From writer-director Alex Garland (Ex Machina, Annihilation), Civil War is one of the most audacious and deliberately uncomfortable films of 2024 — a near-future war thriller that refuses easy political allegiances in favor of a raw examination of what conflict does to the human spirit. The film follows Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst), a legendary war photographer numbed by years of documenting atrocities, who joins veteran journalist Joel (Wagner Moura) and two younger colleagues on a perilous road trip across a fractured United States to reach Washington, D.C., before the Western Forces close in on a besieged president.

Garland is deliberately opaque about the political specifics: we learn only that Texas and California have formed an unlikely alliance as the Western Forces, and that the president (Nick Offerman) has abolished the FBI and ordered drone strikes on American citizens. This ambiguity is intentional — Garland is less interested in the cause of the war than in the moral and psychological cost of bearing witness to it. The film's set pieces are extraordinarily intense, including a sniper standoff that has been widely cited as one of the most harrowing scenes in recent cinema, and a final White House assault that is brutal and visually stunning in equal measure.

At its heart, Civil War is about photojournalism and the ethics of documenting violence for a distant audience. Cailee Spaeny is a revelation as Jessie, a young photographer whose gradual desensitization mirrors the film's central thesis about the cost of covering war. Kirsten Dunst — delivering arguably the finest performance of her career — is both mentor and cautionary tale, a woman who has given so much to her work that she can no longer process the world except through a camera lens. It is a challenging, provocative film that does not offer comfort, but richly rewards those willing to sit with its difficult questions.