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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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      ‘Windfall’ Review: Money Talks

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      A wealthy couple is detained by an incompetent thief in this airless Netflix drama.If you can remain awake until the final moments of “Windfall,” then yes, something exciting actually happens. But that’s a very long wait in Charlie McDowell’s oppressive Netflix drama, a gabby hostage movie with a single, covetable location and three unappealing characters.A frozen opening shot of the exterior of a luxury California home forewarns of the tedium to come. A scruffy thief (played by Jason Segel at his most gormless) is poking languidly around the property, as if trying it on for size. He might be the most inept robber since the doofuses in “Home Alone,” but his lack of skills proves irrelevant when the home’s owners, a tech billionaire and his wife (Jesse Plemons and Lily Collins), return unexpectedly and acquiesce to his demands for money. More, they even encourage him to up his asking price.Shot in Ojai in 2020 (not far from where McDowell filmed his 2014 feature, “The One I Love”), “Windfall” is dramatically flat and logically wanting. As the three wait for the agreed-upon loot to arrive, the meandering script (by Justin Lader and Andrew Kevin Walker) includes a farcical sauna lockdown and a surprise visit from a luckless gardener. Multiple escape opportunities are ignored, especially by the wife, who spends most of the movie lounging and looking fed up. One can hardly blame her.Yet despite the shambolic plot and shuffling camera (briefly roused to a sprint during a woodland chase), Plemons digs beneath his character’s arrogance to unearth something like disgust — for his marriage, his money and his subjugation by a ridiculous interloper.“Why do we keep pretending this guy is an actual threat?,” he asks his wife, angrily. He should probably be asking the screenwriters.WindfallRated R for a greedy husband and a wife gone wild. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      2022 Oscars Nominations: Snubs and Surprises for Lady Gaga and Jared Leto

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      “The Power of the Dog” led the Oscar nominations on Tuesday, but plenty of other high-profile contenders fell short. Here, the Projectionist muses on the morning’s most startling surprises and omissions.Kristen Stewart gets the royal treatment.Kristen Stewart’s role as Princess Diana in “Spencer” is the sort of thing Oscar voters usually rush to crown: It’s a juicy, transformative lead in a biopic, performed by a famous actress who has successfully leapt from blockbusters to prestige films. Then came a shocking snub from the Screen Actors Guild, followed by another shutout from BAFTA, and pundits worried whether she’d get nominated at all. Still, Stewart was game, continuing to do press and awards-season round tables, and the 31-year-old actress was rewarded Tuesday morning with her very first Oscar nomination.Lady Gaga and Jared Leto are shut out.“House of Gucci” was stripped to its studs Tuesday, as former winners Lady Gaga and Jared Leto were both snubbed by the academy. Few performances this year were talked about more — both by audiences and by the two actors themselves — and the red carpet will be a little lesser for their absence. (Hey, nobody said the Oscars were particularly ethical … but they are fair.)‘Drive My Car’ overperforms.Coming out of last summer’s Cannes Film Festival, no one had tagged Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Drive My Car” as a major Oscar spoiler: Instead, films like Asghar Farhadi’s “A Hero” and Julia Ducournau’s “Titane” had all the buzz. But a funny thing happened on the way to the Dolby Theater: A year-end surge from critics’ groups put Hamaguchi’s contemplative three-hour drama in the thick of the awards conversation, thanks to high-profile best-film wins from the critics in New York and Los Angeles. Off that momentum, “Drive My Car” managed an astounding four Oscar nominations, with citations in picture, director, adapted screenplay and international film.‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’ is snubbed.There was no bigger film last year than “Spider-Man: No Way Home” — in fact, with a domestic gross of more than $748 million so far, there are only three other films that have ever been bigger. As the superhero movie kept raking in cash, the drumbeat grew louder that if the Oscars really wanted to reflect the year in film, they should honor one of the few movies that kept theaters open at all. And the academy did … but only with a nomination in visual effects. A best-picture nomination proved well outside the web-slinger’s reach.The director of ‘Dune’ goes missing.The academy’s directing branch is often dazzled by technical achievement, and a filmmaker who can wield blockbuster scale in the service of a soulful story usually has a leg up over more intimate fare. That’s why it’s startling that this year’s best-director race didn’t make room for Denis Villeneuve, especially since his sci-fi film “Dune” did score 10 nominations in a host of categories. But history was made elsewhere in that category, as Jane Campion became the first woman to earn two directing nominations (for “The Power of the Dog” and 1993’s “The Piano”) and the “West Side Story” filmmaker Steven Spielberg became the first person to be nominated in that category in six different decades.Two couples were nominated.Not only did the real-life partners Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons score their first Oscar nominations this year for “The Power of the Dog,” so did Penélope Cruz (“Parallel Mothers”) and Javier Bardem (“Being the Ricardos”), the rare married couple to have already won before. Even better: It’s a four-category split, as Cruz and Bardem were nominated in the lead races while Dunst and Plemons continued the spread in the supporting categories. Talk about a double date!Kenneth Branagh makes history.Even before “Belfast,” Branagh was an Oscar favorite, collecting five nominations over the course for his career in categories as varied as director, actor, supporting actor, adapted screenplay and live-action short film. But Tuesday morning’s collection of nods for the black-and-white film “Belfast” vaulted Branagh to a surprising Oscar record: He is now the first person to be nominated in seven different categories, having added citations for best picture and original screenplay to his haul. (Hopefully that makes up for a few surprising “Belfast” snubs in editing and cinematography.)‘Flee’ scores the hat trick.Look, it’s hard enough to earn just one Oscar nomination, as so many of the morning’s snubbed artists can attest. That makes what “Flee” just accomplished all the more remarkable: This animated documentary about an Afghan refugee is now the first film ever to receive Oscar nominations for documentary, animated film and international film all in the same year. A win in any of those categories seems unlikely, but at least when the makers of “Flee” claim it’s an honor just to be nominated, you’ll know that they mean it. More

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      ‘Antlers’ Review: Buck Wild

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      An environmental parable is tucked inside this gloomy film about a creature that terrorizes a small Oregon town.“Antlers,” a moody muddle by Scott Cooper (“Hostiles”), attempts to do for the wendigo, a man-eating, steroidal, elk-like creature from Algonquin folklore, what “Jaws” did for the great white shark: pare a beast to its protuberances and set it loose on an economically-anxious hamlet where basic human well-being is a luxury.The setting is a small Oregon coal mining town that looks funereal even before the wendigo stacks up spines like discarded toothpicks. The mine has shuttered, but promises to reopen. In the interim, its abandoned shaft is an irresistible temptation for two destructive forces fated to collide: Frank Weaver (Scott Haze), a local meth maker who cooks in the darkness, and the wendigo, Mother Earth’s vengeful protector. (The film’s go-green ideology appears only in the opening crawl before becoming as forgotten as a T-shirt from Earth Day 1994.)A cannibal who symbolizes mankind’s appetite for greed and plunder couldn’t be more relevant. In execution, however, “Antlers” isn’t much interested in expanding on its folkloric myth. The wendigo stalks the movie like just another rattle-throat corpse-grinder that yowls and stomps and does its darnedest to trample a path for a sequel. The script, co-written by Cooper, C. Henry Chaisson and Nick Antosca (“Channel Zero”), dwells instead on the miseries of Frank’s oldest son, Lucas (a promising Jeremy T. Thomas), a 12-year-old grappling with the complete destruction of his already fragile home life. Lucas’s English teacher, Julia (Keri Russell), notices that the starved child is scribbling disturbed drawings that demand more attention than the stretched-thin principal (Amy Madigan) is able to give.Julia has her own history of abuse, conveyed through cryptic flashbacks and Russell’s flatlined frown. The film’s smartest insights come from observing how maltreated children bear their secrets. At the same time, Julia’s brother (Jesse Plemons), the local sheriff, is saddled with speculating that the disemboweled victims were done in by “a bear or cougar or something,” inanities made worse by Cooper’s apparent affection for ponderous dialogue delivery that makes every character speak as though they’re hand-whittling each word.The film’s self-seriousness is as oppressive as its setting’s monotonous fog. The cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister shoots handsomely, making Boschian ghouls of men in bug-eyed gas masks, yet it gets frustrating that neither he nor Cooper allow anyone to turn on more than one lamp. Despite Julia’s classroom lectures about the purpose of fiction — on Goldilocks: “Is there a moral or lesson in that story?” — “Antlers” itself is merely a jumbled presentation of awful things, the bones of a good idea with none of the meat.AntlersRated R for blood and guts and emotional bludgeoning. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters. More