War Horse (Steven Spielberg, 2011)

Boy finds horse, boy loses horse, horse finds boy again. Meanwhile, in the background, several million Europeans kill each other. If this is a brutal reduction of Spielberg's attempt to relate man's inhumanity to man through man's inhumanity to animal, it's his own fault. The execution may be as impressive as ever in set pieces such as the cavalry charge or the panicked flight of the horse across the battlefield, but the story is chaff, with little more substance than a drawn-out Lassie film as the anthropomorphicised beastie brings nice people from all sides together while cartoonish villains scowl at them from the wings. Spielberg the director is getting to be ready for the knacker's yard on this evidence.

5/10