War Horse: Critic Reviews

Poetic, thrilling, heartwrenching, Spielberg has made his finest film in a decade; and maybe the best film of 2011.

The project is tailor-made for Saving Private Ryan Spielberg, the war-story specialist, as well as for E.T. Spielberg, the chronicler of boyhood desires and yearnings for family.

You may find yourself resisting this sentimental pageant of early-20th-century rural English life, replete with verdant fields, muddy tweeds and damp turnips, but my strong advice is to surrender.

Rooted in a buffed-up, sanded-down vision of rural England, where even alcohol-fuelled poverty is given a picturesque, storybook patina.

Sweeping in its style and old-fashioned in its narrative structure, War Horse will likely take its place alongside beloved family films.

A work of full-throated Hollywood classicism that looks back to the craftsmanship and sentimentality of John Ford and other legends of the studio era.

Dialogue is superfluous; in its way, War Horse is as much a "silent movie" as The Artist. Every triumph is pounded into your head and punctuated by a dolly-in close-up.

The vision we connect with isn't that of a horse or his owner, but a storyteller so fascinated by the best and worst of humanity, he continues to search for a way to reconcile them.

The scope and craft are dazzling.

Robustly entertaining.

Tonally jarring and structurally disjointed, it's a punishingly long and bumpy ride.

The film is made with superb artistry. Spielberg is the master of an awesome canvas.

When the army buys the horse and takes it to the French front, Spielberg goes into Lean mode, finding in war the greatest landscapes and crowd shots that money can buy.

War Horse is sugary, to be sure - but it is sugar cut with cannon fire and barbed wire and the horrors of war.

The result isn't groundbreaking, but it's gratifying.

Spielberg all but begs you to cry, and unless you're a heartless cad, you probably will.

War Horse is a don't-miss Spielberg classic that reaches true perfection.

This beautifully composed picture brings a robust physicality to tried-and-true source material, but falls short of the sustained narrative involvement and emotional drive its resolutely old-fashioned storytelling demands.

Those who say they don't make 'em like they used to must now fall silent.

If anyone thought Steven Spielberg couldn't top himself for manipulating audience emotions, they didn't reckon with War Horse.

It's simply crafted, at times bordering on simplistic, and it doesn't just wear its heart on its sleeve - it wears its heart on its heart.

It's almost a great war movie in one direction, and almost a piece of irredeemable cheese in the other, and there you have it.

Call it "lesser Spielberg" and put it alongside Always and Hook.