5 pieces
Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland's second collaboration rebuilds a 2006 Ramadi engagement from the memories of the men who survived it, and the film's claim on attention is its specific refusal to shape.
Alex Garland made a film about an American civil war and deliberately stripped out the politics. A year and a half later, the emptiness in the middle of Civil War is not a choice to respect. It is the thing that breaks the film.
Jonathan Glazer's Holocaust film works by almost never showing us the Holocaust. Two years out, the sound design is still one of the most radical formal choices of the decade.
Park Chan-wook's HBO adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen's novel is the most formally audacious prestige TV of the spring. A show about duality delivered by a director who specialises in it.
The third Spielberg-Hanks World War II series landed on Apple TV+ in January with enormous production ambition and uneven dramatic execution.