Reviews
The Daily Mail
Chris Tookey
"Spielberg wastes no opportunity to pummel our tearducts. He doesn’t do understatement, but the upside is he’s not afraid to be emotive, and reach out to audiences of all ages. His tale is unashamedly manipulative - corny, at times - but storytelling drive, fine acting and gorgeous cinematography carry us through."
13/01/2012
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Empire Magazine
Ian Freer
"In the uncertainty of recession, a simple story of fortitude in friendship filled with that most unfashionable of feelings — hope — might just resonate. The vehemence of the film’s huge-hearted sincerity might not square with the flip irony of the day. But what wins out in the end, as the film draws to a close under a Gone With The Wind sky, is that Spielberg means every word of it."
09/01/2012
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The Evening Standard
Derek Malcolm
"The lesson seems to be that unthinking humankind should think again about treating animals such as the brave and faithful Joey in such a shoddy fashion. But it's not like Spielberg to take a pessimist's view for long and we end on a note that suggests all is well in even the most imperfect of worlds. The sentimentalist triumphs - who was daft enough to think he wouldn't? - but, let's face it, he's only going the same route as the book, after all."
13/01/2012
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The Daily Telegraph
Robbie Collin
"War Horse is no Gone With The Wind, but it’s still worth celebrating. This is filmmaking on a grand scale, bound by a grand vision, bolstered by grand performances and swept along by a grand old John Williams soundtrack. There’s not quite something for everyone, but the cynics can trot on: there’s something for everyone else. "
12/01/2012
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Total Film
James Mottram
"If there were an Oscar for horse wrangling, this film would win hooves down – Spielberg wisely eschews digital trickery wherever possible, which lends the story a genuinely old-fashioned feel."
22/12/2011
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The Independent on Sunday
Jonathan Romney
"War Horse is flawed for sure, but it contains more brio, more surprises, and – dare I say it – more sheer cinema than you might expect.
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15/01/2012
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The Observer
Philip French
"Directed by Spielberg in his most self-consciously epic manner ... War is one of Spielberg's obsessions and he seems to have engraved on his heart Wilfred Owen's celebrated declaration: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."
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15/01/2012
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The Sunday Times
Cosmo Landesman
"For all its cinematic stylisation, it’s rooted in realism and has to obey its rules. Yet Spielberg’s Joey is so incredibly human, it’s amazing he doesn’t pen a series of antiwar poems and become the Siegfried Sassoon of the equestrian set.
"
15/01/2012
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Time Magazine
Richard Corliss
"Spielberg has always hated killing people off in his movies, even his war films ... So War Horse is a World War I movie about an interspecies devotion that survives four years of devastation. It’s as if the goal of the Allies was not to defeat Germany but to save Joey and Albie."
22/12/2011
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Time Out
Dave Calhoun
"We spend much of the rest of this harmless, conventional adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s novel seeking – even aching for – the real world amid the artifice."
09/01/2012
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The New Yorker
David Benby
"Apart from the battle scenes, much of the movie has the feeling of late-fifties family entertainment—it’s leisurely, sentimental, and overly explicit. There are village rowdies and determined, plainspoken women; there is a troublesome goose that nips at men’s trousers."
02/01/2012
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The New York Times
A. O. Scott
"Allow your sped-up, modern, movie-going metabolism, accelerated by a diet of frantic digital confections — including Mr. Spielberg’s just-released “Adventures of Tintin” — to calm down a bit. Suppress your instinctive impatience, quiet the snarky voice in your head and allow yourself to recall, or perhaps to discover, the deep pleasures of sincerity. "
22/12/2011
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The Los Angeles Times
Betsy Sharkey
"There is great beauty in "War Horse," great power in the emotional journey for both boy and beast, if only Spielberg had trusted that we would be able to read between the lines."
23/12/2011
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Screen
Brent Simon
"Screenwriters Richard Curtis and Lee Hall, working from Michael Morpurgo’s novel, get plenty right in the period detail, but never find a way to make a dramatic throughline really stick, and when the film goes to war its grip loosens considerably."
16/12/2011
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The Scotsman
Alistair Harkness
"The everything-is-achievable nature of modern big-budget filmmaking, [however,] ensures that Steven Spielberg’s film version is already at a disadvantage: in choosing to tell the story straight, there’s really no way to disguise its silliness on the big screen – except, that is, by cranking up the melodrama, layering on the sentimentality, exploiting its epic sweep and hoping that the resulting false sense of they-don’t-make-them-like-that-anymore nostalgia will act like blinkers."
12/01/2012
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The Guardian
Peter Bradshaw
"I can only agree with those many bloggers pointing out that Curtis, in co-writing the final Blackadder episode on TV, set on the Western Front, once created a genuinely brilliant and passionate first world war drama. This isn't in the same league ... this War Horse is a pre-packaged brand, rather than a movie."
12/01/2012
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The Independent
Anthony Quinn
"Nearly every frame of it had me clenched in unhappy resistance. Neigh, neigh, and thrice neigh! ... A quite flimsy play, adapted from the novel by Michael Morpurgo, it is redeemed by the magical coup de theatre of a puppet horse ... Spielberg, attempting to translate the story to the screen, drops this wonderful mechanism for an actual horse, losing both the theatrical majesty of the creature and the storybook quality of the tale. "
13/01/2012
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The Times
Kevin Maher
"A movie that’s essentially hollow at its centre, occasionally spectacular round the edges, and drenched with phoney sentiment everywhere else."
13/01/2012
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The Financial Times
Nigel Andrews
"Spielberg once made Duel and Jaws. He still had an artist’s sharpness and appetite for danger in Schindler’s List. In War Horse the talent is banalised beyond recognition. This is a sentimental, fulsome, platitudinous yahooing of novelist Michael Morpurgo’s equine odyssey ... Spielberg gives us anodyne scripting, overcooked visuals and a non-stop chasing after catchpenny rapture and catharsis."
12/01/2012
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