War Horse
Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures | Release Date: December 25, 2011 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
72
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 40 Critic Reviews
Positive:
29
Mixed:
11
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
60
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternDec 29, 2011
The result is a film that may stay in the mind's eye longer than it lingers in the heart. Read full review
60
Los Angeles TimesBetsy SharkeyDec 26, 2011
Has the sweep of a classic John Ford movie, the sentiment of Frank Capra and a spirited steed named Joey who will steal your heart. The film itself is more difficult to love. Read full review
60
New York Daily NewsElizabeth WeitzmanDec 22, 2011
While the Tony-winning play based on the same book creates unexpected impact through strikingly inventive puppetry, Spielberg is at a disadvantage in employing such a literal approach. Not even animals as beautiful as these can substitute for human ingenuity and imagination. Read full review
60
VarietyJustin ChangDec 15, 2011
This beautifully composed picture brings a robust physicality to tried-and-true source material, but falls short of the sustained narrative involvement and emotional drive its resolutely old-fashioned storytelling demands. Read full review
50
SalonAndrew O'HehirDec 26, 2011
It's almost a great war movie in one direction, and almost a piece of irredeemable cheese in the other, and there you have it. Read full review
50
Chicago ReaderBen SachsDec 22, 2011
This may seem slick and sentimental, but beneath the surface is a film every bit as morbid as "A.I. Artificial Intelligence," which also used a nonhuman protagonist to contemplate human death on a mass scale. Read full review
50
Austin ChronicleMarjorie BaumgartenDec 22, 2011
Spielberg's typically emotive storytelling only comes to the fore in a few of the film's pivotal action scenes, a couple of which are truly spectacular and remind us only all too well of what this film might have been. Read full review
50
Slant MagazineJaime N. ChristleyDec 21, 2011
What ultimately hobbles War Horse is a two-pronged attack, with Spielberg's soft-sell producing an unfortunately dramatic flatness in almost every scene, while an 11th-hour scramble for picture-book catharsis doesn't seem to work either. Read full review
40
The New YorkerDavid DenbyDec 27, 2011
War Horse is a bland, bizarrely unimaginative piece of work. [2 Jan. 2012, p.79]
40
Village VoiceJ. HobermanDec 20, 2011
Since he's (Spielberg) a director largely incapable of understatement, War Horse is served up with a self-aggrandizing, distracting surplus of Norman Rockwell backlighting, aerial landscape shots designed to out-swoop David Lean's, and an aggravated sense of doggone wonderment amplified by the director's dependence on John Williams's bombastic score. Read full review
40
Boxoffice MagazineAmy NicholsonDec 16, 2011
Director Steven Spielberg doesn't have a steady grip on War Horse's careening tone, but he'll be damned if there's not 15 minutes in there for everyone. Read full review
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