love is war movie review

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Summary Shuchiin Academy’s student council room – the place where Vice President Kaguya Shinomiya and Student Council President Miyuki Shirogane met. After a long battle in love, these two geniuses communicated their feelings and, at the Hoshin Festival, had their very first kiss. However, there was no clear confession. The relationship between ... Read More

Directed By : Mamoru Hatakeyama, Masakazu Ohara

Written By : Aka Akasaka, Yasuhiro Nakanishi

Kaguya-sama: Love Is War -The First Kiss That Never Ends-

Ai hayasaka, yutaka aoyama, bryn apprill, nagisa kashiwagi, momo asakura, tia lynn ballard, tsubame koyasu, katelyn barr, anthony bowling, shozo tanuma, aaron dismuke, miyuki shirogane, kara edwards, moeha fujiwara, hope endrenyi.

Haruka Fukuhara

Makoto Furukawa

Yumiri Hanamori

Rina hidaka, kobachi osaragi, kana ichinose, kaguya shinomiya, konomi kohara, chika fujiwara, kristen mcguire, madeleine morris, mauricio ortiz-segura, critic reviews.

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Kaguya-sama: love is war -the first kiss that never ends-.

2022 ‘かぐや様は告らせたい-ファーストキッスは終わらない-’ Directed by Mamoru Hatakeyama

Romance can be a little melancholy.

After pining for one another and plotting for so long, Kaguya Shinomiya and Miyuki Shirogane finally have their climactic first kiss. However, they struggle to define their relationship. After all, how much of their true selves have they really shown to one another?

Makoto Furukawa Aoi Koga Konomi Kohara Ryota Suzuki Miyu Tomita Yumiri Hanamori Momo Asakura Rina Hidaka Taku Yashiro Kana Ichinose Haruka Fukuhara Yutaka Aoyama Takehito Koyasu Ari Ozawa Yuka Nukui Madoka Asahina Ayaka Asai Nobunaga Shimazaki Yuuki Takada Saori Hayami Sayumi Suzushiro Yuuka Morishima Junpei Morita Yuuki Itou Koichi Kamiki Emiko Takeuchi Hina Yomiya

Director Director

Mamoru Hatakeyama

Producers Producers

Tatsuya Ishikawa Genki Negishi Taku Funakoshi Toshihiro Maeda Akira Shimizu Kenshiro Yamada Mikihiro Takiyama Ryota Kanda Kohei Matsuoka

Writer Writer

Yasuhiro Nakanishi

Original Writer Original Writer

Akasaka Aka

Editor Editor

Rie Matsubara

Cinematography Cinematography

Masaharu Okazaki

Additional Directing Add. Directing

Masakazu Obara Takayuki Kikuchi Hiroshi Yakou Miharu Nagano Reina Kawasaki Kouhei Yamazaki Kotaro Okubo Takayuki Kidou Wakako Yoshida Takashi Torii Shinobu Nishioka Junichi Saito Shotaro Kitamura Tsuyoshi Tobita Youichi Ishikawa Marina Kobayashi Miyuki Ishizuka Jun Yukawa Yuu Yoshiyama

Art Direction Art Direction

Risa Wakabayashi

Special Effects Special Effects

Hiroyuki Kodama Kiritsu Takesaki Hisaya Takahara Shuntaro Shiba

Visual Effects Visual Effects

Hiroshi Yakou Reina Iwasaki Honoka Yokoyama Yuko Hariba Shinnosuke Ota Saori Suruki

Composer Composer

Kei Haneoka

Sound Sound

Jin Aketagawa Kimitaka Shindo

A-1 Pictures Aniplex Shueisha East Japan Marketing & Communications MBS

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09 Feb 2023

14 feb 2023, 30 mar 2023, 17 dec 2022, 23 dec 2022, 15 feb 2023, 06 apr 2023, 31 mar 2023, 01 apr 2023, releases by country.

• Theatrical +13
• Theatrical M
• Digital Crunchyroll
• Theatrical 15A
• Theatrical G
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South Korea

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Popular reviews

Review by James (Schaffrillas) ★★★★

Fuck it I'm reading the manga, I need to know how best boy Ishigami's Christmas Eve went

Review by adambolt ★★★★½

Review by Fey ★★★★★ 2

This movie is gonna be rated R in the States for how many times they say the word "sex" in the first third.

Review by ZombieTrex ★★★★½ 3

Watching Kaguya-sama in a crowded theater is something I never knew I needed. The pure comedy gold that is this series only gets more hilarious when you’re laughing your ass off with a whole crowd of people. Kaguya-sama: Love is War was already one of the funniest shows I’ve ever seen, animated or otherwise, and this film showcases exactly why that is. The comedy hits as hard as it does because it is so awkwardly relatable at points, but with enough exaggeration for the audience to laugh at the absurdity of it. The show becomes this expertly woven tapestry of running gags and character quirks that know exactly how to collide to create the most effective joke possible.

Review by Zhe3ro ★★★½ 3

YOU SKIPPED THE WHOLE ISHIgAMI PART FYCK YOU

Review by Jessica Wessica ★★★★ 6

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

Really good! I was a little confused by the ending because I haven't read the manga but really good and ugh my heart <3

I joked to my friends that the end of episode 4 "Started as a good ending" (when Kaguya and Miyuki kissed) then "became an even better ending" (after their conversation on the bench) then "became a really confusing ending (when Miyuki's fortune-teller dad said a bunch of weird stuff to Tsubame with like no payoff)

Review by Frankie ★★★★½ 6

Here I am sobbing in the theater all alone in between two couples at this fully packed screening in the only theater playing in all of Utah. 

Maybe its just the fact that ive felt lonely more recently or pondered the fact that im probably gonna die alone but this hit me like a ton of bricks. Will absolutely be reading the manga and unironically one of my favorite anime films out there.

Even had some Eva elements in there I loved 

2023 Ranked

Update: Cried the entire drive home and contemplated my entire existence.

Review by Kevin_Nyaa ★★★★ 1

What does it mean to be in a relationship? This Kaguya-sama film aims to explore this question by first tackling the hardest obstacle in one's life, yourself. Everyone wears different masks of personality in life, one for friends, another for family and one for romantic relationships. These persona's are all apart of who you are and to be in love with another person means to show all the sides of who you are. The good and the bad. Kaguya-sama shows us that in order to find 'the one' they must be willing to accept every flawed part of yourself, trauma and all. Relationships aren't supposed to be perfectly romantic with no problems. You share both the good, bad and mundane…

Review by Ethan Ethan ★★★½

Such a bold move in turning the most important payoff of the series into something the characters rejected afterwards, yet it works. The ending of the 3rd season is a sigh of relief, and this movie is the conclusion of the love is war saga. It's satisfying, it's cute, and it's romantic.

Review by Jessica Wessica ★★★★½ 3

Still not quite perfect, but I'm pleased to report that a lot of the Ice Kaguya stuff made more sense and worked better for me on rewatch! The jokes also landed much harder for me in the amazing dub, so hats off to everyone who had a hand in it <333

Review by leslie 🏳️‍⚧️ ★★★★★

call me biased all you want but i'm giving KAGUYA-SAMA: LOVE IS WAR -THE FIRST KISS THAT NEVER ENDS- ( かぐや様は告らせたい -ファーストキッスは終わらない -) 5 stars solely because how ethereal the experience of watching this movie in theaters was and how much love i have for the anime. of course it was a great film too, but my biggest gripe with it is that it never justifies why it's adapted as a movie rather than a 4th season (and skips some of my favorite chapters from volumes 14-16). it's not too big of a complaint though, as above all else, KAGUYA-SAMA: LOVE IS WAR -THE FIRST KISS THAT NEVER ENDS- ( かぐや様は告らせたい -ファーストキッスは終わらない -) is the movie a fan of the series and manga, like myself, has been waiting to see for a very long time. just in time for valentine's too!

Review by bocchipho

this is gonna be the film ever made

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The Kaguya-sama: Love Is War movie trailer reveals what happened after THAT kiss

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The Kaguya-sama: Love Is War movie is coming to North America next month — right on Valentine’s Day! Titled Kaguya-sama: Love Is War - The First Kiss That Never Ends , the movie will be in theaters for a two-day special event kicking off on Feb. 14. It will be shown in Japanese with English subtitles.

The movie picks up right after the third season finale where stubborn and prideful student council members Miyuki Shirogane and Kaguya Shinomiya finally — finally! — admitted their feelings for one another and kissed . (Still screaming, btw). The trailer, however, reveals that things aren’t as obvious as the two maybe hoped. After all, neither of them actually defined anything about their relationship. The trailer pivots from laughs to more serious reflections on their feelings for one another — something the show always deftly balances.

The official synopsis is as follows:

Shuchiin Academy’s student council room, the place where Student Council Vice President Kaguya Shinomiya and President Miyuki Shirogane met. After a long battle in love, these two geniuses communicated their feelings and, at the Hoshin Festival, had their very first kiss. However, there was no clear confession of love. The relationship between these two, who assumed they would be a couple, remains ambiguous. Now, overly conscious of their feelings, they must face the biggest challenge yet: Christmas. It’s Shirogane who wants it to be perfect versus Kaguya who pursues the imperfect situation. This is the very “normal” love story of two geniuses and the first kiss that never ends.

Kaguya-sama: Love Is War is available to stream on Crunchyroll. It’s an absolutely hilarious romantic comedy, following two very capable, intelligent, and arrogant students who decide to make the other fall in love. It backfires splendidly, and for three seasons, Shirogane and Shinomiya dance around their feelings in series of elaborate schemes and miscommunications. But it’s not just hilarity enthusing; the show also dives into the lead characters’ deeper vulnerabilities and fleshes out the eclectic supporting cast.

Tickets are on sale for Kaguya-sama: Love Is War - The First Kiss That Never Ends via Fandango . Check out the first poster:

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Movie Review: “Kaguya Sama: Love is War — The First Kiss That Never Ends”

Viggo Kovas , Staff Writer Feb 27, 2023

I’ve never been invested in rom-com anime as a genre. I find that these shows typically have uninspired character designs, unengaging plots, and an overreliance on sexual humor. Sticking to my more traditional anime of choice, like “Dragonball” and “Jujutsu Kaisen,” I veered clear of rom-com anime and still do to this day. So, believe me when I tell you that “Kaguya-sama: Love is War — The First Kiss That Never Ends” depicts a moving story about what it means to truly love someone. 

“The First Kiss That Never Ends” is part of a modern rom-com anime series written by Aka Akasaka and animated by A1 Pictures by the name “Kaguya-sama: Love is War.” The series stars the two main characters: Kaguya Shinomiya (Aoi Koga) and Miyuki Shirogane (Makoto Furukawa) as they attend Shuchi’in Academy. Kaguya, the vice president of the student council, is naturally gifted at everything she tries and has familial ties to a huge business conglomerate. Meanwhile, Shirogane, despite being president of the student council, is the polar opposite; he’s a hard worker but a natural clutz who comes from an unstable family background. The two are hopelessly in love with each other but neither wants to admit it to the other. As such, the series focuses on them making elaborate schemes that force the other to confess their love. Filled with a colorful cast of characters and goofy premises, the series lives up to the name of love being war.

However, as the show progresses, the two become more straightforward with each other, culminating in the season three finale where Shirogane prepares the performance of a lifetime at their school’s culture festival to make Kaguya confess to him. While Shirogane ultimately wins a soft confession from Kaguya, what would typically be the end of a romance story is just the tip of the iceberg for Kaguya-sama .

“Kaguya-sama: Love is War — The First Kiss That Never Ends” takes place directly after the events of season three, with Kaguya and Shirogane being unsure of their current relationship. While they want to officially commit to each other, both are scared of revealing the side of themselves they deem “ugly.” Shirogane has no aptitude towards anything and thinks he needs to constantly work harder to become a man worthy of Kaguya. Kaguya views herself as a deplorable human being who only uses others for her benefit and is incapable of showing kindness. For Kaguya, this manifests into an alter ego known as “Ice Kaguya,” the side that reflects all the characteristics about herself she hates. After much mental turmoil regarding the culture festival, Kaguya assumes this alter ego. While this creates a variety of comedic moments throughout the movie, it also emphasizes a central theme of self-acceptance.

At the midpoint of the movie, Shirogane looks exhausted; his facial expressions become increasingly gloomy with bags constantly under his eyes. He ends up collapsing from exhaustion, which leads to one of the most powerful scenes in the movie: Kaguya accepting her ice-self as something to embrace, not hide away. She begins to break down and sob uncontrollably. To see a normally calm and collected character show this much remorse and sadness takes viewers off guard and demonstrates how much resentment Kaguya truly held toward herself. Aka’s writing in this portion was emotionally engaging, but other important aspects of the scene were the dark lighting and quiet setting of the empty hospital room. These choices help the audience sympathize with Kaguya’s loneliness, expressing how suppressing a side of herself to be more lovable only led to more sorrow. It is in this vulnerable state where Kaguya comes to the realization that, for a perfect romance, Shirogane must understand and accept her completely. The animation that accompanies this sequence is superb, acting in stark contrast to when Kaguya refused to accept what she deemed her negative traits. As she learns self-acceptance, the music swells up, and the scene becomes vastly brighter to reflect on Kaguya’s positive character growth. Similarly, Shirogane must learn to accept he cannot be perfect at everything and that he shouldn’t be afraid to show Kaguya his imperfections and klutzy nature.

The climax of the film takes place on Christmas Eve and can be seen as the polar opposite of the season three finale. Contrasting a lively culture festival surrounded by spectacle, it’s set in a dark, rundown park with nothing to illuminate the area but the full moon. Even the kiss that the two eventually share is less intense, opting for a kiss on the lips instead of the french kiss at the Culture Festival. But most important is Shirogane’s gift to Kaguya: a cup-and-ball game. It’s so random, has no connection to Kaguya, and is considerably less grand than the performance he put on at the culture festival. He failed, which is exactly what he doesn’t want Kaguya to see. Yet, Kaguya loves it since it shows that, like her, Shirogane isn’t perfect, and she’s seen the real him. Despite the lack of a grand outward appearance, this moment is made to feel just as impactful as their first confession due to how the characters have come to understand each other by the end of the film. With Ice Kaguya and the cup-and-ball game symbolizing their respective imperfect natures, the two are able to share another kiss, this time uninhibited by the weight of their personas. 

“The First Kiss That Never Ends” tells a simple, yet effective story of two characters afraid to reveal their true selves and imperfections to each other. It’s incredibly relatable to anyone who’s ever had a crush on someone, as it’s always a risk choosing to unmask yourself to someone you long to be loved by. Refusing to accept one’s imperfections can lead to immense stress and push people to work themselves to death — as exemplified by Shirogane collapsing midway through the film. But with his work, Akasaka claims that a perfect romance is one where you understand your partner fully. To share everything and understand each other completely, what could be more perfect than that? Image courtesy of Crunchyroll

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Ernest Hemingway went to the First World War like a kid going to summer camp. It sounded like a lot of fun; he wouldn't have missed it for the world. Early in "In Love and War,'' he gets his fun and his war all boiled down into a few minutes. He arrives at the front lines, is thrilled by first sight of the enemy, and then a shell strikes nearby and he is surrounded by mud and body parts.

A wounded man screams for help; Hemingway races to carry him to safety and is shot in the leg. In a field hospital, amputation looks like the best bet, but Hemingway says he would rather be dead than lose a leg. He tells this to a nurse named Agnes, who persuades the doctor to spare his leg. During his long convalescence, they fall in love.

Although Hemingway's love affairs were well charted during a long and publicized life, the specifics of this one escaped notice until Agnes von Kurowsky died in the 1980s, and a cache of her love letters to Hemingway came to light. He was 18. She was 26. In his mind, it was all planned that she would follow him back to the States and they would marry and live in his father's cabin in the woods and she'd "be making the old place spick-and-span, while I write great words.'' This prospect on reflection did not appeal to von Kurowsky, who wrote him to break off their engagement. She later married a doctor she met in the war. If Hemingway's biographers did not know of this early romance, Hemingway himself certainly remembered it, and wrote about it in "A Very Short Story,'' which takes less than two pages to express his bitterness. Describing what is obviously the same event--the nurse caring for his wound, the wartime love affair--he ends with a few terse sentences about receiving a letter in which she says it was boy-girl love, not man-woman love. A few days later, he says, he got a venereal disease from a woman he met in the Loop and took on a cab ride through Lincoln Park. End of story.

Not, as they say, a pretty picture, but Richard Attenborough's "In Love and War'' doesn't use the Hemingway angle and indeed could be about someone else altogether. There is little feeling here for the man and writer Hemingway would become, and the movie is essentially the story of a romance between a naive kid and a woman who liked him--maybe even loved him--but was too wise to risk her life on his promises of future glory.

Chris O'Donnell plays Hemingway and Sandra Bullock is Agnes von Kurowsky. Their relationship seems more sentimental than passionate; to recycle a Hemingway phrase that perhaps became more notorious than he would have liked, the earth does not shake. It is hard enough to make a movie about a love affair without a future, and harder still when the audience agrees that maybe it doesn't need a future. Eight years is a big age difference, especially between 18 and 26, and although great love can certainly transcend it, this is not great love.

There are some problems, also, with the way the love affair is depicted. The movie chooses not to deal with two realities that might have made it more interesting: Hemingway at 18 was probably sexually inexperienced, and sex before marriage in 1918 was not treated as casually as it is today. The screenplay by Allan Scott , Clancy Sigal and Anna Hamilton Phelan chooses not to reflect those conditions, and so when Ernest and Agnes make love for the first time in the little pensione down by the railroad station, it is a conventional movie scene, not one specific to these characters.

"I wanted this to be the most beautiful place on God's earth,'' he says, realizing the pensione is little more than a brothel. "Then close your eyes,'' she says. Hemingway would have been reaching for his blue pencil. Then again, maybe not, as the earth shook.

I am always suspicious of stories that take on significance because of events that happen after they're over (". . . and that little boy grew up to be--George Washington!''). "In Love and War'' is not much interested in Ernest Hemingway's subsequent life and career, and even in its treatment of this early period, it doesn't deal with themes such as his macho posturing, his need to prove himself, his grandiosity. Hemingway creates a more interesting (and self-revealing) character in his own stories of the war.

As for Agnes von Kurowsky, she comes across in the Bullock performance as sweet, competent and loving. She must have reflected, after Hemingway was shipped home, on her choices between marrying a wealthy doctor or keeping things "spick-and-span'' for a kid trying to become a novelist while living in his dad's cabin. As she read about Hemingway in the papers, did she sometimes regret the decision she had made? Not if she read the same stories the rest of us have.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Rated PG-13 For Graphic War Injuries and Some Sensuality

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‘Civil War’ review: Alex Garland’s dystopian vision of America horrifies

Movie review.

Alex Garland’s “Civil War” is essentially a horror movie, one in which the horrors feel uncomfortably close to home. In this vision of America, the country is divided into two violent factions: one led by a fascist three-term president (Nick Offerman, in a small but vivid role), the other an armed rebellion against the government. Four journalists — photographer Lee (Kirsten Dunst), her reporting partner Joel (Wagner Moura), veteran writer Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and young aspiring photographer Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) — travel across hundreds of miles of this war zone to reach Washington, D.C., in the hopes of getting one last interview with the president. 

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It’s a strange, terrifying journey, punctuated by bodies and blood and an eerily deafening soundscape. They drive past empty streets, abandoned cars, urban buildings with curls of smoke rising. They bargain, at a remote gas station manned by hostile men toting guns, for fuel (their offer of $300 is scoffed at, until Lee clarifies that it’s $300  Canadian ). They witness a firing squad, a bloody riot on a city street, a load of bodies in a dump truck, snipers on the roof of an idyllic-looking small-town street. And they run toward all of it — taking pictures, asking questions, documenting, remembering. If “Civil War” wasn’t so utterly horrifying, it could be a superhero movie, with journalists wearing the capes. 

But in its quieter moments — you wish there were more of them — the film becomes the story of an impromptu family: four people united by a common goal. No one is saintly here: Lee, hardened and weary from years of war reporting, bickers with Joel about not wanting to take responsibility for the inexperienced Jessie, and makes it clear that Sammy is a burden; he’s old, she says, and can’t run. But ultimately they take care of each other, in sometimes surprising ways, and the actors let us see that bond. Dunst, whose Lee seems hard-wired to expect danger at every turn, beautifully lets us see the faintest of meltings as she becomes a reluctant mentor to Jessie. And Henderson shows us an aging man full of stories, even those he didn’t want to tell; he’s still seeking one last byline, somehow. 

“Civil War” creates the sort of dystopian world in which little flashes of normality seem startling: water bottles, newspaper vending boxes, a dress shop open for business, a quiet hotel room. They’re tiny islands of calm for these characters, racing through a war zone, not knowing how long they can stay alive. Lee, at one point, muses on her career documenting violence around the world. “I thought I was sending a warning home: Don’t do this,” she says. The words hang in the quiet for moment, soon drowned out by gunfire. 

With Kirsten Dunst, Cailee Spaeny, Wagner Moura, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Nick Offerman. Written and directed by Alex Garland. 109 minutes. Rated R for strong violent content, bloody/disturbing images, and language throughout. Opens April 11 at multiple theaters. 

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'The Blue Caftan': An unusual love triangle in Morocco - review

Silk is at the center of a moving drama about a couple in a small moroccan city who make silk caftans in their workshop, which turns into an unusual love triangle..

Reviewing the love triangle

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Kaguya-sama: Love Is War Reviews

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The best movies of 2024 so far, according to critics

‘perfect days,’ ‘sasquatch sunset,’ ‘love lies bleeding’ and ‘civil war’ all make our evolving list of 2024’s best films.

When it comes to movies, why wait for the end-of-year best-of lists? A number of movies have already garnered three stars or more from The Washington Post’s critics and contributors (Ann Hornaday, Ty Burr, Amy Nicholson, Jen Yamato, Jessica Kiang, Michael O’Sullivan, Mark Jenkins and Michael Brodeur — identified by their initials below).

Throughout the year, we’ll update this list — bookmark it! — with the films that we loved and where to watch them. (Note that all movies reviewed by The Post in 2024 are eligible for inclusion.)

Writer-director Alex Garland doesn’t investigate how this war started or how long it’s been going on or whether it’s worth fighting. His lean, cruel film is about the ethics of photographing violence, and those blinders make it charge forward with gusto. The film feels poetically, deeply true, even when it’s suggesting that humans are more apt to tear one another apart for petty grievances than over a sincere defense of some kind of principles. Starring Kristen Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny. (R, 109 minutes) — Amy Nicholson

Where to watch: In theaters

Challengers

A slick, sexy, hugely entertaining, tennis-themed romantic triangle that offers three young performers at the top of their games under the guidance of Luca Guadagnino, a director who gives them room to swing in all senses of the word. The movie’s a paean to hard work and hedonism, and if its pleasures are mostly surface — grass, clay, emotional — it’s still been too long since we’ve had an intelligent frolic like this. Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor play rising tennis stars; Zendaya is their coach, holding down the center with her furiously knitted brow. (R, 131 minutes) — Ty Burr

Wicked Little Letters

An art-house audience pleaser , based on an actual historical incident, that slaps a veneer of tea-cozy classiness over cartoonish characters and changing social values. In a dingy English seaside town in 1920, someone has been sending anonymous poison-pen letters to church lady Edith (Olivia Colman) — written in language so obscene that it’s practically an art form — and suspicion quickly falls on the foul-mouthed Rose (Jessie Buckley), a single mother freshly arrived from Ireland. The movie is good fun and surprisingly obvious — a slapstick comedy of manners that only hints at darker human urges. (R, 100 minutes) — T.B.

Sasquatch Sunset

Either the silliest movie you’ll see in 2024 or one of the most unexpectedly affecting, but, like the meme says, why not both ? A year in the life of a family of Bigfoots — Bigfeet? — it functions simultaneously as slow-motion slapstick, a very hairy nature documentary and a melancholy portrait of creatures not unlike us as they confront their own disappearance from the Earth. With no narration and no dialogue beside grunts, hoots and warbles, the movie effectively puts an audience on the same (big) footing as the characters. Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Riley Keough and Nathan Zellner. (R, 89 minutes) — T.B.

Two-time Oscar winner Ennio Morricone , who died in 202o at the age of 91, was a composer and arranger of music that helped define what it sounds like to go to the movies. Now, director Giuseppe Tornatore — who worked with Morricone for nearly all his films, including 1988’s “Cinema Paradiso” — turns an overdue spotlight on the composer behind the legendary scores of “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” “The Thing” and more than 500 others. At nearly three hours, “Ennio” is a long haul, exhaustive without ever becoming exhausting. Though it could definitely survive edits, its length feels like the product of genuine ardor and care. (Unrated, 156 minutes) — Michael Brodeur

Where to watch: In theaters and on demand

The People’s Joker

Hollywood’s superhero blockbuster business has grown creatively stale, but Vera Drew’s irreverent renegade opus is just the antidote the genre desperately needs. Both a tough-love letter to the commodified IP it satirizes and a scathing takedown of mainstream comedy institutions, this defiantly personal low-budget marvel is also a genuinely affecting queer coming-of-age tale in which Drew stars as Joker, a closeted trans woman and aspiring comedian who leaves her Smallville hometown for a dystopian Gotham City. Her film is the cinematic coup of the year, finally delivering the boundary-obliterating antiheroine Hollywood deserves. (Unrated, 92 minutes) — Jen Yamato

The Iranian French actress Zar Amir Ebrahimi has the eyes of a silent film heroine and the face of a Modigliani. In repose, she can convey a sense of sorrow that feels both elegant and timeless, but in “ Shayda ,” that stillness is fraught with specific threat: the anguish of a woman fleeing an abusive husband. Made with a striking sensitivity to mood and moment, the film marks a strong debut for Iranian Australian writer-director Noora Niasari, who mines her own experience and that of her mother for a gripping yet tender suspense drama. (PG-13, 117 minutes) — T.B.

Antiquity and the modern day sit side by side in the films of Italy’s Alice Rohrwacher, permeating each other with the timelessness of a folk tale passed around a campfire. The writer-director’s latest concerns a raffish band of working-class tombaroli — grave robbers — who dig up ancient Etruscan artifacts and sell them on the black market, but the movie’s also a meditation on the tension between romanticizing the past and profiting from it. Wise, funny and mysterious, it’s a one-of-a-kind charmer. (Unrated, 132 minutes) — T.B.

Where to watch: Not yet streaming

Love Lies Bleeding

Rose Glass’s gorgeously pulpy film is a grisly delirium of female rage and romance in which queerness is neither a liability nor a simple fact of life that deserves respect: It’s a goddamn superpower. Kristen Stewart, in a skeevy mullet and a sleeveless tee, plays a gym manager who falls in crazy, scuzzy love with a bodybuilding drifter (Katy O’Brian). There are pyrotechnics and sucked toes and a jaw beaten clean off a skull. In terms of graphic gore, the head-stomping scene in “American History X” and the corpse-splitting moment in “Bone Tomahawk” need to scooch over on the podium. (R, 104 minutes) — Jessica Kiang

Where to watch: In theaters, available for streaming later this year on Max

They Shot the Piano Player

Spanish filmmaker Fernando Trueba (“Belle Époque”) and artist/co-director Javier Mariscal celebrate the spirit of Brazilian bossa nova and the ghosts of artists who live on only in recordings and archival interviews. But this animated documentary ’s central ghost remains touchingly and frustratingly unknowable: Francisco Tenório Júnior, a gifted pianist, considered by his peers as one of the best of their generation, who disappeared in 1976 while on tour in Argentina. “They Shot the Piano Player” doesn’t unravel a mystery so much as confirm a tragedy. (PG-13, 103 minutes) — T.B.

Four Daughters

Film as family therapy and family therapy as film. This gripping and format-stretching documentary by writer-director Kaouther Ben Hania brings actors into the household of a Tunisian mother named Olfa and her two youngest daughters, both teenagers. The three women play themselves alongside two professional actors filling in for the girls’ two missing siblings — what happened to them will unfurl, one twist at a time. (Unrated, 110 minutes) — A.N.

Where to watch: Netflix

Perfect Days

The premise is perfectly simple: Hirayama (Kôji Yakusho) lives in Tokyo, where he cleans bathrooms, approaching his job with the same care and detail he gives to the tree seedlings he’s nurturing in his modest, sparsely furnished apartment. The fact that writer-director Wim Wenders has called a movie about cleaning toilets “Perfect Days” might strike some viewers as the height of absurdity, even perverse humor (the film bears more than a whiff of Jim Jarmusch at his most wryly absurdist). But once they get a glimpse of Hirayama in action, the dreams behind the drudgery reveal themselves. (PG, 123 minutes) — Ann Hornaday

Where to watch: On demand

Directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Morgan Neville (“Twenty Feet from Stardom”), this documentary take on comic Steve Martin is broken into two feature-length installments, titled “Then” (94 minutes) and “Now” (97 minutes). The first and lesser half is pretty standard stuff, covering in enjoyable but repetitive detail the period of Martin’s gradual stand-up ascendancy to selling out stadiums. The much more engaging “Now” dips in and out of Martin’s movie career, includes interviews (Jerry Seinfeld, Tina Fey, Lorne Michaels) and delivers candid moments with Martin’s bestie, Martin Short. (TV-MA, 191 minutes in two parts) — J.K.

Where to watch: Apple TV Plus

The Zone of Interest

Jonathan Glazer’s quietly shattering, Oscar-winning portrait of a family living next door to Auschwitz is really two movies in one: the film that audiences see on-screen — a bucolic domestic drama, filled with children, gardens and daily rituals — and the movie we conjure in our minds, with images of emaciated bodies, shaved heads and screams barely audible above the clinking teacups and cooing babies. Adapted from Martin Amis’s novel, the film is about denial and Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil. But the mental contortions Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) go through to justify their own monstrosity go beyond obliviousness into something far more insidious and timeless. (PG-13, 106 minutes) — A.H.

Where to watch: Max

Ava DuVernay’s audacious, ambitious adaptation of the equally audacious and ambitious book “Caste,” operates on so many levels at once that the effect is often dizzyingly disorienting. But hang in there: Viewers who allow themselves to be taken on this wide-ranging, occasionally digressive journey will emerge not just edified but emotionally wrung out and, somehow, cleansed. (PG-13, 135 minutes) — A.H.

The Taste of Things

A radiant Juliette Binoche plays Eugénie, a gifted cook who for the past 20 years has been running the kitchen of a 19th-century epicurean named Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel). No one breaks a sweat in “ The Taste of Things ” — they glow. No one swears or yells “Corner!” or “Yes, chef!” — they whisper, or simply deliver an approving glance of gustatory satisfaction. This is the anti-“Bear,” a sensuous fantasia of gastronomical pleasure less redolent of the Beef than “Babette’s Feast.” (PG-13, 134 minutes) — A.H.

Born two months before the Nazis surrendered, celebrated German artist Anselm Kiefer grew up amid his homeland’s rubble. Destruction still compels and even delights him, as Wim Wenders demonstrates in his epic 3D documentary. The colossal spaces Kiefer inhabits and transforms are ideal for Wenders’s approach, which conveys the physicality of the artist’s work and places the viewer virtually within the maelstrom of creation. It’s a fascinating, if somewhat unnerving, place to be. (Unrated, 93 minutes) — Mark Jenkins

How to Have Sex

The title of this promising writing-directing debut from Molly Manning Walker is something of a misdirect. Her startlingly intimate portrait of teenage girls in search of the endless party while on summer holiday in Greece is more accurately described as a tutorial in how not to have sex, i.e., when you’re young, inebriated, feeling pressured or vulnerable to manipulation. In its frankness and often frightening candor, it’s of a piece with coming-of-age dramas like “Thirteen” and “The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” with a dash of “Spring Breakers.” (Unrated, 90 minutes) — A.H.

Io Capitano

Matteo Garrone’s Oscar-nominated, migrant-themed drama fashions a hero’s journey that feels utterly of the moment: inspired by the true stories of African immigrants , but told in a way that features episodes of both harrowing verisimilitude and hallucinatory magic realism. It’s a film that is gorgeous at times yet also tough to watch. (Unrated, 121 minutes) — Michael O’Sullivan

The Teachers’ Lounge

Despite the title of Germany’s Oscar submission , the primary setting is a sixth-grade classroom, where things have gone missing lately. As school officials attempt to get to the bottom of the thefts, that classroom becomes a mirror of the outside world, with all its diversity, divisions and discontents. The film is far more than a conventional whodunit, though it does build a nice head of suspense as it grapples with themes of justice, doubt and bias. Its larger message is also one worth hearing, if not exactly news: In an age of cancel culture, the classroom is a battlefield. (PG-13, 98 minutes) — M.O.

Sometimes I Think About Dying

As subdued in tone and emotion as the neutral beige and brown ensembles favored by its mousy, office-worker protagonist (Daisy Ridley), this film offers an unconventional love story : one less about the thrill of romance than about the terror — and ultimate release — of connection. Director Rachel Lambert delivers its story with a reserve that is made up for by a genuinely affecting tenderness for its flawed yet searching characters. It’s kind of a downer, yes, but also stimulating as hell. (PG-13, 91 minutes) — M.O.

The Monk and the Gun

This sweet, off-kilter comedy offers a sly satire of today’s polarized world. Written and directed by Pawo Choyning Dorji, and focusing on Bhutan’s preparations for the democratic elections first held in 2008, it shares the same wry spirit and gentle tension between tradition and modernity that characterized the Bhutanese-born, American-trained filmmaker’s heartwarming Oscar-nominated 2019 film, “Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom,” but with some added bite. (PG-13, 112 minutes) — M.O.

This rebooted hybrid of the hit 2004 movie “ Mean Girls ” and the Broadway stage musical it spawned wisely doesn’t try to simply adapt for the screen something that worked onstage and wouldn’t translate to film. Yes, it’s got songs (by Jeff Richmond and Nell Benjamin), but they feel abridged and ever so slightly diminished, delivered more in the context of the original narrative of viral shaming, which has been tweaked for our TikTok times. The remake is sharp, well-acted and funny, and there are a few surprises for “Mean Girls” cultists. (PG-13, 105 minutes) — M.O.

Where to watch: Paramount Plus

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“Civil War” has little to say about America — but a lot to say about war

You might think a movie about a second American civil war would be a thinly veiled Trump story. It’s not — and it’s better for it.

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You might think the new movie Civil War is a warning about America’s deepening political divide. The film’s trailer certainly suggests so , and director Alex Garland seemingly confirmed that was his intent in a recent interview with the Atlantic .

For me, a writer who has written a book on democratic decline , this marketing set off major alarm bells.

While the United States faces very real threats from extreme polarization and rising political violence , a modern repeat of the Civil War is basically out of the question (especially the film’s version , in which a rebel alliance led by Texas and California confront the federal government). Trying to use such a war to examine how American polarization could collapse our democracy would almost certainly be a doomed enterprise.

Thankfully, Civil War is not the film I was led to believe. The movie begins near the end of the conflict, providing little context about how things got so bad in fictional America. There are stray hints — the president (Nick Offerman) is in his third term and has disbanded the FBI — but nothing that could help the viewer understand why the United States collapsed into bloodshed. Contrary to marketing, and perhaps even the director’s intent, Civil War has virtually nothing to say about real-world American politics.

But this doesn’t mean the film is a failure — far from it. Once you understand that Civil War isn’t about what you think, you can appreciate it for what it actually is: a searing meditation on what happens when political orders collapse and violence takes on a sinister logic of its own.

In doing so, it channels some of the best modern academic research on violence in civil wars.

This is your brain on violence

Civil War tracks a group of four reporters as they race from the (relative) safety of New York City to Washington, DC, to cover the fall of the president: The combined forces of California and Texas are knocking at the Capitol’s doorstep.

Yet there’s no real sense of place or specificity in this narrative. With the exception of a rebel base outside Charlottesville, the towns and cities they pass through have no names. The violence the reporters witness on the road is horrific — we’re talking mass graves, suicide bombings, and torture — but it generally has no clear political motivation or higher purpose.

In one scene, a sniper opens fire on the reporters’ car, forcing them to take shelter beside two soldiers he’s also attacked. When the reporters ask the soldiers which side everyone is on, they scoff — explaining that he’s trying to kill them, and that’s all that matters.

That scene clarifies what the movie is really about: not how political order collapses into civil war, but what happens to a society after it does.

Civil War presents a narrative where war takes on a logic of its own. For some, the need to survive pushes them to act in ways they never would have contemplated otherwise. For others, the collapse in order creates opportunities to act on their very worst impulses — best dramatized in an unforgettable scene in which a bigoted soldier (Jesse Plemons) cruelly interrogates the main characters at gunpoint.

Under such conditions, social trust collapses altogether; faith in both institutions and other people can’t survive.

Civil War ’s treatment of journalism basically fits this theme. The movie’s reporters, led by steely photojournalist Lee (a fabulous Kirsten Dunst), are generally decent people and stellar professionals. But in a world where no one trusts anyone, a truly neutral institution like journalism has no place. Without any legal system or supreme power to appeal to, they’re at the mercy of whatever armed faction they come across — most of whom don’t trust journalists any more than anyone else.

In conditions of social breakdown, violence consumes all of what makes a society work.

What a fake civil war tells us about real ones

Civil War ’s grim vision reminded me, more than anything else, of an academic book: The Logic of Violence in Civil Wars by Oxford professor Stathis Kalyvas.

The book, a modern classic in the literature on civil conflict, argues that most people overestimate the degree to which patterns of violence in civil wars are driven by ideology or emotions run amok. Instead, Kalyvas argues, individual decisions are often made based on calculations of rational self-interest — starting with survival.

Kalyvas’s treatment of the relationship between violence and civilian behavior is particularly noteworthy.

As we know from American experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan , winning the support of the local civilian population is critically important in determining who wins a civil war. Drawing on data from the 1940s Greek Civil War , Kalyvas argues that civilians make decisions about cooperation based primarily on perceptions of who is in control of the territory in which they live. Basically, they’re most likely to cooperate if they think that side will have the power to keep them safe and advance their other interests.

Civilian cooperation then shapes how combatants use force, as informers tell them where their enemies are hiding or who in the civilian population supports the opposing side. How combatants act on this information in turn shapes civilians’ views, affecting their future decisions to cooperate or not. Violence is, in Kalyvas’s language, a “joint process”: Who lives and who dies is determined by the interplay of civilian and combatant actions, all rooted in perceptions of rational self-interest.

This is basically how the world in Civil War works. Characters make choices not about ideology or partisanship, but about how best to advance their interests in a country defined by who’s trying to kill them and who isn’t. I can’t recall a single scene where anyone makes an ideological statement about the nature of the American civil war and why they’re fighting it.

Such a film has little to say about contemporary American politics. But the imagery and places may help American audiences connect more easily to the subtler story it’s actually telling: about how people in real-life civil wars make life into hell for the people caught up in them.

It is less a film about political polarization, or even the headline-dominating wars in Gaza and Ukraine, than one about the long and bloody counterinsurgency wars that defined the war on terror era.

In that respect, Civil War should make Americans think less about our own contemporary problems and more about the suffering we so recently inflicted on others .

This story appeared originally in Today, Explained , Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions .

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Home » Reviews » Hollywood Movie Reviews

Civil War Movie Review: Alex Garland Returns With A24’s Biggest Film, But The Film’s Refusal To Examine Its Characters And World Makes It Empty

Civil war chooses not to take sides when contrasting its plot to real-world politics, but it also refuses to substitute those elements for anything else, making the film quite shallow in the process.

Star Cast: Kirsten Dunst , Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Sonoya Mizuno, and Nick Offerman

Director: Alex Garland

What’s Good: Garland’s direction is still as sublime as before, conjuring great visuals and a powerful atmosphere.

What’s Bad: The film lacks context for its world and characters; only the most superficial remnants of conflict and motivation propel them forward.

Loo Break: The film has a very paper-thin plot, so you can skip some of the vignettes and still get everything the movie is trying to say, which is not much.

Watch or Not?: Like Garland’s films, Civil War is still quite enjoyable and will ignite conversation.

Language: English (with subtitles).

Available At: Theaters

Runtime: 109 Minutes.

Alex Garland is undoubtedly one of the most exciting filmmakers of the 21st century, and his career, as his films, has been anything but orthodox, having started as a novelist to jump into writing films and then directing them. Civil War, his latest cinematic effort, pulls from everything Garland has done in the past, and while his ability to craft powerful atmospheres and enchanting visuals is still there, Garland has been losing the thread when it comes to telling captivating stories.

Civil War Movie Review: Script Analysis

Civil War could be considered a piece of speculative fiction, in the same vein as something like “The Man in the High Castle,” a novel written by Philip K. Dick, where World War II went the opposite way for the Allies and left a defeated USA divided by its conquerors; The Nazi, and the Japanese Empire. Like that by Philip K. Dick, Garland tries to transport us to another reality where the USA is suffering a second civil war, changing the landscape of the country forever once again, with states like California and Texas becoming allies and fighting against the established government.

This idea sounds perfect on paper, but sadly, Garland has chosen to not enter any details regarding how the reality of his film ended up in the situation. Instead, the movie is, in fact, a character study centered around the character of Lee Smith, a photojournalist who is on a mission to get a picture of the President of the United States before he is killed or arrested. That is it. The movie wants to avoid dwelling on the world that the characters are living in, and it also refuses to examine the characters beyond a very surface level, so the result is a movie with nothing to say.

This is a double-edged sword because while the movie has nothing to say about anything, it serves as a canvas so the audience can fill the blank spaces with their biases. This results in many conversations about what the movie wants to say, its message, and its message, but in reality, the film only serves as a reflection of the audience. If that is the film’s point, it was successful, but that doesn’t make it a good movie either; it is just a concept with several ideas thrown at the screen without structure or purpose.

The setting and the concept of a modern civil war in the USA are wasted, as it doesn’t matter that the war is happening in that country. The movie could have done precisely what it does with its characters and story in any other place, and it wouldn’t have mattered at all. Without context for the world or the characters, the story lacks resonance, and it works mainly as a series of vignettes instead of a full-fleshed story. Of course, creating an actual fictional world that still manages to find a balance between sides of the conflict and being separated from real-world politics would be more challenging, but it would have been much more satisfying.

Civil War Movie Review: Star Performance

It is hard to talk about the characters in Civil War because they are so undefined, and this makes them incredibly superficial, which is sad because, in previous films like Ex Machina and Annihilation, Garland has proved that he can create compelling characters; here, these main characters are just glimpses of something, in this case, journalists, but they never act like journalists at all. Kirsten Dunst does excellently, but she never feels alive, and that is the point, as I believe that if the movie is about something, it is about journalism and desensitization in the media.

However, those themes are never developed, and the characters, like every other theme in the movie, are more of a footnote than something relevant to the plot or the story. In the end, Cailee Spaeny does the best at being a sort of surrogate for the audience, but there is so little to learn that her inclusion, other than proving that the cycle of violence never ends, feels wasted. Wagner Moura also does his best with a foolish and useless character. There are a lot of useless characters in this film.

Civil War Movie Review: Direction, Music

Garland made a splash with Ex Machina, a captivating science fiction film with gorgeous visual effects and a powerful atmosphere that took Garland to the Oscars, and he has been riding that wave ever since. The director’s best work is Annihilation, a movie that offers impressive visuals and performances, but since then, it seems Garland can only hit the visual department and not much else. In Civil War, Garland even stumbles regarding the visual aspect of the film because while this is A24’s most expensive film, it still feels too small for the story the film wants to tell.

The scale feels small, and the world never feels real in any shape or form. There are a couple of scenes with fabulous sound design, but nothing really matters because of a lack of context in these action scenes. Garland tries to save the film in its third act but fails to create a scenario that feels totally unrealistic and cheap in many ways. Garland didn’t know how to make the proper scale for the project, or maybe he didn’t have enough resources. In recent interviews, he has declared that he has fallen out of love with filmmaking, and this movie is proof of that; there is barely Ex Machina energy left in here.

Civil War Movie Review: The Last Word

Civil War is still a fascinating film, not because of what it says but because of what the people will say about it. Sadly, the film is incomplete and will need ideas from outside to give it any relevance. Garland might be taking a break from filmmaking, and he really needs it because he has been running on autopilot for his last two films. Dunst and Spaeny do great, and Henderson is the heart of the film, but because the characters are so paper thin, not much can be said about them. This is a proper miss.

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Civil War released on 19th April 2024.

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Movies | ‘Challengers’ review: Tennis, everyone? Zendaya…

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Movies | ‘challengers’ review: tennis, everyone zendaya keeps a juicy romantic triangle spinning.

A little delirious and a lot of serious, witty, stylish fun, “Challengers” plays a beautiful game of Canadian doubles with its three main characters, on and off the court. It’s a purely enjoyable romantic drama, and the one thing people seem to agree on is its deft sidestepping of easy labels. Is it a screwball dramedy, as one writer put it? A sports movie dripping with competitive juices? Or simply that extremely rare thing in 2024 movies: an R-rated picture, written by a terrific first-time screenwriter, Justin Kuritzkes, not a sequel, not a Marvel, not much like anything we’ve seen lately in mainstream commercial filmmaking.

The director Luca Guadagnino continues his streak as one of contemporary cinema’s most florid sensualists, though it’s something of a shock, or a joke, to see the latest Guadagnino picture open with a comically drab establishing shot of New Rochelle, New York. It’s not exactly Milan or Lombardy, Italy, where Timotheé Chalamet and Tilda Swinton, respectively, found ecstasy among flora, fauna and tantalizing sexual partners in “Call Me By Your Name” (2017) and  “I Am Love” (2009). But this is the site of the second-tier challenger tennis match, where one-time phenom Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), now broke, is vying for a few thousand dollars in prize money.

Also vying, quite unexpectedly: Patrick’s longtime now-estranged friend and certified tennis champ Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), whose recent cold streak has brought him to New Rochelle to score a wildcard confidence boost prior to his U.S. Open bid. Art doesn’t love the idea, but he loves his cutthroat coach and wife, Tashi, a one-time teen tennis phenom. And the idea is hers. And she is played by Zendaya.

Without giving the whole game, set and match away “Challengers” starts with teasing questions not unlike those posed by the opening late-night bar scene in Celine Song’s “Past Lives” (Song is screenwriter Kuritzkes’ wife, and it’s delightful to see both halves of a screenwriting couple score with their feature debuts.) The year is 2019; we’re plunked into the middle of a tense winner-take-all match between Josh and Art, with Tashi keeping an eagle eye on both men. What are they to each other? What’s their history? From there, the movie begins jumping back in time, and forth, and then a little back, a little forth, spanning the characters’ college-age years to the present.

In the furthest-back scenes, the boys meet the superstar Tashi at a swank Long Island Adidas endorsement bash and are smitten in the time it takes to type the word “smitten.” In Art and Patrick’s hotel room later on, Tashi coaxes some pertinent information about their story, how they met (tennis camp, age 12), are they or were they ever lovers (no, but both script and direction in “Challengers” challenges any strict binary notions of the sexual continuum). She’s amused and enticed, a little, at her admirers’ insta-crushes on her, which leads to the story’s three-way spark.

From there it’s a crafty series of reveals, not in the murder-mystery or twist-ending sense, but in revealing what quieter, more reserved Art and brash, arrogant Patrick will do, and have done, to undermine each other’s chances with Tashi. As conceived by Kuritzkes, Zendaya’s character might’ve settled for caricature, ruthless manipulation incarnate — Svengali’s tennis coach, if Svengali played tennis.

But “Challengers” makes surprisingly dimensional sense of that she-wolf archetype, finessed and humanized by Zendaya. The role hands her a welcome change of pace, so she can ditch the narcotic “Dune” vibe for a couple of hours and dig into some tart, testy, sharp-witted scenes with Faist and O’Connor. The interplay is loose, yet exacting; it’s a pretty sexy movie, and Guadagnino films the key encounters in long, uninterrupted takes, the actors hinting at what’s going on underneath the surface dialogue. These people are not noble. Their relational scruples are optional. Their lives are racquets, balls and winning. They do what they need to do to get what they want.

The forth-and-back narrative chronology in “Challengers” proves more useful and engaging than it sounds. It keeps us guessing about motives and the dramatic equivalent of break points. On the court, Guadagnino and cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom activate the rallies to varyingly delirious degrees, at one point turning the camera into the tennis ball, back-forth-back-forth-topspin-back. The Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross techno score drives the action. Is it all a bit much? Toward the end, key flashbacks unfold against the backdrop of a windstorm that just won’t quit, and Guadagnino cannot resist every possible screw-tightening suspense tactic in the final stages of the court battle.

That said: Even the excess has its payoffs, though I don’t know if audiences will swing with the degree of ambiguity going on with the final seconds of this exuberant, eccentric horndog of a movie. I also don’t care much. It’s one of the essential titles of the year so far, if only for its sheer kinetic assurance.

“Challengers” — 3.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for language throughout, some sexual content and graphic nudity)

Running time: 2:11

How to watch: Premieres in theaters Fri. April 26

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

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The Dead Don't Hurt

Two pioneers fight for the survival of their lives and their love on the American frontier during the Civil War. Two pioneers fight for the survival of their lives and their love on the American frontier during the Civil War. Two pioneers fight for the survival of their lives and their love on the American frontier during the Civil War.

• Viggo Mortensen
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• 67 Metascore

• Vivienne Le Coudy

• Holger Olsen

• Weston Jeffries

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• Trivia The knight that appears in young Vivienne's visions carries a familiar sword: Anduril, Aragorn's sword from The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) , which was gifted to Viggo Mortensen by Peter Jackson at the end of filming.
• Connections Referenced in CTV News at Six Toronto: Episode dated 8 September 2023 (2023)

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• Apr 9, 2024
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• May 31, 2024 (United States)
• Hasta el fin del mundo
• Durango, Mexico
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• Runtime 2 hours 9 minutes
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