Is Warfare the most realistic war film ever made?

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In Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s brutal and immersive new film, memory informs the events that take place in real time to a unit of soldiers in Iraq Warfare , Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s assiduous new film on a single episode of the American war in Iraq, opens with a title card typical to a war picture: date, location, barebones summary – 11 November 2006, in Ramadi, Iraq. Navy SEAL team alpha one is supporting Marines in insurgents’ territory. And then one final, unusual detail in place of the standard “based on a true story” – “This film uses only their memories.” The “only” is an ominous indicator: this is a film working against the Hollywood tide to gloss, simplify or narrativize. Warfare, based primarily on Mendoza’s memories of that day as a former SEAL, as well as those of fellow soldiers and civilians present, is as much an experiment of translation as a cinematic achievement, a movie defined by both what it shows and what it does not. Much of the press surrounding Warfar...
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Oppenheimer: sex, death and impending apocalypse – discuss with spoilers

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Christopher Nolan’s film about the godfather of the nuclear bomb is impressive, and Cillian Murphy the perfect man for the job, but do women get a raw deal and is it all too sanitised?

  • This article contains spoilers for Oppenheimer

J Robert Oppenheimer’s apocalyptic legacy has haunted modern politics and culture, but his personal story is not obvious blockbuster material. It would take a film-maker of the talent, and Hollywood heft, of Christopher Nolan to pull it off.

Oppenheimer opened in the US last weekend with a box office haul of $82m, second to Barbie’s gargantuan $162m. The instincts of Nolan, and his backers at Universal Studios, have been rewarded in a way that, hopefully, bodes well for the future of big-budget films about difficult subjects (Nolan isn’t the only purveyor of such work, but there aren’t many around).

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