will end (until the sequel). Adult fears are another matter.In “Civil War,” the British filmmaker Alex Garland explores the unbearable if not the unthinkable, something he likes to do. A pop cultural savant, he made a splashy zeitgeist-ready debut with his 1996 best seller “The Beach,” a novel about a paradise that proves deadly, an evergreen metaphor for life and the basis for a silly film. That things in the world are not what they seem, and are often far worse, is a theme that Garland has continued pursuing in other dark fantasies, first as a screenwriter (“28 Days Later”), and then as a writer-director (“Ex Machina”). His résumé is populated with zombies, clones and aliens, though reliably it is his outwardly ordinary characters you need to keep a closer watch on.By the time “Civil War” opens, the fight has been raging for an undisclosed period yet long enough to have hollowed out cities and people’s faces alike. It’s unclear as to why the war started or who fired the first shot. Garland does scatter some hints; in one ugly scene, a militia type played by a jolting, scarily effective Jesse Plemons asks captives “what kind of American” they are. Yet whatever divisions preceded the conflict are left to your imagination, at least partly because Garland assumes you’ve been paying attention to recent events. Instead, he presents an outwardly and largely post-ideological landscape in which debates over policies, politics and American exceptionalism have been rendered moot by war.One thing that remains familiar amid these ruins is the movie’s old-fashioned faith in journalism. Dunst, who’s sensational, plays Lee, a war photographer who works for Reuters alongside her friend, a reporter, Joel (the charismatic Wagner Moura). They’re in New York when you meet them, milling through a crowd anxiously waiting for water rations next to a protected tanker. It’s a fraught scene; the restless crowd is edging into mob panic, and Lee, camera in hand, is on high alert. As Garland’s own camera and Joel skitter about, Lee carves a path through the chaos, as if she knows exactly where she needs to be — and then a bomb goes off. By the time it does, an aspiring photojournalist, Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), is also in the mix.The streamlined, insistently intimate story takes shape once Lee, Joel, Jessie and a veteran reporter, Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), pile into a van and head to D.C. Joel and Lee are hoping to interview the president (Nick Offerman), and Sammy and Jessie are riding along largely so that Garland can make the trip more interesting. Sammy serves as a stabilizing force (Henderson fills the van with humanizing warmth), while Jessie plays the eager upstart Lee takes under her resentful wing. It’s a tidily balanced sampling that the actors, with Garland’s banter and via some cozy downtime, turn into flesh-and-blood personalities, people whose vulnerability feeds the escalating tension with each mile.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What to Know About ‘Sasquatch Sunset’

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      An earthquake and an eclipse weren’t the only natural rarities that happened in New York City this past week. Did you hear about the sasquatch in Central Park? The makers of “Sasquatch Sunset” sure hope you did.That’s because the sasquatch was a costume and his stroll through the park was a publicity push for the new film from the brothers David and Nathan Zellner. Opening in New York on Friday, the movie spends a year in the wild with a sasquatch pack — a male and female (Nathan Zellner and Riley Keough) and two younger sasquatches (Jesse Eisenberg and Christophe Zajac-Denek) — as they eat, have sex, fight predators and reckon with death.Droll but big-hearted, the movie sits at the intersection of the ad campaign for Jack Link’s beef jerky, the 1987 comedy “Harry and the Hendersons” and a 1970s nature documentary, down to the hippie-vibe soundtrack.What goes into a movie about Bigfoots? (Bigfeet?) Even after a day of following the costumed sasquatch around Central Park, we had questions for the cast and crew. They had answers, which have been edited and condensed.Even sasquatches can appreciate the halal cart. And sometimes they need a rest.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      Trevor Griffiths, Marxist Writer for Stage and Screen, Dies at 88

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      For him, “art played a particular role in social change,” the director Mehmet Ergen said. “Everything was political.”Trevor Griffiths, a prolific and avowedly Marxist writer for stage and screen most widely known for his play “Comedians,” which was staged in London and on Broadway, died on March 29 at his home in Yorkshire, England. He was 88.His agent, Nicki Stoddart, said the cause was heart failure.An important figure on the English left, Mr. Griffiths conjoined the political with the personal and expressed that affinity across a wide range of topics, whether connected to British party politics or comparable upheavals abroad.He was at his most visible during the decade or so from 1975 onward. That period encompassed the premiere of “Comedians” in Nottingham, England, in 1975, as well as its New York premiere in 1976 — it was his only Broadway play — and his lone foray into Hollywood, as a collaborator with Warren Beatty on his screenplay for the much-admired movie “Reds” (1981).Laurence Olivier, right, with Gawn Grainger in a scene from Mr. Griffith’s play “The Party” (1973) at the Old Vic Theater in London. It was Olivier’s last stage role.via Everett CollectionHis plays granted Laurence Olivier his last stage role, in the National Theater premiere of “The Party” (1973) — an anatomy of the British left set against the backdrop of the 1968 political tumult in Paris — and offered early opportunities for budding talents like Jonathan Pryce, who won a Tony for “Comedians,” and Kevin Spacey and Gary Oldman, who starred in the American and British premieres of the play “Real Dreams” in the 1980s.“Comedians,” set in Manchester among the hopefuls in a night comedy class, has had various notable revivals over the years — among them a 2003 Off Broadway production, with Raúl Esparza inheriting Mr. Pryce’s career-defining role, and one at London’s Lyric Hammersmith in 2009, David Dawson playing the same role.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why Filmmakers Love to Adapt Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley

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      In the new series and in five previous movies, the character serves as a blank slate to examine the mores and concerns of the time.Tom Ripley’s background is always sketchy. Patricia Highsmith provides only a few rudimentary details in the first few chapters of “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” her 1955 novel that kicked off a series of five books about the elusive con artist. Tom lives in New York, in near-destitute circumstances. He has some friends — acquaintances, really — whom he hates, mentally labeling them “the riffraff, the vulgarians, the slobs.” He wants nothing more than to be rid of them, and after the first few chapters, he succeeds. He receives money from an aunt in Boston; she raised him after his parents drowned in the harbor there. He hates her, too.When we meet Tom, he has been committing check fraud through the mail, amassing payments in the amount of $1,863.14 that he does not plan to cash. The con job was, he thinks, “no more than a practical joke, really. Good clean sport.” He’ll destroy the checks before boarding the ship that will take him to Europe, where he’s tasked with hunting down Dickie Greenleaf, the scion of a shipbuilding mogul who’s been wasting time, and money, in Italy.The curious thing about these features of Tom Ripley’s life is that they add up to nothing. Highsmith structures them as telling details, the kinds of specifics that writers employ like shorthand to build a person in the reader’s mind. But in fact, we get very little from them, and at every turn our attempts to wrap our heads around this character are rebuffed. You might think Tom is a man of taste and talent, except he doesn’t exhibit any real taste, and the talent seems limited to a knack for forgery and impersonation. You might think he’s a malevolent mastermind seeking to bilk a wealthy family of their fortune, but he’s really just pathetic, far more concerned with making sure the Greenleafs view him as a man of their own social class. Unfortunately, he’s charmless.Tom is not particularly handsome, clever or well-connected. He’s just miserable, but he doesn’t have much in the way of plans, or goals, beyond getting away from where he is.This does not make Tom Ripley a screen-ready hero. He’s not even really a strong template for an antihero. But that has not stopped filmmakers from trying. Five films and now a Netflix series, starring a parade of alluring actors, have tried out various angles on the Ripley question. Who is this guy, really? A criminal? A climber? A sociopath? A thief?Alain Delon in “Purple Noon,” which offers a French existentialist take on the character.Criterion CollectionWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Rufus Sewell Plays a Gasping Prince Andrew in ‘Scoop’

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      In the feature “Scoop,” streaming on Netflix, Rufus Sewell plays the disgraced royal blundering through a 2019 BBC interview.Before filming started on “Scoop,” a Netflix feature about Prince Andrew’s notoriously misjudged 2019 interview on the BBC, the actor Rufus Sewell, who stars as the disgraced royal, turned up on set to shoot a few photographs that would appear in the background. Loaded with makeup and prosthetics, including false teeth and a feathery wig, Sewell felt leaden and self-conscious, he said, fearful that his impersonation would slip into parody.Then, he recalled, he sat down opposite an elderly man working as an extra. Had they worked together before, the man asked Sewell; he looked vaguely familiar. “No,” Sewell told him, “but obviously I wouldn’t have looked like this.” The man seemed confused, and was even more bewildered when Sewell explained, “This isn’t my real face.” The extra laughed: “What do you mean it’s not your face?”This interaction, though strange, was very helpful, Sewell said in a recent video interview. “I realized that it wasn’t about passing for Andrew,” he added. Instead, the man “hadn’t doubted for a second that I was a human — that I was a real person,” Sewell said. “That gave me a real freedom and a lease on life.”The right way of playing Prince Andrew, Sewell said, was in “the uncanny valley between me and him.”Eamonn M. Mccormack/Getty ImagesSewell’s performance as Prince Andrew, who is also known as the Duke of York, is impressive, not so much because of the resemblance (which is, at times, striking), but because he slyly channels the spirit of the man who so horrified the British public by seeming to justify his friendship with the financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.Sewell avoids the typical pitfalls of playing a real person as a broad, exaggerated impersonation. His duke is a spasm of nervous tics and shifty glances, of unctuous charm and feigned candor. Watching the journalist Emily Maitlis (an excellent Gillian Anderson) walk in to conduct the interview wearing pants, he gawks at her and shouts, “Trousers!” It feels true to the Prince Andrew the public knows, however little viewers may not believe what the character says.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Grey Gardens’ and Billy Joel in Concert

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      TCM airs the cult classic 1975 documentary, and Joel airs his first broadcast concert at Madison Square Garden.For those who still haven’t cut the cord, here is a selection of cable and network TV shows, movies and specials that broadcast this week, April 8-14. Details and times are subject to change.MondayTHE GREEN MILE (1999) 7 p.m. on AMC. Based on the 1999 Stephen King novel of the same name, this three-hour-plus film tells a somber tale of the death row warden Paul Edgecomb (Tom Hanks) who meets an enigmatic inmate, John Coffey (Michael Clarke Duncan) — a gentle giant with healing powers that border on the supernatural.ELTON JOHN & BERNIE TAUPIN: THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS GERSHWIN PRIZE FOR POPULAR SONG TRIBUTE CONCERT 8 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). The songwriting duo of Elton John and Bernie Taupin are the recipients of the 2024 Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, awarded by the Library of Congress. To honor their achievements, a tribute concert held in Washington D.C. will be held with performances by Metallica, Garth Brooks, Annie Lennox, Joni Mitchell — last year’s honoree — and more.TuesdayFrom left, Ke Huy Quan, Sean Astin, Josh Brolin, Corey Feldman and Jeff Cohen in “The Goonies.”Warner Bros.THE GOONIES (1985) 6 p.m. on E! When a band of misfit neighborhood kids finds a treasure map to the fabled treasure of an infamous pirate known as One-Eyed Willy, a zany adventure unfolds as they race to find gold to save their homes from foreclosure. Will the Goonies find what they’ve been searching for before the Fratellis, a crime family hot on their tail, get their grubby mitts on the priceless jewels? Will their coastal town be saved from destruction? Faced with treacherous traps, secret caves and no shortage of nail-biting moments, repeat after me: “Goonies never say die!”WednesdaySalvatore Corsitto, left, and Marlon Brando, in “The Godfather.”Paramount PicturesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Making Films About Outsiders, Increasingly in the Mainstream

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      Goran Stolevski, who is from North Macedonia and grew up partly in Australia, has made three features in three years, all teeming with unruly emotion.Periods of personal crisis have often yielded writing sprees for Goran Stolevski, a Macedonian filmmaker who has made three critically acclaimed features in three years.Although his recent spate of theatrical releases — all by Focus Features — could make it seem as if success has been quick to come by for the filmmaker, it has been proceeded by long seasons of debilitating professional uncertainty.Right after turning 30, Stolevski wrote four feature screenplays in a nine-month period he spent living in Bristol, England. Writing gave shape to his days as an unemployed artist who couldn’t get any of his projects off the ground. Two of those screenplays became his recent features “You Won’t Be Alone” and “Housekeeping for Beginners.”Then, after his 2017 short film “Would You Look at Her” won a prize at the Sundance Film Festival, Stolevski was out of work for another two years, and wrote four more screenplays.Stolevski, now 38, had written at least 10 scripts before making his 2022 feature debut, “You Won’t Be Alone.” An evocative tale about a shape-shifting witch in a 19th-century Macedonian village, it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. His sophomore effort, the 1990s-set Australian gay romance “Of an Age,” opened in U.S. cinemas in early 2023.“I wouldn’t make every film I’ve written, but there are some I’m obsessed with; they need to exist outside of my head,” he said in a video call in January from this year’s Palm Springs International Film Festival where his third feature, “Housekeeping for Beginners,” screened.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      When a Sasquatch Comes to Central Park

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      A publicity effort for the movie “Sasquatch Sunset” had one of the film’s cast members in full sasquatch costume, wandering through Central Park.If you were near the Ramble in Central Park on Thursday afternoon, you might have thought you were in a “Planet of the Apes”-themed episode of “What Would You Do?”Because you may have witnessed a 6-foot-7 longhaired sasquatch slowly traversing tall rocks and promenading through thickets, grunting at the sky and scaring children and dogs silly.But what you saw wasn’t Bigfoot. It was a big gimmick.The sasquatch sighting was a gorilla — sorry, guerrilla — publicity effort for “Sasquatch Sunset,” a new film directed by the brothers David and Nathan Zellner that opens in New York on April 12.Conceptually, the promotional shenanigans in Central Park were in line with the film’s irreverent sensibility. A mix of bro comedy, National Geographic documentary and emotional family drama, it stars Riley Keough and Jesse Eisenberg as members of a pack of kind-eyed sasquatches who brave life and death in the wilderness.Nathan Zellner, who plays the male alpha, was the human underneath the hairy suit on Thursday. A natural grunter, he was greeted by big laughs and phones aloft the moment he stepped out of a van across from the American Museum of Natural History.Inside the park, Trey Hope stopped to gawk and take a snapshot. What was it and why was it there? He wasn’t sure.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More