Metacritic reviews

Capped by a truly lovely final shot, The Yellow Birds (the title comes from a particularly cruel Army cadence) is about unseen wounds and wasted lives. The closer we get to these young men, the closer we are to wondering how many more of these stories we can bear to hear.

The Yellow Birds is a war movie whose outlines may be familiar — but its emotional clarity gives this drama an almost crushing sense of intimacy.

Yellow Birds goes heavy on the brooding, and even though a lot of it looks gorgeous and carries the whiff of great importance it is ultimately stunted by a central event that isn’t worth the mystery that surrounds it.

Moors is a filmmaker with immense talent, as demonstrated in his Sundance film Blue Caprice from a few years back, but the beats don’t quite align this time around.

An excellent novel about the Iraq War and its homefront fallout has been turned into a rather flat and disappointing film in The Yellow Birds.

There are elements of “The Yellow Birds” that should equate to a unique cinematic experience. Unfortunately, like Bartle’s return home, you leave the theater somewhat dazed, confused and thinking of what went wrong.

For all the vivid combat sequences, the gritty adjustment-back-home touches and a couple of genuinely emotional scenes, it feels incomplete, choppy and something of a cheat.

You may want for something to hold on to, but Tye Sheridan and Alden Ehrenreich slip through the fingers, both seeming uninterested and restless to move on to other projects.

The film keeps acting like it has something big to tell us; it plods and broods with self-importance. Yet in almost every crucial way, The Yellow Birds is a flat and listless piece of moviemaking, a monotonous indie dirge.

For a film that has such an intriguing premise at its core, The Yellow Birds seems to drag due to Moor’s abrupt tempo changes and flat visual style.