For all the spectacle of thundering cavalry charges, muddy trenches and wartime love and loss, the current popular storytellers of the First World War skip over the conflict’s greatest moral drama by leaving out part of its cast of characters.
Sorry about this—a 10-best list dragging along in the wake of all the others, which began appearing around Halloween. And it isn’t even a nice round 10 in number. I could come up with only six movies this year. I have my excuses. [Pictured above, Werner Herzog, director of “Into the Abyss.”]
Boy gets horse. Boy loses horse. Boy (after many adventures, especially by the horse) is reunited with the animal. In terms of narrative, that’s all there is to “War Horse”—except to say that Steven Spielberg’s film is a lovely and touching movie, representing, among other things, a vast improvement on the extraordinarily successful novel and stage play.