Metacritic reviews

Part of the genius of Warfare’s ending is that it admits that war rarely – if ever – contains endings at all.

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.

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.

Warfare is impressive, efficiently tense filmmaking.

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.

This is a formidable technical showcase and obsessive forensic recreation whose imposed formal limitations become meaning-making ends in and of themselves.

It's gripping and effective but doesn't have anything new to say.

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.

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.

Warfare’s violence feels unmoored without its context.