Flags of Our Fathers: Critic Reviews

Brilliant and poetic, a masterful and all-encompassing story of war.

In Flags of Our Fathers, Eastwood is here to tell us that the reality of World War II was scarier and darker than any inspirational photograph.

In his new film about the battle for Iwo Jima, Clint Eastwood says something new and urgent about the uses of war and of the men who fight.

Flags of Our Fathers is touched by greatness. It argues that soldiers may go into battle for country and glory but they always end up fighting for the survival of themselves and their comrades.

It is one of the year's best films and perhaps the finest modern film about World War II.

Flags of Our Fathers stands with the best movies of this young century and the old one that preceded it: It's passionate, honest, unflinching, gripping, and it pays respects.

It's a monumental subject, and this heartsick but diffuse movie only occasionally glimpses its entirety.

With Flags, Eastwood has made one of his best films -- a searching, morally complex deconstruction of the Greatest Generation that is nevertheless rich in the sensitivity to human frailty that has become his signature as a filmmaker.

In his no-nonsense style, the 76-year-old filmmaker is merely telling the story he was given.

His is a deeply affecting account, admittedly a sometimes muddy one, of the band of brothers in THE iconic photograph of World War II.

Flags of Our Fathers may well be an accurate depiction of war-zone tumult and its psychic wounds, but that does not make for a cogent narrative.

Flags of Our Fathers is as handsome and gutsy as we want all our soldiers to be. That they can't always live up to our needs has more to do with us than with them.

Some movies and their makers are essential to our understanding of ourselves. Eastwood has become such a director. With Flags, he once again proves he is filmmaker for what ails us but also for what can make us extraordinary.

[Flags] fits into Eastwood's late-in-life agenda -- to make violence, even in self-defense, seem soul-killing, and to expose the gulf between reality and myth. After this, how can we ever again make our peace with the iconography of war?

Flags of Our Fathers is an accomplished, stirring, but, all in all, rather strange movie.

Eastwood's two-film project is one of the most visionary of all efforts to depict the reality and meaning of battle.

An American masterpiece. It is a searing and powerful work from a 76-year-old artist who remains at the top of his game.

There's a tremendous amount of material here, and the script covers too much of it, often confusingly.

This is underimagined and so thesis ridden that it's nearly over before it starts.

It can and will be seen as 'patriotic,' a tribute to the armed forces. But it is also, in its clear-eyed depiction of the chaos and carnage of battle, of the soldiers' quaking fear, and the cruel finality of a bullet or a bomb, very much an antiwar film.

Eastwood's skeptical film is respectful of the patriots who gave everything in the service of their country, but it pointedly leaves the flag-waving to others.

There's some slight, indefinable lack to Flags of Our Fathers, some piece of missing brimstone that keeps it from setting the heart afire, leaving it a wholly admirable piece of filmmaking, but nothing more.

You could argue that the story is as much about the aftermath as the battle, but Eastwood still jumps around too much.

Brilliantly conceived, articulately written, sensitively acted, filled with deeply penetrating emotions and breathtaking action, it is the greatest cinematic canvas of war since Saving Private Ryan.

[Captures] the spirit of our time with its mixture of cynicism and idealism, irony and conviction, satiric skepticism and red-blooded patriotism.