Warfare
A24 | Release Date: April 11, 2025 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
78
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 43 Critic Reviews
Positive:
35
Mixed:
8
Negative:
0

Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
The Observer (UK)Wendy IdeApr 23, 2025
The overriding impression, once the adrenaline has drained away, is of futility, waste and pointless destruction. Read full review
100
BBCCaryn JamesApr 16, 2025
Together, Garland's virtuosity and Mendoza's first-hand experience create a masterful technical achievement that is, more important, emotionally harrowing. Read full review
100
Wall Street JournalKyle SmithApr 11, 2025
I can’t imagine a movie doing a better job bottling such an experience. Drinking it down requires a taste for the maximum dosage, though. Read full review
100
The TimesKevin MaherMar 28, 2025
This is a movie that’s as difficult to watch as it is to forget. It’s a sensory blitz, a percussive nightmare and a relentless assault on the soul. Read full review
100
San Francisco ChronicleG. Allen JohnsonMar 28, 2025
The incident depicted in Warfare may have happened nearly two decades ago, but the film seems as fresh as today’s headlines. Read full review
100
EmpireAlex GodfreyMar 28, 2025
War is hell, and Warfare refuses to shy away from it. Free of the operatics of most supposed anti-war films, it’s all the more effective for its simplicity. It is respectfully gruelling. Read full review
100
The TelegraphRobbie CollinMar 28, 2025
Part of the genius of Warfare’s ending is that it admits that war rarely – if ever – contains endings at all. Read full review
91
Original-CinJohn KirkApr 10, 2025
A visceral cross-section of an Iraq War incident, related by the veterans who served there, Warfare stuns viewers into submission and leaves them with a grim apprehension of military service - albeit as close as one gets without being there. Read full review
90
The AtlanticDavid SimsApr 17, 2025
That Warfare is, in dramatically rendering a true story, visceral is hardly a surprise. What’s fascinating is how so much of the film commits to the waiting that exists during battle: the taxing, dull tension of knowing that something might happen any minute. Read full review
90
The Daily BeastNick SchagerApr 10, 2025
A taut and terrifying portrait of courage under fire. Read full review
90
The New York TimesManohla DargisApr 10, 2025
The highest praise I can offer Warfare, a tough, relentless movie about life and death in battle, is that it isn’t thrilling. It is, rather, a purposely sad, angry movie, and as much a lament as a warning. Read full review
90
The New YorkerJustin ChangApr 4, 2025
Warfare, you come to discover, is waging a war of its own—against the glamorizing tendencies and readily digestible classical conventions of its genre. Read full review
90
Screen DailyNikki BaughanMar 28, 2025
Warfare certainly isn’t the first combat movie to take such an immersive approach to the subject, but what’s striking about this film is its overriding commitment to the truth as perceived by its real-life characters. Read full review
90
The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneyMar 28, 2025
As courageous as the platoon members are, Warfare is not to be confused with a movie about heroism; it’s a movie about hell that leaves you shaken. Read full review
90
ColliderAidan KelleyMar 28, 2025
The result is one of the best films of 2025 so far, successfully capturing the grim, brutal, and unpredictable nature of warfare that only a handful of feature films truly have. Read full review
88
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsApr 10, 2025
It’s a specific sort of achievement, without the full dimension or larger resonance of a classic. That’s a lot to ask of any film, especially one that does so much so rigorously and well. Read full review
87
PolygonAusten GoslinApr 11, 2025
By smartly leaning on the tools of horror movies rather than war movies, the co-directors have made one of the most tense and scary movies of the year so far, along with some of the most harrowing cinematic combat ever put to film. Read full review
83
The A.V. ClubBrianna ZiglerMar 28, 2025
Warfare is impressive, efficiently tense filmmaking. Read full review
80
NMELou ThomasApr 17, 2025
It’s honest and unflinching, tough but not witless and, for the most part, an immersive, overwhelming sensory experience. It should be compulsory viewing for warmongers of all ages and young conscripts. Read full review
80
The Irish TimesDonald ClarkeApr 16, 2025
Many will retain understandable uneasiness about the project, but few could deny the technical brilliance and dedication to an austere brief. An essential watch. Though maybe just the once. Read full review
80
Los Angeles TimesAmy NicholsonApr 11, 2025
Warfare is strictly the facts, and those alone are terrible, brave, intense, random, tedious and captivating. Read full review
80
Rolling StoneDavid FearApr 9, 2025
The only agenda in Warfare, in other words, is to give you a sense of not just what happened but how everything felt while it was happening. A tall order, to be sure, but one that Garland, Mendoza, their cast and the crew pull off shockingly well. Read full review
80
SlashfilmJacob HallApr 2, 2025
Warfare is downright experimental in its presentation, daring even in how it bucks form and structure. As an experience, it cuts to the bone. Read full review
80
IGNEric GoldmanMar 28, 2025
Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s Warfare is incredibly effective at putting you into the middle of combat, evoking feelings of dread and terror usually reserved for the darkest horror movies. Read full review
78
Austin ChronicleRichard WhittakerApr 10, 2025
Audiences wanting a more rounded discussion of the U.S. occupation of Iraq might find it too militaristic and Americentric, while flagwavers wanting raw jingoism may find its questioning too probing. But as a depiction of the futility of conflict from those who fought, Warfare is far from ambivalent. Read full review
75
RogerEbert.comMatt Zoller SeitzApr 11, 2025
Warfare is a viscerally impressive work. Your body feels it. But you might come away from it wondering what the point is, other than the fact that it happened to someone. And you wouldn’t be wrong to ask that question. Read full review
75
Washington PostAnn HornadayApr 9, 2025
Warfare is a process movie: It’s less interested in character development and “narrative” than in simply plunging viewers into an environment and giving us a sense of what life is like within it. Read full review
75
The Associated PressJake CoyleApr 8, 2025
In this forensic portrait of war, the only way to not get what’s happening on the ground is to be too far from it. François Truffaut famously said there’s no such thing as an anti-war film because movies inherently glamorize war. “Warfare,” though, is intent on challenging that old adage. Read full review
75
Slant MagazineRocco T. ThompsonMar 28, 2025
This is a formidable technical showcase and obsessive forensic recreation whose imposed formal limitations become meaning-making ends in and of themselves. Read full review
73
Paste MagazineJarrod JonesApr 10, 2025
As a blistering exercise in sustained tension, Warfare works. As a depiction of the toll war takes on the body and soul, well, it’s pretty good at that, too. Read full review
70
TimeStephanie ZacharekApr 11, 2025
If a movie can be elegant and brutal at once, this one is: the dissipating smoke from the grenade hangs in the air, a pinkish-gold mist; polka dots of sunlight stream through a scattering of bullet holes in a door. Read full review
70
Screen RantMary KasselMar 28, 2025
It's gripping and effective but doesn't have anything new to say. Read full review
67
Entertainment WeeklyJordan HoffmanApr 4, 2025
That the specific task at hand in Warfare is so vague is a good reminder that though this happened 20 years ago, there are people right now who have been ordered to enforce political will with violence, and this savagery will likely repeat for all time. Read full review
67
The PlaylistRodrigo PerezMar 28, 2025
Warfare may sharply communicate what it’s like to be under fire, and those looking for bruising action will be exhilarated by the electricity it generates. But anyone asking for some complexity beyond these are the boys that answered the call to go to war will be left decidedly SOL. Read full review
67
IndieWireDavid EhrlichMar 28, 2025
Warfare is a film that wants to be felt more than interpreted, but it doesn’t make any sense to me as an invitation — only as a warning created from the wounds of a memory. Read full review
60
LooperReuben BaronApr 11, 2025
The lack of character development blunts any potential for the deeper emotional impact found in the best war movies. The lack of political contextualization further limits how much the film is really capable of saying. Read full review
60
Little White LiesHannah StrongApr 11, 2025
The filmmaking is raw and tense, with the young cast suitably disappearing into their roles as anonymous SEALs and the filmmakers seeking to get as close to reality as one can get without projecting literal bodycam footage of a war zone onto a cinema screen. Read full review
60
SlateDana StevensApr 11, 2025
I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the screen during Warfare, even if they were sometimes half-covered during those many cutaways to lacerated flesh. But leaving the movie, my main sensation was relief that that brutal viewing experience was over, rather than reflection on the meaning of the Iraq War, on the experience of war itself, or on the success or failure of this particular attempt to represent it. Read full review
60
VarietyOwen GleibermanMar 28, 2025
It scrapes every last bit of romantic glamour off the image of combat, and I guess you could say that’s an achievement. But it’s an achievement, in this case, that seems to be saluting itself. Read full review
60
The IndependentClarisse LoughreyMar 28, 2025
Warfare’s violence feels unmoored without its context. Read full review
60
The GuardianPeter BradshawMar 28, 2025
The movie is its own show of force in some ways, surely accurate in showing what the soldiers did, moment by moment, though blandly unaware of a point or a meaning beyond the horror. Read full review
50
Movie NationRoger MooreApr 11, 2025
Mendoza’s pitch, to “get it right” and have “real combat vets” have their story told, might be noble in its intention and the tribute (stay through the credits) to their service the film represents. But he and Garland emphasize authenticity over empathy, accuracy over dramatic connection. Read full review
41
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Barry HertzApr 7, 2025
Alternately tedious, cacophonous and stultifying, the latest show of force from writer-director Alex Garland following last year’s equally frustrating Civil War just might be the most unnecessarily unpleasant cinematic experience you will endure this year. Read full review
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