Spielberg is mindful of the family audience, but still captures the misery of trench combat.

| Nov 16, 2022

This is always emotionally obvious, as well as consistently predictable. Something important has been lost in translation that cannot be compensated for by realism or pictorial beauty.

| Aug 31, 2018

[Not] entirely satisfying … Somehow, though, the sum of the parts are more than the whole … It is a film of a kind we don't see any more, that it would be good to see more of.

| Original Score: B+ | Feb 22, 2012

If any movie released in 2011 screams, "Oscar Bait!," louder than Steve Spielberg's War Horse than I haven't seen it.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 27, 2012

War Horse is a pre-packaged brand, rather than a movie.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 12, 2012

We are marched through cloying kidult rhetoric for 150 minutes, ending with the inevitable pull on our hankie pocket, as wheedling as a beggar pulling on our change pocket. The only difference: the beggar is more deserving.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Jan 12, 2012

This is a soaring, sprawling epic that harks back to the dream-big visionaries of old Hollywood: John Ford, David Lean, David O. Selznick.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 12, 2012

Heavy-handed melodrama with flashes of brilliance.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 12, 2012

Spielberg still manages to surprise and impress.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 10, 2012

War Horse is bold, exquisite family filmmaking in the grandest Hollywood tradition.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 9, 2012

The trouble here is not so much that Spielberg's film staunchly insists on finding a happy ending even in the calamity of the First World War, but that he slathers it on so thick and leaves so soft an impression.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 6, 2012

The material sometimes feels oversugared, though it's also guaranteed to raise a lump in your throat.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 5, 2012

Tthe images have what I can only describe as a wonderful texture. They also have intense color: deep gemlike greens and reds, with black shadows out of an old master painting.

| Dec 31, 2011

We never ask why the production is devoted to an animal while ten million men are dying, but when Spielberg does the story realistically, it seems trivial, even a little daft.

| Dec 30, 2011

Amid the incomprehensible slaughter, it's a horse that reminds these warriors of their humanity.

| Dec 30, 2011

A film that may stay in the mind's eye longer than it lingers in the heart.

Full Review | Dec 30, 2011

It is a work by a master, but it is not a masterpiece.

| Original Score: B | Dec 29, 2011

War Horse is the law of diminishing returns in action.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Dec 26, 2011

It's almost a great war movie in one direction, and almost a piece of irredeemable cheese in the other, and there you have it.

| Dec 26, 2011

Because the material itself is absorbing, and inherently emotional, and because it's a handsome production, War Horse is a very watchable.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.1/2 | Dec 24, 2011