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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Mark Kermode on… Martin Scorsese’s love of British cinema

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The director’s new BFI season championing hidden gems of British film, hot on the heels of his Powell and Pressburger documentary, reveals some of the inspirations of a film-making great and passionate fan

This weekend, the BFI Southbank in London begins a season of films entitled Martin Scorsese Selects Hidden Gems of British Cinema. Among the treats that caught my eye are a terrific Terence Fisher double bill (1948’s To the Public Danger and 1952’s Stolen Face), Roy Ward Baker’s Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971), John Hough’s The Legend of Hell House (1973) and a rare nitrate-print screening of Alberto Cavalcanti’s dark 1942 gem, Went the Day Well?

The fact that a director whose own extraordinary CV includes Taxi Driver (1973), Raging Bull (1980), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Casino (1995), Gangs of New York (2002), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) and, just last year, Killers of the Flower Moon should curate such a season may seem remarkable. But Scorsese has always been a film fan as much as a film-maker, and the movies he has championed over the years are every bit as important to him as those he has made.

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