Is Warfare the most realistic war film ever made?

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...

Power review – damning documentary traces the history of US policing

Sundance film festival: Yance Ford’s followup to Oscar nominated documentary Strong Island is a visually elegant, if a little dry, look at a problematic instituion

Power, documentarian Yance Ford’s clinical inquiry into US policing, isn’t trafficking in new information. The 86-minute project billed as an “essay-film”, which premiered at Sundance and will stream on Netflix later this year, has clear eyes on the past, synthesizing the work of several academics with a robust archival record to examine the origins, structure and impact of police power in the United States.

That doesn’t mean it’s unnecessary; the film makes cogent, sweeping sense of the record for perhaps the most illuminative, swift and damning case against the institution of policing – the real fourth estate, as one subject puts it – of the many investigations conducted in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. But there’s a dryness to its procedure. Though more visually elegant and poetic (almost to a fault, owing to Ford’s at times ponderous narration) than a Netflix Explained entry, Power basically has the same function as a nonfiction explainer. Perhaps owing to its ample use of academics to supply the exclamation points and through-lines to a truly remarkable collage of archival footage, the film has the feel of a very deluxe college lecture. (A visual metaphor linking policing power to an atomic bomb, while mesmerizing to look at, never fully lands.)

Power is screening at the Sundance film festival and will be released on Netflix later this year

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