All Critics (95)
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Top Critics (20)
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Fresh (96)
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DVD (44)
No further commentary is needed when the raw brutality of combat is presented as indelibly as it is here.
I found it tediously manipulative despite its Herculean energy.
The greatest Steven Spielberg movie since the last great one? Sure.
A powerful and impressive milestone in the realistic depiction of combat, Saving Private Ryan is as much an experience we live through as a film we watch on screen.
Saving Private Ryan is not a film that one takes pleasure in, or even enjoys in the usual sense, but rather, it's a movie that elicits a hushed admiration and an uneasy appreciation.
A 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.
Thanks to Hanks, and Spielberg's technical finesse, this develops into a powerful and potent portrayal of men at war, and those opening 20 minutes are worth the price of entry alone.
Bloody, tragic war epic doesn't hold back.
The back of the box calls is "the movie that helped the world to remember," but Saving Private Ryan still suffers from a forgettable second act.
What, asks the film, is the worth of a single human soul? (Blu-ray Edition)
It deserved all the honors it received, looks and sounds great on Blu-ray, and safely remains among the best war movies of all time.
Saving Private Ryan set a new benchmark for realism in WWII films, and defined war movies for a generation. A film of scope and vision rarely experienced, its award-winning cinematography and sound editing helped convey the blood-chilling images of
Private Ryan resembles the director's other so-called mature efforts by putting a positive spin on unspeakable horrors.
Violent, harrowing, and horrific; you bet. This is not a movie to take your children to see, or even a date. And it's definitely not worth seeing alone. How the ratings board gave this movie an "R" rating is a mystery. Well, maybe not.
I personally have never fought in a war before but I would go out on a limb and say that the first twenty minutes of the film may be the most realistic war scene I have seen.
It's forty minutes of steely violence and two hours of cliche-ridden flab.
Why did Spielberg make it? He wants us to imagine we can feel the terror of being there, but does that make us any wiser about this or any other conflict? Probably not.
Saving Private Ryan is an incredible movie, a near-masterpiece.
The opening 30 minutes are so devastating that much of what follows ends up feeling anticlimactic. Good, but overrated.
The movie epitomizes the paradox of all great filmmaking: It's a thrillingly violent war drama about an unbearably painful subject.
Neither wholly condemning war, nor spouting patriotism, Spielberg shows us the price we pay.
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