O Resgate do Soldado Ryan

[Saving Private Ryan] accomplishes something I had been taught was most difficult -- making an action-filled anti-war film or, at least, one that doesn't in some way glorify or lie about combat.

The cast functions as an effective and believable unit. And Hanks gives a strong, increasingly solemn performance as its mysterious leader.

Anyone who would like to know what superb filmmaking is all about need look no further than this overpowering movie.

By now we expect this level of performance and narrative competence from a Spielberg film. But what makes Saving Private Ryan a watershed is its emotional maturity.

The visual masterwork finds Spielberg atop his craft, weaving heart-pounding action and gut-wrenching emotion that will leave viewers silently shaken... If words occasionally fail the picture, the images speak indelible volumes.

Saving Private Ryan is a masterpiece. It cements Steven Spielberg's reputation as one of the seminal filmmakers of the era.

The film is directed by Steven Spielberg, and breaks new ground in content and style. It merges some of the most realistically disturbing battle footage ever included in a feature film with a touching human story.

If Steven Spielberg's emotional intelligence matched his visual genius, his harrowing, passionately felt and honorably flawed new film might qualify for one of the greatest American movies ever made about World War II.

Spielberg puts us through the hair-trigger terrors of combat in a way no other filmmaker has ever dared, and yet there's a gentleness to his enterprise. He's interested in the humaneness that comes through the horror.

Spielberg accomplishes these goals with a technical virtuosity that no other director, arguably in the history of the cinema, can even approach.

Saving Private Ryan is the war movie to end all war movies. It's the ultimate combat film, far outdistancing what until now had been the genre's World War II classics.

Dramatic lapses notwithstanding, Saving Private Ryan goes beyond technical dazzlement to put a new, indelibly terrible face on war.

Calling it the greatest war movie ever made does a disservice to other, equally worthwhile, lower-profile films. But it's still an excellent movie, as effective in battle scenes as it is in that of soldiers ruminating on an Edith Piaf song.

What Steven Spielberg has accomplished in Saving Private Ryan is to make violence terrible again. Nothing in the movie's melodramatic narrative can diminish the shocking immediacy of its combat scenes.

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.

Spielberg goes a long, long way toward overcoming his tendencies toward the shallow, but the visceral punch of his not-quite-masterful film is softened by an almost neurotic slickness that keeps getting in the way of the [issues it raises].

Spielberg obviously decided that blood and guts meant just that, and so he arranged his violence into a semblance of pure disorder. The illusion holds, complete with severed limbs and wellsprings of blood, and it feels honorable.

The great Hollywood battle films have told us repeatedly that war is hell. Saving Private Ryan, more than any other, is the one that shows it.

Saving Private Ryan is Steven Spielberg's best war film and one of the two or three best movies the director has made.

War may be a faceless affair, but war movies shouldn't be.