60
A solid enough war flick, but Spielberg doesn’t have too much to worry about yet.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
67
Entertainment Weekly by Chris Nashawaty
Stalingrad is a 3-D epic that's one-dimensional.
70
The Hollywood Reporter by Deborah Young
It is a strange cross-breed between an old-fashioned WWII epic full of genre cliches and a modern update whose meticulous historical recreation is frighteningly real.
38
Its blind reverence toward the Russian mythos is so grandiose that it becomes impossible to rescue it from self-importance, and as such President Putin would likely give it two big thumbs up.
30
Assaults are filmed in ubiquitous slow-mo to better register the way bodies are thrown into the air. It’s all rather confusing, actually, since the monochromatic tonalities and weak script, lacking in any comprehensible battle strategy, tend to meld the two sides together.
60
Hollywood does this too; truth be told, Russia’s high-tech whitewash goes down smooth like vodka.
63
McClatchy-Tribune News Service by Roger Moore
In detail and combat spectacle, Stalingrad is hard to beat. And whatever its failings, one can’t help but be curious about a story as connected to national identity as this one, a film that like today’s Russia, feels more Soviet than Russian.
70
Village Voice by Stephanie Zacharek
Lush with feeling that could easily be mistaken for sentimentality, Stalingrad is more like a 19th-century novel than a 21st-century blockbuster. It's theatrical and intense, sometimes in an overbearing way, but it's never boring.
40
The macho showmanship of director Fyodor Bondarchuk, wedded to such a facile script, turns this undeniably impressive megaproduction into a behemoth you mainly want to cower from.
40
Time Out London by Tom Huddleston
When the best one can say about a movie is that it’s pyrotechnically impressive, something important is missing. In this case it’s tension, originality and memorable characters.