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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Deadpool & Wolverine review – Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman’s sarky gagathon mocks the MCU back to life

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The highly-anticipated odd-couple action bromance shatters the fourth wall into a million pieces with plenty of juke-box slams to keep blood-sugar content high

Can the ailing Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise be redeemed with a metric tonne of frantically self-aware comedy? Now that fewer and fewer people care, can this summer tent pole persuade them to have a laugh at what they used to care about? Can the superhero genre get back on top with a gag riot from Ryan Reynolds’s wisecracking crime fighter Deadpool in an odd-couple action bromance with Hugh Jackman’s wizened Wolverine as his straight man, the careworn spirit of seriousness?

Kind of. Deadpool was always the satiric turn – but this is a movie which more or less orders the audience to stop taking any of the proceedings seriously, shattering the fourth wall into a million pieces with material about nerds saving their “special sock” for particular fight scenes. It cheerfully (if sheepishly) makes mock of the MCU’s cosmic timeline shenanigans which permit characters to be brought back to life and even does loads of very tiresome corporate in-jokes about Disney taking over Fox, presumably on the basis that civilians care as much about this as the Hollywood combatants. Reynolds is often funny, sometimes very funny, periodically entirely unbearable, often a weird and interesting mix of the three.

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