Alex Garland’s Civil War depicts America coming apart the day after tomorrow. It may be too deliberate and stark to ignite excitement and debate. But it is a devastating destruction spectacle. The film’s British writer-director likes to scare us to the marrow. He’s written novels that evoke William Golding and Graham Greene, and he’s written and directed movies and TV series that suggest a fusion of Michael Crichton and Ingmar Bergman. With Civil War, he revamps Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece Shame (1968). Just as Bergman prompted art-house audiences to see the ravages of civil war through the eyes of characters like them, Garland wants pop/art crossover crowds that line up for A24-produced films like Everything Everywhere All at Once to experience the chaos of our broken republic through wised-up stand-ins: journalists who plan to travel from New York to Washington, D.C., and hope to buttonhole the besieged president (Nick Offerman). —Michael Sragow