Warfare (2025) Reviews: What Critics Said

Editorial note: This is a roundup of published criticism of Warfare. Celluloid has not screened the film for this piece, and it carries no Celluloid rating. The critics are named and linked under Sources.

Is Warfare worth watching?

Most critics say yes, with a warning about how punishing it is: Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland’s near real-time account of a single mission was widely praised as an unusually convincing depiction of modern combat. Reviewers singled out its sound design, its refusal to glamorise violence and its lean construction. The dissent centres on what the film leaves out: character, context and any Iraqi perspective, which for some critics left it hollow or worse.

What is Warfare about?

A platoon of US Navy SEALs embarks on a dangerous mission in Ramadi, Iraq, and the chaos and brotherhood of the day are retold through the memories of the men who were there. Ray Mendoza, a former SEAL who was part of the operation, co-wrote and co-directed the film with Alex Garland. D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai plays Ray, with Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, Kit Connor, Joseph Quinn, Michael Gandolfini and Noah Centineo in the ensemble. The film was released in 2025 and runs 95 minutes. Release details and where to watch are on the Warfare film page.

What critics praised

Alex Godfrey of Empire was the most admiring, ranking it as about as pure and effective an anti-war film as cinema has made. He valued its economy, with no wasted scenes and no showy visual flourishes, and described sound design so forceful that gunfire, explosions and screams become the film’s main source of power. He stressed that it never makes war look attractive, avoids both sentimentality and hand-wringing, and tells its story from the Americans’ side without politicising it.

Writing for TIME, Stephanie Zacharek found the film elegant and brutal at once. She was struck by unexpected moments of visual beauty amid the violence, praised the young cast, and felt the collaboration between Garland and Mendoza captures a shared trauma rather than individual heroics. She also used the film as a prompt to question how well veterans are cared for once they return home.

Brianna Zigler of The A.V. Club admired the efficiency and tension of the filmmaking, and its claustrophobic, frenetic direction. She had worried beforehand that it might be jingoistic, but concluded that its commitment to the veterans’ own accounts makes it firmly anti-war, whatever its makers intended. She found one explosion sequence especially powerful in conveying the physical reality of the carnage.

Where critics were divided

Philip Kemp of Sight and Sound was more reserved. He acknowledged a vivid sense of danger and praised the vigour and precision of David J. Thompson’s camerawork, as well as the absence of time jumps or a musical score. But he found the soldiers hard to tell apart, missed any backstory or inner life, and felt the Iraqi fighters appear only as distant, fleeting figures. For him the result is gripping on the surface but offers little emotional involvement.

Zigler shared some of those concerns. She noted that Iraqi civilians are given almost no characterisation, that the film leans on familiar war-film patterns, and that its closing dedication to the veterans left her uneasy.

The sharpest criticism came from Gregory Nussen of Deadline. He granted that the film is artfully made and at times harrowing, and admired its sound. But he found the premise thin and the characters anonymous, faulted the film for never explaining the mission’s purpose or reckoning with the war itself, and argued that, far from an unromantic portrait of combat, it plays as reverent military propaganda.

Who is it for?

Warfare is for viewers who want an unflinching, ground-level account of combat and can tolerate prolonged, graphic injury scenes. It is rated R in the US and 15 in the UK. Those looking for the character arcs and historical framing of films such as Saving Private Ryan should expect something far more stripped back. More titles are gathered under war.

The critical verdict

Most of the critics here regard Warfare as a formidable technical achievement and a sobering, unglamorous portrait of combat. Godfrey and Zacharek were strongly positive, and Zigler largely agreed. The disagreement is about its narrow focus: Kemp found it emotionally distant, and Nussen considered its silence on context a serious failing. Few disputed its intensity; the argument is over whether intensity is enough.