72
Metascore
13 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 88RogerEbert.comRogerEbert.comThough this is a story of enormous cultural importance and dramatic power, it’s virtually impossible to imagine today’s Hollywood making a movie about it.
- 80New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinNew York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinThe Kill Team, an essential film no matter what your political convictions. The setting is Afghanistan, but it might be Iraq or Vietnam or anywhere with occupying forces. It might be Gaza. This map of hell is timeless, placeless.
- 80SalonAndrew O'HehirSalonAndrew O'HehirSoberly executed and highly principled documentary filmmaking, tightly focused on the Winfield family’s efforts to navigate the byzantine Army bureaucracy and the ass-covering military justice system. But it’s also a kind of Rorschach test of any viewer’s attitudes about war, the military and the United States’ amorphous 13-year mission in Afghanistan.
- 75Slant MagazineSlant MagazineThis is a rare War on Terror military exposé, one almost exclusively interested in the hearts and minds of low-ranking soldiers.
- 70Village VoiceZachary WigonVillage VoiceZachary WigonThe emotional disconnect between a soldier's perception of reality and reality itself is the subject of this documentary, which finds drama in evenhanded storytelling that is the inverse of its characters' emotional shakiness.
- 70The DissolveNathan RabinThe DissolveNathan RabinThe Kill Team tells a compelling story, but the 79-minute runtime leaves that story feeling incomplete.
- 60Time OutJoshua RothkopfTime OutJoshua RothkopfThe film is weak on its essential indictment, vaguely suggesting a mood of battlefield boredom without quite pinpointing the pathology that would lead military men to squeeze the trigger pell-mell.
- 58The A.V. ClubMike D'AngeloThe A.V. ClubMike D'AngeloWar is hell, in other words, and punishing these soldiers—and Winfield in particular—for doing what they were taught to do is wrong.
- 50The New York TimesManohla DargisThe New York TimesManohla DargisMr. Krauss might have served his material better if he had pulled the curtain back in The Kill Team, if only to explain why a movie that initially seems to be about one thing — as its shocker title suggests — is a partisan portrait of Specialist Winfield and his family.