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| SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (1998) - R
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ReviewScore: 89 out of 100
SBD Star Rating:
by Lew Irwin
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Few films in recent years have been extolled by critics with such passion as Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. Consider Stephen Hunter's comments in today's (Friday) Washington Post: "Searing, heartbreaking, so intense it turns your body into a single tube of clenched muscle, this is simply the greatest war movie ever made, and one of the great American movies." Janet Maslin in the New York Times: "This film simply looks at war as if war had not been looked at before." And she, too, calls it "the finest war movie of our time." Philip Wuntch in the Dallas Morning News says that despite the epic battleground scope of the film, it is "the most intimate of human dramas. Even in a crowded theater, even clinging to the hand of your beloved, you'll feel like you're the only one in the audience." Many of the reviewers compare the film with war movies of the past -- as does Jay Carr in the Boston Globe, who concludes: "Saving Private Ryan is a great film. It takes us as close as you can get -- or would want to get -- to the consuming inferno that is war. It is, finally, a movie designed to remind us that war is not a movie." But Desmond Ryan of the Philadelphia Inquirer observes, "Anyone who would like to know what superb filmmaking is all about need look no further than this overpowering movie." Rod Dreher in the New York Post indicates what the studio is braving as it releases such a film during the height of a mindless movie season, when he writes that it is "of such cyclonic visual and emotional power, of such dazzling virtuosity and shattering humanity, that it is difficult to endure, yet alone describe. Savagely beautiful and savagely true, Saving Private Ryan is an excruciating masterpiece." Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times is one of the few critics who faults what he calls "niggling weaknesses" in the film's script, yet even he writes that Saving Private Ryan "is as much an experience we live through as a film we watch on screen." |
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