Kathleen Murphy writes:
Few directors possess Steven Spielberg's gift for imagining movie worlds with such dynamism and exhilarating cinematic precision. His Dickensian taste for tales of abandonment and reunion speaks to the lost child in all of us, defining the primal desire for home, in boy or man, alien or artificial intelligence, war or peace. But in some circles, Spielberg's storytelling has long been dissed for sentimentality of the calculating kind. Many resent and resist the masterly audacity of this director's stylistic embraces, dismissing them as manipulative and faux-naïve. To which I've almost always riposted, "Bah, humbug!"
But not this season. When it comes to War Horse, nearly every Spielbergian touch goes toxic. Like Dickens and D.W. Griffith, the artist who dreamed The Color Purple and A.I. has always been able to walk right up to the edge of sentimental sadism to harvest powerfully authentic emotion. But in this new, so-called family film, Spielberg's sense of balance has gone MIA. War Horse careens wildly from treacle to horror, from blatant artifice to hyper-realism, from one genre to another. Tonally jarring and structurally disjointed, it's a punishingly long and bumpy ride.
Continue reading at http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie-critic-reviews/war-horse/#Review_0
[[In-content Ad]]