The director of War for the Planet of the Apes and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Matt Reeves, has an incredible skill for creating the plausibly crumbling natural world Caesar and his tribe are about to inherit. He's also very good at balancing the necessary irony of Harrelson's performance with the even more necessary total conviction of Serkis's (and the other mo-cap ape actors). Even better: Though the film is full of violence, Reeves makes every death matter to someone on-screen. He's less good at noticing when his film overreaches with the whole "But who is the savage, now?" shtick. At one point, the Colonel forces a cadre of ape POWs to build a (wait for it) wall outside his commandeered fortress. "Why do they need a wall?" one of them asks, and only barely resists looking damply into the camera at Trump's America. But guess what: This is Trump's America, and Reeves makes an admirable effort to present it/us with a credible catastrophization of the moral and spiritual trajectory we can't even seem to fully acknowledge, much less avert. by Sean Nelson