Film reviews: Warfare and A Minecraft Movie

Warfare

Directed by Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza (R)

Alex Garland's latest provocation has to be "one of the most realistic war movies ever made," said G. Allen Johnson in the San Francisco Chronicle. Teaming with Iraq War veteran Ray Mendoza, the Ex Machina and Civil War director plunges viewers into the middle of a 2006 Navy SEAL operation in Ramadi that erupts in violence. "The film isn't explicitly anti-war or pro-war," but the personalities of the U.S. service members emerge in the quiet before they come under attack, and when gunfire or explosions tear their bodies apart, "we know them, and we are horrified." Despite the dramatization's hyperrealism, the filmmakers' choice to focus on a minor skirmish in the war "feels like a commentary on the larger misadventure," said Justin Chang in The New Yorker. "Certainly, it is hard to come away from Warfare, with its soldiers' screams still ringing in your ears, and see the U.S. military's presence in Iraq as anything but a violent, misguided intrusion."

Garland and Mendoza have captured one sliver of the experience of that conflict "with disquieting skill," said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. But watching Warfare, "I felt involved and detached at the same time," because the film intentionally leaves its characters and even the purpose of their surveillance operation so opaque. Warfare "scrapes every last bit of romantic glamour off the image of combat," and, sure, that is an achievement. "But it's an achievement, in this case, that seems to be saluting itself."

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A Minecraft Movie

Directed by Jared Hess (PG)

"How did no one see this coming?" asked Harrison Richlin in IndieWire. Despite middling reviews, the new Minecraft movie blew far past expectations to notch a $163 million first weekend, besting even Barbie's 2023 North American haul and topping all other 2025 releases to date. Young fans turned screenings into Rocky Horror Picture Show–like crowd-participation events, shouting out two-word meme lines as clownish co-stars Jack Black and Jason Momoa helped transform the best-selling video game of all time into big-screen entertainment.

The takeaway for Hollywood's graying execs should be obvious: "Put the younger generation's interests into focus, y'all." If you've never played Minecraft, the movie won't do much for you, said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. Though Black and Momoa have an "endearing rapport" as rival knuckleheads who wind up inside the cubic world of the game trying to help two siblings save the universe, "nothing about this hodgepodge fits together." Playing off the game's invitation for players to build almost anything they can dream of from blocks, the film tries but fails to spread the message that creativity is cool. Give it a chance, though, if you enjoy the humor of circa-2008 Starburst commercials, said Brandon Yu in The New York Times. That's always been director Jared Hess' aesthetic, and "there's something almost refreshingly bold in the full-tilt inanity here, as if to knowingly say, 'I mean, it's a Minecraft movie.'"