War Horse
Directed by: Steven Spielberg
Written by: Lee Hall and Richard Curtis (screenplay), Michael Morpurgo (novel)
Starring: Jeremy Irvine, Peter Mullan, Emily Watson and Niels Arestrup

In his second movie of 2011 (released only a few days after The Adventures of Tintin), Steven Spielberg has made one of the most quietly beautiful films of the year and his career.  War Horse may lack the grand narrative spectacle that follows much of his other work, Tintin included, but its imagery is truly captivating.

From the pensive beginning and ending on the same British farm to the desecrated terrain of World War I battlefields, Spielberg films War Horse with the kind of steady hand that only experience can bring.  Instead of embracing new motion capture animation technology like he did with Tintin, here he meticulously recreates explosive battles without using special effects.  As if that weren’t enough, he has placed a horse at the center of his story, and it does not talk like it might in an animated film.

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