Saving Private Ryan Reviews
Top CriticNo 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.
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.
The greatest Steven Spielberg movie since the last great one? Sure.
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| Original Score: 3/4
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.
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| Original Score: 4/5
For 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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| Original Score: 4/4
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.
| Original Score: 5/5
Feels like the first truly honest attempt to deal with the horrors of combat - and the terrible responsibility shared by all survivors.
For all the care and thoughtfulness that follow in the story, I never could shake the impression that all I was watching was every other war film Spielberg had ever seen.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
Gripping and satisfying in a way that no mere summer event movie could ever be.
Launches and climaxes with two of the greatest extended battle sequences ever put on film.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Using 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.
As compelling, intimate and brutally realistic an account of men at war as you've ever seen.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Spielberg has captured the hair-trigger instability of modern combat.
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| Original Score: A
Spielberg has taken us back to basics -- back to art, back to amazement at the film medium itself.
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.
Spielberg opens in flashback with a half-hour set piece brilliant enough to climax any other masterpiece.
| Original Score: 4/4
