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100For those who are willing to brave the movie's shocking and unforgettable images, Saving Private Ryan offers a singular motion picture experience.
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100This film embodies ideas. After the immediate experience begins to fade, the implications remain and grow.
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100A watershed picture, for both Spielberg and war movies.
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100Steven Spielberg's best war film -- and one of the two or three best movies the director has made.
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100A film of such cyclonic visual and emotional power, of such dazzling virtuosity and shattering humanity, that it is difficult to endure, yet alone describe. Savagely beautiful and savagely true, Saving Private Ryan is an excruciating masterpiece.
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100An overwhelming experience.
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100The effect is riveting and frightening. You feel you are under siege with the combatants.
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100The rawest, most sustained screen portrayal of 20th century combat.
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100No Hollywood film within recent memory has achieved such richness and originality of texture, such a compelling amalgam of passionate human drama and awesome technique.
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100One of the best films ever made in this country, filled with our proudest national virtues, cognizant of our deeply rooted human weaknesses and frighteningly able to evoke emotions.
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100A movie of staggering virtuosity and raw lyric power, a masterpiece of terror, chaos, blood, and courage.
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100An excellent movie, as effective in battle scenes as it is in that of soldiers ruminating on an Edith Piaf song.
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100He (Spielberg) commemorates the soldiers in that vast Normandy cemetery in the most absolute and honorable way possible.
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100In striving to duplicate reality, Spielberg has gone reality one better -- he's playing war, but it's a game no one would ever willingly join in.
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100Steven Spielberg's soberly magnificent new war film, the second such pinnacle in a career of magical versatility, has been made in the same spirit of urgent communication. It is the ultimate devastating letter home.
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100A war film that, entirely aware of its genre's conventions, transcends them as it transcends the simplistic moralities that inform its predecessors, to take the high, morally haunting ground.
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100A searingly visceral combat picture, Steven Spielberg’s third World War II drama is arguably second to none as a vivid, realistic and bloody portrait of armed conflict.
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100Searing, heartbreaking, so intense it turns your body into a single tube of clenched muscle, this is simply the greatest war movie ever made, and one of the great American movies.
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100Spectacular, wrenching masterpiece that unflinchingly documents the random horror, the grisly spectacle and the ugliness of war.
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90A magnificent piece of movie-making.
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90Feels like the first truly honest attempt to deal with the horrors of combat - and the terrible responsibility shared by all survivors.
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90What Steven Spielberg has accomplished in Saving Private Ryan is to make violence terrible again.
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89A bitter, bloody masterpiece with adrenalized emotions and hyper-realized images, this is perhaps as close to battle as any sane human being should ever hope to tread.
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80The movie's greatest strength lies in phenomenal performances that reach from the leads right down to the smallest supporting roles.
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80Using the overpowering techniques of modern film, Steven Spielberg has cut through the glory-tinged gauze that shrouds World War II to reveal its brutal reality, creating a phenomenology of violence unsurpassed in the history of cinema.
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80If Steven Spielberg's emotional intelligence matched his visual genius, his honorably flawed new film might qualify for one of the greatest-ever American WWII movies.
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80An exceptionally intense movie whose sheer filmmaking power ultimately transcends all its (many) limitations.
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80A startling reminder of exactly how spectacular a director Spielberg can be when he allows himself to be challenged by a subject (in this case World War II) that pushes against his limits.
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80Raises Hollywood's depiction of war to a new level.
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80Its relatively minor imperfections seem more glaring when compared to the near flawlessness of the film's lyrical, scorching start.
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80Steven Spielberg's new film begins as a monumental epic; then it diminishes; and, by its finish, is baffling. [August 24, 1998]
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75The story raises hard moral questions relating to the relative value of human lives and the overwhelming debt that may be felt by those who benefit when others sacrifice. But the movie falls short of excellence because it doesn't so much explore these issues as finesse them in an action-filled climax.
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75A horror movie based on history, offering some of the most spectacularly brutal, viscerally intense battle scenes ever brought to a Hollywood movie.
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50Nothing that suggests an independent vision, unless you count seeing more limbs blown off than usual.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 98 out of 110
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Mixed: 1 out of 110
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Negative: 11 out of 110
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