Pretty good, but has some definite flaws. Spoilers.

Rating: 7/10 (19 June 2001)

First of all, the framing device for the movie is not just sappy but downright manipulative and quite frankly impossible. Anytime you frame a flashback like that, you have to stay (mostly) within that characters frame of reference (I can't think of a single example that stays 100% in first person--it's just not possible or practical). How can Ryan look back in time on someone else's life, while he's somewhere else? I certainly doubt that Hanks could have told him his life story so quickly. Spielberg's no idiot, so he knows that this isn't possible, which brings us back to the manipulation factor and the chance to have a "surprise ending" in the worst possible sense. I'd like to think Spielberg was trying to emulate the experience of war (and not knowing who's going to live or who's going to die) by making the old cliches of war movies (that the hero will live) work for him. Because Spielberg makes us believe that Hanks' character isn't going to die (we think he's the old man), then supposedly we'll be more shocked and have more emotions when he is killed, as if we were experiencing war in real-time. For me this didn't work, because by Bull-S*** alarm started blaring. It has a high intolerance for lies, and that is pretty much what the framing device does. It promises one thing, but gives just the opposite.
If Spielberg had not included the framing device, I would have given the movie a 9/10 instead of 7/10. Why he felt he needed one, I don't know, since, even beyond my other complaints, the framing device doesn't add anything to the movie that couldn't have been done (and better) while we were still in 1945.
By the way, did they bury all of our dead in France in that graveyard? I thought that one was for those who died on the beach that first day (but I'm not sure). Hanks was pretty far in by the time he died.
One final point: the "evil", backstabbing German captive thing worked all right as propaganda (and even better as a lesson in mob violence) back when Hitchcock directed his extraordinary Lifeboat in 1944(?), but when stolen and put in Private Ryan, it just seemed like a plot device--he would just as likely have been grateful for being spared. Or, as a hypothetical situation in which Germany invaded America, it is just as likely that an American would do exactly the same thing as the German. At least in Lifeboat, the issue is thoroughly explored, while Private Ryan uses it merely to show how the weak-willed, peace-loving, prototype-hippie linguist learns that killing people in war is necessary. Whatever happened to the less pro-active attitude from Catch-22?