It's an adventure film as refreshing in content and style as The Deer Hunter was horrifyingly realistic and Apocalypse Now was terrifyingly philosophical.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 27, 2020

But in the end, for a film that pretends to be anti-war, it comes across as ambiguous, which isn't anything new in the work of Samuel Fuller. [Full Review in Spanish]

| Aug 15, 2019

... if you want a World War II story from a real vet's perspective, Sam Fuller is still the man and The Big Red One, drawn from his own war experiences, is the film

| Apr 12, 2009

It's a terrific war yarn, a picture of palpable raw power which manages both Intense intimacy and great scope at the same time.

| Mar 26, 2009

Personal observation bleeds out of every scene, and somehow it feels like a true story in a way that most war movies can't achieve.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Sep 12, 2007

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 22, 2006

... displays both raw power and the hint of war's brutality.

| Original Score: B | Oct 2, 2006

Visually and philosophically, it's Fuller's equivalent of Kurosawa's Kagemusha, although Fuller's film is more complex, more absurd and more haunted.

| Jun 24, 2006

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 4, 2005

Although these are the stock characters of war drama - the sage, grizzled Sarge, the farm boy, the street kid, the nice guy who doesn't want to kill anyone and the witness - Fuller's are particularly credible ordinary people.

| Original Score: 5/5 | May 11, 2005

meant to be the culmination of a life's work... It didn't come to pass.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | May 10, 2005

The cast smartly underplays things, with Marvin being as charismatic as usual playing a man of few words. And Hamill, an actor given to over-the-top outbursts, reins it in here; this may be his best big-screen performance.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 18, 2005

These places were where Fuller himself served during the war, and he imbues these stories with the same gritty detail he probably delivered telling them over a beer.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 18, 2005

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 14, 2005

Schickel's painstaking work elevates The Big Red One into the pantheon of the all-time great war films and gives it a fullness that the original only suggested.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 21, 2005

Fuller went a step further, baring not only his soul but the wartime scars inflicted upon it. For all its merits, the 1980 version of the film denied audiences that connection. The new version both restores and reaffirms it.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 21, 2005

Fuller wrote and directed The Big Red One with a reporter's respect for detail and a humanist's respect for the moments that shape lives.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 20, 2005

'The Reconstruction,' which clocks in at 2 hours, 43 minutes, with not a single extraneous frame, elevates the work from a robust genre film to a full-blown epic.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 20, 2005

To see this seamless 'reconstruction' -- consisting of some 15 entirely new sequences as well as augmentations to 23 others -- is to behold a masterpiece revealed.

| Jan 20, 2005

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 5, 2005