Critical reception

Bring Your Own Brigade received positive reviews from film critics. It holds a 89% approval rating on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 27 reviews, with a weighted average of 7.40/10.^[11] On Metacritic, the film holds a rating of 81 out of 100, based on 5 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".^[12]

Manhola Dargis of The New York Times gave the film a positive review writing: "In “Bring Your Own Brigade,” the director Lucy Walker doesn’t simply look at the fires; she investigates and tries to understand them. It’s a tough, smart, impressive movie, and one of its virtues is that Walker, a British transplant to Los Angeles, doesn’t seem to have figured it all out before she started shooting. She comes across as open, curious and rightly concerned, but her approach — the way she looks and listens, and how she shapes the material — gives the movie the quality of discovery. (She’s also pleasantly free of the boosterism or the smug hostility that characterizes so much coverage of California.)Specific and universal, harrowing and hopeful, “Bring Your Own Brigade” opens on a world in flames. "^[13] Bob Strauss of The San Francisco Chronicle also gave the film a positive review writing: "Mixing in citizens' harrowing cellphone footage and heartbreaking emergency call recordings, Walker's teams immerse us in the flaming terror as few features have before.".^[14] The New York Times's A.O. Scott saw the film at Sundance and described it as a “relentless forensic examination of some of California’s most horrific recent wildfires. The movie’s first section is an almost unbearable immersion in terror, including 911 calls and cellphone videos that capture death and destruction in real time. Walker, a British transplant sensitive to her outsider status, is driven by an effective mixture of empathy and intellectual curiosity as she tries to understand the ecology, economics and politics of fire. As the narrative shifts from disaster to its aftermath — which is also, inevitably, the prelude to the next round of catastrophe — the scope broadens, even as the camera remains focused on local events and individual stories. In a way that I can’t quite explain but that I think will be clear when you see it, Bring Your Own Brigade” strikes me as one of the early, definitive films about the current pandemic" ^[15] and added a few days later on his "best of Sundance" wrap-up that the movie was on his list of those he was "most looking forward to seeing again and writing about further. Bring Your Own Brigade: Lucy Walker’s documentary on some of the worst recent California wildfires is sprawling and intimate, an issue-driven film that is full of narrative surprise and human detail."^[16]