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.

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.

Entertainment Weekly by Chris Nashawaty

Stalingrad is a 3-D epic that's one-dimensional.

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.

Time Out by Joshua Rothkopf

Hollywood does this too; truth be told, Russia’s high-tech whitewash goes down smooth like vodka.

Total Film

A solid enough war flick, but Spielberg doesn’t have too much to worry about yet.

The Telegraph by Tim Robey

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.

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.

Slant Magazine by Drew Hunt

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.

Variety by Jay Weissberg

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.