Based entirely on the story unfolding in a dystopian America that’s become embroiled in the titular conflict and releasing the same year as a presidential election, Alex Garland‘s Civil War was always going to be a lightning rod for controversy and hot-button discussions.
Although that may not have been the filmmaker’s intention specifically, the increasingly divided nature of politics in the United States made it an inevitability. However, it’s hard to see where the battle lines can be drawn between the typical ‘red’ and ‘blue’ party divides when the movie is so intentionally evasive of what ignited the Second Civil War in the first place.
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Politicians barely factor into the story, either, with Nick Offerman’s dictator-like incumbent of the White House not even being given a character name. In one respect, he exists solely to drive the story forward in that he’s a three-term president pitting countryman against countryman on his watch, but it’s impossible not to see the parallels between the erstwhile antagonist and a certain Home Alone 2 star.
Garland may paint the battleground in broad, nationwide strokes, but the narrative zeroes in on those with their boots firmly on the ground. Kirsten Dunst’s photojournalist Lee Smith and Wagner Moura’s reporter Joel embark on a road trip to Washington with Stephen McKinley Henderson’s veteran Sammy and Cailee Spaeny’s aspiring photographer Jessie in tow, trying to make it to Washington for the story of a lifetime before the commander-in-chief is overrun and executed for his crimes.
That’s the entirety of Civil War in a nutshell from a storytelling perspective, which is no bad thing by any means. Dunst outwardly projects the personality of someone immune to being knee-deep in a warzone, but that gradually reveals itself to be a façade. Joel thrives on being in the thick of the action, Sammy urges caution having been around the block several times over, while Jessie finds herself torn between the visceral thrill of living her dreams and the harsh realities it brings.
The quartet bounce off each other effortlessly as they navigate the increasingly hostile terrain, with deafening gunshots, thunderous explosions, pinned-down snipers, and a scene-devouring mass murdering Jesse Plemons all contributing to paint the picture of a country divided what may well be beyond repair.
There’s no explanation given for why the Civil War started in the first place, and the opposing forces are loosely divided into Texas and California, uniting as the ‘Western Forces’, where they defeated the ‘Florida Alliance’ along the way. Putting two such politically opposed states together to combat a fascistic leader feels like Garland urging the audience to look at the bigger picture, but it’s never made clear enough what that bigger picture actually is or what it’s supposed to mean in the grand scheme of things.
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Civil War tries to stay as apolitical as possible, but that regularly puts it in direct opposition to what it’s trying to say. The president doesn’t get a name, the other side of the conflict doesn’t get a name, the political parties don’t get a name, and only a scarce few of the characters outside of the central four get names, but that deliberate muddying of the waters makes it hard to gain a clear understanding of the overarching events outside of the journalists.
That’s kind of the point, in fairness, with Lee, Joel, Sammy, and Jessie remaining objective in the face of the horrors they witness. On a micro level, it’s hauntingly effective in conveying how they – and, by extension, society at large – have become numb to the terrors of everyday life. On a macro level, though, obfuscating why things have devolved to such an extent that the president has ordered airstrikes on civilians leaves too many questions unanswered for Civil War to land with maximum impact.
It’s a visceral, hard-hitting, and intensely immersive thriller that’s close to flawless on a technical level. It’s also another sign that Garland is one of the most distinctive visualists working today, but as much as exposition can often be the death knell of any movie with a lot on its mind, Civil War would have benefitted immensely from leaving a lot less unsaid.
Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s latest team-up brings cop drama, plenty of mystery, and oodles of tension in a sharp, engaging thriller for Netflix.
The Rip Directed By: Joe Carnahan Written By: Joe Carnahan Starring: Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Steven Yeun, Teyana Taylor, Kyle Chandler, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Sasha Calle Release Date: January 16, 2026 on Netflix
When a Miami-Dade police Captain Jackie Velez (Lina Esco) is murdered, the specialized unit she was over (the Tactical Narcotics Team) comes under heavy suspicion. As leads seem to go nowhere, the federal agents and internal affairs officers investigating the homicide fear a history of corrupt cops throughout the department is a factor.
Considering the team is made up of only a handful of officers, obviously tensions are incredibly high. Not only are they still reeling from the death of their Captain—a friend—they’ve got pressure from the FBI, along with concerns about their task force being disbanded. Everyone is certainly on edge.
TNT consists of a five main detectives. There’s Lieutenant Dane (Matt Damon), who’s been recently promoted to the role despite having reservations about still being a cop. Sergeant JD Byrne (Ben Affleck) is Dane’s close friend who lost out on the LT spot and had a personal relationship with Captain Velez. Then there’s Ro (Steven Yeun), Numa (Teyana Taylor), and Lolo (Catalina Sandino Moreno) who are eager to do their jobs but also weary at all the suspicion and seeming lack of recognition for their efforts.
When they set out on a bust, the team inadvertently stumbles into something major. Something that may have been the reason Captain Velez was killed; several millions of dollars of Cartel money. The bust (or “Rip”) becomes anything but ordinary, as they find themselves essentially boxed in at a culdesac, with an unknown caller threatening to slaughter them all if they don’t leave within thirty minutes.
By and large, The Rip feels like an old-school crime drama which is both good and bad. Bad in that it relies on some typical cliches for certain bits (though I greatly enjoyed how the main mystery aspect is treated) and it’s action pieces don’t do anything new/groundbreaking. The good, however, is that it’s a pretty top-tier example of this kind of genre fare. Sure, it’s not breaking the mold, but what it gives you is a great time that gets the blood-pumping.
The film brings together an interesting blend of genres. There’s definitely the cop drama element, with corruption and greed at the forefront, along with a little bit of a heist movie tossed in as well. You’ve got the action set pieces, but there’s also a bit of noir over the whole thing. There are numerous twists and turns (which I’m not spoiling), with many of the characters have their own motives you’re never quite sure of. The combination of it all makes for a thrilling movie that keeps you on your toes and is never boring.
It’s made all the more fun to watch thanks to the characters in play. Damon and Affleck’s iconic chemistry is in full force here; completely selling you on the idea of buddy cops who may—or may not—be at odds. While they take the main focus, the rest of the characters manage to be equally engaging.
What I enjoyed most about The Rip is how well it handles the mystery aspect of the story. This push and pull between trust and betrayal is the primary driver in the story. This small, usually close-knit team are forced into a close quarters situation with time running against them. This dynamic allows for some tense interactions as it becomes clear their trust in one another is being put to the ultimate test.
The way the story unfolds does a fantastic job of keeping the twists and turns underwraps. Like I said, it uses familiar tropes, but it’s also aware enough to know when to use them to their advantage. So even when I thought I had things figured out—because of how certain cliches would normally pan out—it managed to genuinely surprise me.
Perhaps more importantly, it handles those reveals/twists without feeling cheap, or like a far-fetched deus ex machina. Once the cards are laid out on the table, a lot of previous sequences and character beats click into place. It’s easy to see how things were able to work out, without straining credulity or making you feel dumb for missing something. In this way, it’s smartly written, making use of the familiar to throw you for a loop.
A man has 90 minutes to prove his innocence during an AI-expedited murder trial in Mercy, a slick new sci-fi thriller from director Timur Bekmambetov (in his first Hollywood outing since 2016’s Ben-Hur) premiering in Prague and cinemas worldwide this weekend. The premise instantly draws us in, and solid execution maintains our interest for the majority of the movie, but a third act implosion sinks the whole enterprise and makes us question our own good taste for enjoying it in the first place.
In an era where most of us interact with artificial intelligence on a daily basis, we walk into these kinds of things with certain expectations. Mercy‘s painfully outdated interpretation of AI feels less like The Creator, Ex Machina or even M3GAN and more like 90s thriller Virtuosity: by the time Rebecca Ferguson‘s algorithm praises Chris Pratt‘s “gut instincts” and shares a meaningful nod, it has severed any sense of technological realism.
Mercy stars Pratt as L.A. police detective Chris Raven, who helped advocate for the titular technology: an AI-powered criminal justice system that serves as judge, jury, and executioner, and gives defendants 90 minutes to plead their cases before an AI judge delivers a verdict and carries out the sentence. Death sentences are instantly delivered through lethal injection, conveniently located in the chair on which defendants are restrained.
But it’s not all bad: the Mercy system bypasses any need for warrants, and gives both the AI judge and the defendant access to phone records, traffic cameras, police databases, and any other kind of evidence that could possibly be available in the cloud. Defendants should have everything they need to prove their case—save for a lawyer—but the all-knowing algorithm should already know whether or not they’re guilty.
That puts Raven in a bind when he wakes up from a hangover and a head injury before the digital Judge Maddox (Ferguson), who tells him his wife Nicole (Annabelle Wallis) has been murdered and there’s a 97.5 percent chance that he’s the killer. Raven can’t quite remember what transpired, but he knows he isn’t a murderer, and has exactly 90 minutes to get his guilt rating below 92 percent, or else he’ll be executed on the spot.
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This is essentially The Fugitive, except Raven isn’t trying to prove his innocence and track down the real murderer while he’s on the run: he’s doing it all while restrained to a chair in a darkened room. Good thing he’s an actual detective, unlike the homeless men he’s put in front of the Mercy system in the past.
The setup immediately draws us in, and director Bekmambetov does a great job of ratcheting up the tension as Raven scrambles to not only save his own life, but solve his wife’s murder. As he scrambles to untangle the mystery before the clock runs out, he calls AA sponsor Robert Nelson (Chris Sullivan), daughter Britt (Kylie Rogers), and partner Jaq (Kali Reis) to help him put the pieces of the puzzle together.
All Mercy needs is a sensible resolution to succeed in B-movie terms. Maybe Raven finds the real killer, and succeeds in proving his innocence before the Mercy system. Maybe the killer gets away, and Raven’s execution becomes the impetus to bring the whole system down. Or maybe Raven really is the killer—and his inside knowledge allows him to game the system and get away.
After 75 minutes of an interesting and well-executed sci-fi murder mystery-cum-courtroom drama, any reasonable resolution would seal the deal. But instead, the utter nonsense delivered in the final act of writer Marco van Belle’s script sends this whole movie off the rails.
Key test in these kinds of credulity-testing whodunnits: walk back the events of the narrative from the point of view of the killer. What Mercy asks us to believe has transpired is not only completely baffling, but it also forces the film to completely switch gears, abandoning the premise that made it interesting in the first place.
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Still, Mercy has enough technical polish to keep it watchable, buoyed by Ramin Djawadi’s propulsive score, sleek cinematography from Khalid Mohtaseb, and proficient VFX work (love that police dronecopter). Bekmambetov stages the action well, and both Pratt and Ferguson give fun performances that lean into the script’s silliness—even if Maddox is written with far too much empathy to convincingly register as artificial intelligence.
In the end, Mercy is a thriller that builds a smart, timely hook and sustains it for just long enough to make its collapse especially frustrating. The film asks provocative questions about truth and justice in the AI age of only to abandon them in favor of a finale that doesn’t withstand even minimal scrutiny. It’s a cautionary tale about blind faith in algorithms—a lesson that could have also benefitted the filmmakers.
The new period screen drama starring Ralph Fiennes is at its best “when it chafes quietly against our expectations of gentle British comfort viewing,” said Guy Lodge in Variety. In a small Yorkshire mill town, young men are shipping off to World War I’s battlefields and returning broken “if at all” when an outsider played by Fiennes is hired as the local church’s new choirmaster. But while director Nicholas Hytner bathes the proceedings in “a buttery gloss of tea-and-crumpets nostalgia,” screenwriter Alan Bennett, who was also Hytner’s partner for 1994’s The Madness of King George, ensures that the film “doesn’t culminate in the against-the-odds artistic triumph you might expect.” The story honors art more honestly and proves “never less than diverting.”
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To me, The Choral widely misses its mark, said Johnny Oleksinski in the New York Post. The rebuilt choir’s “scrappy, working-class, aurally iffy Brits” are “supposed to find healing, togetherness, and compassion through the power of music.” But Bennett’s script fails to even convince us that Fiennes’ Dr. Henry Guthrie teaches them anything, and the rest is “a cacophony of half-baked characters and rushed ideas that leaves you puzzled and unsatisfied.” So see the movie without trying to guess where it’s going, said Glenn Kenny in The New York Times. Sure, once Guthrie begins recruiting singers, his great find is a talented Black singer “beautifully played” by Amara Okereke. Past that discovery, though, the story’s dramatic swings turn out to be “gripping and unpredictable.” What’s more, “the film’s final shot will kick your heart into your throat.”
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