Critic Reviews

The Kill Team doesn't saint Winfield at all, instead, smartly casting responsible, impartial questions as to what his options could have been.

Though 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.

The 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.

Soberly 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.

A harrowing picture of the casualties of war — and the unchecked madness that may drive those entrusted to defend us.

This is a rare War on Terror military exposé, one almost exclusively interested in the hearts and minds of low-ranking soldiers.

The scope of the film can be frustratingly narrow. But even this limited view into the events of the Maywand District murders is gripping cinema.

The Kill Team is expertly edited, at one point overlaying interviews with the men who participated in the war crimes with B-roll of infantrymen milling about, weapons in hand. And it’s all set to a brilliantly spare and evocative soundtrack. It’s a beautiful way to lose faith in humanity.

The 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.

The Kill Team tells a compelling story, but the 79-minute runtime leaves that story feeling incomplete.