Excellent World War II drama

Rating: 8/10 (12 September 2001)

Trenchant World War II drama about an army captain (Tom Hanks) assigned to take his squad of seven men into France, locate a private whose three brothers have been killed in combat and let him go home. Conventional elements in the script are balanced by a genuinely complex examination of heroism in the field and over powered by the most realistic, relentlessy harrowing battle footage ever committed to a fiction film.