Critic's Notebook: 'Civil War' and the elusiveness of the of-the-moment movie

The movies are good at resurrecting the past and imagining the future, but pinning down the present can be tricky. Movies take a long time to make. Once you’ve gone from idea to script to production to edit and, finally, to audiences, several years might have passed.

Take “Civil War,” Alex Garland’s seemingly very of-the-moment, election-year release that led the box office over last weekend. Garland wrote it in 2020 as the pandemic was unfolding and a presidential election was approaching. “Civil War” arrived in theaters four years later, loaded with the anxieties of societal breakdown and concern for the endgame to our current political extremism.

But it also