Warfare review – nerve-shredding real-time Iraq war film drags you into visceral frontline combat

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Co-directors Alex Garland and former US Navy Seal Ray Mendoza recreate a 2006 battle with almost unbearable intensity – and a dazzling ensemble cast It’s up there with the first 23 bruising minutes of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan or Elem Klimov’s harrowing and relentless Come and See . This is film-making that doesn’t just show you the horrors of war; it forces you to taste the dust and the choking panic, smell the fear and the cordite and the tinny metallic tang of spilled blood. Warfare , by Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza, is the most forceful and unflinching depiction of combat since Edward Berger’s 2023 Oscar-winning All Quiet on the Western Front . It’s also one of the boldest and most formally daring. There are certain conventions at play in most war movies. Among them is the unwritten rule that however blisteringly hellish the depiction of combat, there’s a mitigating audience sop in the form of a flag-waving message about the nobility of the cause. Or, at the very le...
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‘I couldn’t be less interested in fashion’: the designer who dressed Mad Max and Cruella – and changed the world

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Up for a fourth Oscar thanks to Mrs Harris Goes to Paris, Jenny Beavan talks about her bohemian childhood, her early work with Merchant Ivory and how she deals with difficult actors

If you spot a woman trying to surreptitiously take a photo of you on the bus – you’d have to look interesting – there’s a fair chance it might be Jenny Beavan. “I am the biggest people-watcher ever,” says Beavan, the British costume director who is up for her fourth Oscar next month. She took a secret photo the other day, she says, of “a fabulous woman. I don’t know whether she was from a sect or something – she was wearing white and had the most extraordinary white hat on. She was amazing; she looked like a sort of strange clown. I snuck a photo.” Elements of it might make it into a film – “I might be doing something to do with ghosts” – but it will be squirrelled away in Beavan’s mind, even if she can’t find the actual photo now to show me. She sighs and puts her phone away.

We are sitting in her office at the back of her beautiful London house, where she has lived for more than 30 years. Beavan has a straightforward, no-nonsense manner, but she’s also incredibly warm, her grey curls bouncing around her face, so the effect isn’t austere but fun and surprisingly comforting. If you were a film star, you would think nothing of telling her all your secrets while she was dressing you. Does she get good gossip? “Oh yeah,” she says, with a glint of mischief. “It’s like the confessional. Thank God I’ve got a really pants memory and can’t remember a thing, because I do hear some fairly intimate stuff. I’ve been very good, I’ve never divulged.”

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