Saving Private Ryan is Steven Spielberg’s best war film and one of the two or three best movies the director has made.
Saving Private Ryan is a masterpiece. It cements Steven Spielberg’s reputation as one of the seminal filmmakers of the era.
The cast functions as an effective and believable unit. And Hanks gives a strong, increasingly solemn performance as its mysterious leader.
Despite nearly six decades of filmmakers trying to come to grips with [World War II, Saving Private Ryan] feels like the first truly honest attempt...
[Saving Private Ryan] accomplishes something I had been taught was most difficult – making an action-filled anti-war film or, at least, o...
Steven Spielberg’s film is not perfect: it plays its strongest card first, the middle section is slightly uneven, and there are sallies into...
Salon.com January 1, 2000 Using the overpowering techniques of modern film, Steven Spielberg has cut through the glory-tinged gauze that shrouds World War II to reveal its b...
This is an important film that deconstructs war machines into separate, frightened men as it so likely was.
Spielberg accomplishes these goals with a technical virtuosity that no other director, arguably in the history of the cinema, can even approach.
The film is directed by Steven Spielberg, and breaks new ground in content and style. It merges some of the most realistically disturbing battle fo...
The visual masterwork finds Spielberg atop his craft, weaving heart-pounding action and gut-wrenching emotion that will leave viewers silently shak...
Austin Chronicle January 1, 2000 A bitter, bloody masterpiece with adrenalized emotions and hyper-realized images.
Washington Post August 2, 2013 Searing, heartbreaking, so intense it turns your body into a single tube of clenched muscle, this is simply the greatest war movie ever made...
The result, I am sorry to say, is that Saving Private Ryan seems almost banal in its achievement, a film that sacrifices humanity for technical wiz...
A powerful and impressive milestone in the realistic depiction of combat, Saving Private Ryan is as much an experience we live through as a fi...
Washington Post August 2, 2013 Spielberg goes a long, long way toward overcoming his tendencies toward the shallow, but the visceral punch of his not-quite-masterful film is...
Launches and climaxes with two of the greatest extended battle sequences ever put on film.
RogerEbert.com January 1, 2000 A powerful experience.
War may be a faceless affair, but war movies shouldn’t be.
Chicago Reader January 1, 2000 It has a few pretty good action moments, a lot of spilled guts, a few moments of drama that don’t seem phony or hollow, some fairly stra...
Baltimore Sun August 2, 2013 By now we expect this level of performance and narrative competence from a Spielberg film. But what makes Saving Private Ryan a watershed is i...
I found it tediously manipulative despite its Herculean energy.
ReelViews January 1, 2000 For those who are willing to brave the movie’s shocking and unforgettable images, Saving Private Ryan offers a singular motion picture e...
L.A. Weekly August 19, 2014 If Steven Spielberg’s emotional intelligence matched his visual genius, his harrowing, passionately felt and honorably flawed new film might...
Decent Films July 24, 1998 The remaining battle scenes are riveting, and in war as nowhere else difficult choices can have shattering consequences.
Anyone who would like to know what superb filmmaking is all about need look no further than this overpowering movie.
The Guardian June 6, 2019 An old-fashioned war picture to rule them all – gripping, utterly uncynical, with viscerally convincing and audacious battle sequences.
sfweekly.com August 19, 2014 Spielberg puts us through the hair-trigger terrors of combat in a way no other filmmaker has ever dared, and yet there’s a gentlene...
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