This is a great American movie -- easily the most powerful film of the year.

| Aug 23, 2022

I didn't take a single note during the screening of Platoon: It's that engrossing, that overwhelming.

| Aug 23, 2022

It's a powerful, painful, must-see film -- an impassioned and riveting dispatch from the front that's at once a battle cry and a lamentation.

| Aug 23, 2022

Despite the effectiveness of some of its moments, one begins to wish this movie were headed somewhere. Sensitive, intimate performances on the part of every member of a large ensemble cast, however, are enough to keep one watching.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Aug 23, 2022

Platoon marks the channeling of a zealot's rant into artistry of a high caliber.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Aug 23, 2022

This is not a John Wayne war in which glory awaits the gung-ho crusader. There are no heroes, only survivors... The tension of instant death that Stone imparts in his script is accented by the taut camera work of cinematographer Robert Richardson.

| Aug 23, 2022

Platoon is brutal, vicious, surpassingly ugly -- in a word, realistic. It’s one of those movies that are hard to watch yet, impossible not to watch.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 23, 2022

Platoon is the best American combat movie since All Quiet on the Western Front, and may be the most realistic of all American war movies.

| Aug 23, 2022

The war movie is as established a genre as the Western, the Musical, the Thriller and the Women's Picture. Stone has artfully worked within it, and Berenger and Dafoe both give excellent performances.

| Aug 23, 2022

A political film from America just now would seem like a miracle, and this is not it. What it is, though, is some kind of expiation or exorcism, laid out with a kind of dramatic power that Stone gave us in Salvador.

| Aug 22, 2022

For all its surface bravura, Platoon proves a thinly-conceived film thickened out with quantities of visual and visceral rhetoric and war-is-hell philosophizing.

| Aug 22, 2022

Platoon is the best American (albeit British-financed) film about Vietnam. Others have had their virtues, but this one, despite its flaws, gets its act together with greater artistry and passion.

| Aug 22, 2022

This is the best movie so far about the Vietnam war, and probably one of the best about any war. I can't remember a film about war that has such an unadorned and ferocious sense of reality.

| Aug 22, 2022

Platoon evokes Vietnam more intensely than any previous film, and at the same time drowns it in all the particularities, infused by boredom, exhaustion, terror, of what it meant to fight there.

| Aug 22, 2022

Platoon captures the crazy, adrenalin-rush chaos of battle better than any movie has done before. Stone is ruthless in his deglamorization of war, but not at the expense of the men who fought there.

| Aug 18, 2022

At heart, Platoon is a very conventional picture. That's what's good about it (it's a supremely well-crafted classical-style war movie), and also why it's ultimately a little unsatisfying.

| Aug 16, 2022

[Oliver Stone] offers no context or overview -- surely by now none is necessary -- but what he does provide is immediacy and authenticity; to go any deeper into the belly of the militaristic beast than Platoon plunges the audience is probably impossible.

| Aug 16, 2022

Although Platoon is not the easiest film to watch, it is one of the best at reminding us that the cinema is not always interested in evading or distorting history. Sometimes it tells the truth.

| Apr 26, 2018

This film is an act of courage. Stone, the gutsy writer-director, records in a devastating barrage of images the relentless horror and the senseless carnage experienced by far too many Americans in Vietnam.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 22, 2015

Stone's strongest suit, however, isn't so much realism as it is his way of blending immediacy and insight.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 22, 2015