Meticulous Civil War story runs a little long.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 24, 2010

Everybody is so good and decent that it's hard to tell where the generals leave off and the gods start.

| Original Score: C- | Oct 29, 2008

Maxwell continues his textbook emphasis on military maneuvers, but despite literally thousands of Civil War reenactors recruited for the film, the wide-screen canvas fails to map the tactics or evoke the terror of battle.

| Feb 27, 2007

The big battles impress, but become somewhat samey. Part Three is threatened.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 30, 2006

The procession of monotonous, oddly gore-free battles breaks frequently for bloated speechifying.

| Jun 24, 2006

Every shot is fired in sorrow, and there are no villains - except, of course, for the politicians, who remain safely out of the frame.

| Oct 17, 2003

Incredibly boring and badly acted.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Jul 8, 2003

Swapping politics for crass platitudes, Gods and Generals is a monumental folly.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Jun 24, 2003

Full of windy speeches about honor, god, fealty, and so on, the movie comes to a literal standstill whenever one of these noble addresses is about to be delivered.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Mar 10, 2003

As remote and unyielding as an untouched textbook, often so much so that its academic fanaticism causes it to resemble a spectacular parody of daytime television's breathy, on-the-fly awkwardness.

| Feb 24, 2003

Four hours including the intermission, I felt like I was seeing the Civil War in real time for awhile there.

Full Review | Feb 24, 2003

It was made strictly by and for Civil War buffs who insist that every pious speech and every skirmish is worthy of filming, even if the end result suffers from serious battle fatigue.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 21, 2003

A movie that crams in so many faces, chronological details and endlessly ham-handed stretches of dialogue that the impact of the legitimately moving segments is considerably diminished.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 21, 2003

It's a plodding, episodic film, reverent and sanctimonious, and its pro-Southern viewpoint -- a time-honored Hollywood tendency -- makes Gone With the Wind look like a Northern polemic.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Feb 21, 2003

What the filmmakers fail to recognize is that history on the page is quite different from what it needs to be onscreen, namely alive and visceral.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4 | Feb 21, 2003

It may not be the worst war epic ever made -- that probably would be Battlefield Earth -- but it's darn close to being an unqualified disaster of that magnitude.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Feb 21, 2003

A shameless apologia for the Confederacy as a divinely inspired crusade for faith, home and slave labor.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Feb 21, 2003

An inert pageant of waxen figures that fails completely as drama even as it insults the sensibilities of anyone not clinging to rosy memories of the slave-era South.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Feb 21, 2003

A viewing of this epic is likely to leave all but the geekiest Civil War buffs feeling as itchy and as restless as if they themselves were wearing woolen underwear -- soggy, unwashed, vintage 1860s, government-issue woolen underwear.

| Feb 21, 2003

One doesn't come away from it with any sense of what the victory cost in human terms or what it's like to face a rank of men shooting at you, or to jam a bayonet into somebody's guts or have one jammed into your guts.

| Feb 21, 2003