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100Spielberg has been ridiculed for shooting his actors from below against impossibly Spielbergian skies and a denouement that lays the love on copiously. But there's nothing simpleminded about how he uses movie magic, as a spell to dispel nihilism, to save us from the worst of ourselves by summoning up the best.
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100There isn't a moment in the movie where you don't feel Spielberg's passion, and this time, the film is worthy of his enthusiasm. It's a knockout.
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100It's not a knock on Steven Spielberg to say he is history's finest maker of children's movies. His capacity to evoke simplicity, awe, beauty and unconditional love are his genius, and his vision of the children's story War Horse is a gorgeous, majestic fable about a boy who yearns to be reunited with his steed.
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100An entirely fitting Christmas Day release -- filled as it is with magic and talk of miracles -- and easily one of the best films of 2011.
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100To create his disarmingly earnest film, Spielberg draws from the past. Its tone is humanistic and its technique classic.
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100War Horse is a don't-miss Spielberg classic that reaches true perfection.
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100In his most painterly film, Spielberg has appropriated the lavish visual palette of John Ford movies: "The Quiet Man" for the rural settings, "The Horse Soldiers" for the war scenes. Boldly emotional, nakedly heartfelt, War Horse will leave only the stoniest hearts untouched.
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91This is a beautifully built, classically framed movie, shot with the unshowy natural expressiveness of a John Ford Western by Spielberg's great cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski.
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90You 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.
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88War Horse gets to you. It's one from the heart.
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88War Horse is bold, not afraid of sentiment and lets out all the stops in magnificently staged action sequences. Its characters are clearly defined and strongly played by charismatic actors. Its message is a universal one.
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85For all its borrowing from old Hollywood, I don't think War Horse is particularly nostalgic. The word I'd use is wistful. It's the largest, most lavish handful of wistfulness money can buy, and sometimes it's too much. Yet it's nice to know that even Steven Spielberg can still wish for something.
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83War Horse takes time reaching its full emotional gallop with a late sequence combining man, beast and barbed wire. Yet it remains a technically magnificent ride throughout, and a checklist of visual influences from "All Quiet on the Western Front" to "Gone with the Wind."
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83Pieces of War Horse that may charm some eyes might well bore others to tears.
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Jan 9, 201280War Horse is bold, exquisite family filmmaking in the grandest Hollywood tradition. Be warned: whether you're a hippophile or not, it's a four-hankie moviegoing experience.
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80It's very much an old-time moviegoing experience; the film could have been made in 1940, and that's a compliment.
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80What's missing, then? There's no fiery central performance in the mix (the horse doesn't count), and once Emily Watson's hardscrabble mom is rotated out of the action, you yearn for an anchor.
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75While the PG-13 approach to the most brutally sustained war the world has ever known makes it suitable for mature children, some cynical adults may resent the tug of the reins. Me, I cried like a grandmother.
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75War Horse's primary attraction is not the story of how it makes us feel but its impressive re-creation of the Great War's battlefields and some stunningly beautiful camerawork by cinematographer Janusz Kaminski.
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75War Horse will likely take its place alongside beloved family films. But that doesn't mean sitting through it is pure pleasure. It's a long slog at almost 2½ hours, and occasionally it resorts to obvious sentimentality. At times it's hard to escape the sense that we're watching "Saving Private Ryan"-meets-"The Black Stallion."
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75There are extraordinary and beautiful things in War Horse, enough of them to make the movie a pleasure and a worthwhile experience, though not enough to trick the eye or get you believing this movie hangs together.
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75Spielberg has created an appropriate showcase for the magnificent creature that emerges, one that recalls the great movie horses of yore in a story guaranteed to pluck, grab and wring viewers' hearts, but thankfully not break them.
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75War Horse, despite its excellences, is a supreme demonstration of a director phoning it in.
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75Spielberg and his team - composer John Williams, as always, cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, screenwriter Richard Curtis - never forget their mission: to pull at heart strings, jerk some tears.
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75War Horse is the best film of the year. The year, unfortunately, is 1942.
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75For certain movies, the adjectives "formulaic" and "predictable" are complimentary. War Horse is one of them.
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70Whatever its missteps, this is a film that kids, middle-aged adults and grandparents can all see -- together or separately -- and get something out of in their own ways. There are precious few films that fit this description today and hats off to Spielberg for making one.
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63Sumptuous and schmaltzy, Steven Spielberg's First World War drama, War Horse, is a strange beast of a film.
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63Take the theatrical flourish away from this story, however, and the story's thinness becomes apparent.
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60The result is a film that may stay in the mind's eye longer than it lingers in the heart.
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60Has the sweep of a classic John Ford movie, the sentiment of Frank Capra and a spirited steed named Joey who will steal your heart. The film itself is more difficult to love.
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60While the Tony-winning play based on the same book creates unexpected impact through strikingly inventive puppetry, Spielberg is at a disadvantage in employing such a literal approach. Not even animals as beautiful as these can substitute for human ingenuity and imagination.
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60This 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.
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50It's almost a great war movie in one direction, and almost a piece of irredeemable cheese in the other, and there you have it.
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Dec 22, 201150This may seem slick and sentimental, but beneath the surface is a film every bit as morbid as "A.I. Artificial Intelligence," which also used a nonhuman protagonist to contemplate human death on a mass scale.
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50Spielberg's typically emotive storytelling only comes to the fore in a few of the film's pivotal action scenes, a couple of which are truly spectacular and remind us only all too well of what this film might have been.
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50What ultimately hobbles War Horse is a two-pronged attack, with Spielberg's soft-sell producing an unfortunately dramatic flatness in almost every scene, while an 11th-hour scramble for picture-book catharsis doesn't seem to work either.
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40War Horse is a bland, bizarrely unimaginative piece of work. [2 Jan. 2012, p.79]
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40Since he's (Spielberg) a director largely incapable of understatement, War Horse is served up with a self-aggrandizing, distracting surplus of Norman Rockwell backlighting, aerial landscape shots designed to out-swoop David Lean's, and an aggravated sense of doggone wonderment amplified by the director's dependence on John Williams's bombastic score.
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40Director Steven Spielberg doesn't have a steady grip on War Horse's careening tone, but he'll be damned if there's not 15 minutes in there for everyone.