Popular reviews

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  Review by James (Schaffrillas) ★

  I feel like it's usually really reductive to say "that's two hours of my life I'm never gonna get back" about a movie

  But like

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  Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★½ 3

  Spielberg was one of the relative few I expected to be mostly consensus on, but revisiting this one completely blindsided me - the quote from Kubrick to Spielberg saying that the film should have been marketed as a drama is very perceptive, because as many have noted the film really isn't *that* funny (unless you have as genuinely deranged a sense of humour as Spielberg himself - which I can't necessarily deny) because for all the absurdity it's hard not to be cogent that this is likely how many average Americans actually behaved in the year 1941, and as such you can imagine why some people found it offensive. And in that sense it's actually kind of mean spirited given…

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  Review by Matt Singer ★½

  A useful reminder that even the best artists are capable of producing disasters under the right conditions.

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★

  "It's gonna be a long war."

  Spielberg's insanely bloated live action Looney Tune, a seemingly endless cacophony, as if "funniest" translated to "containing the most ostensibly comedic things". the determinedly exuberant tone feels entirely manufactured. but, almost exactly because of that, wow what a sharp, ugly, eerily prescient portrait of jingoistic hysteria immediately following a devastating terrorist attack.

  also contains some of the most amazing miniature sequences i've ever seen.

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  Review by Michael Offerosky ★★★★ 1

  Note: This is a review of the extended version

  Long considered a big bomb for big time director Steven Spielberg, Universal has just released a new blu-ray edition that may change peoples minds. Definitely worthy of a revisit, 1941 is a star packed screwball comedy about California types worried Japan is going to attack the mainland. There's a reason for that, the Japanese are off California's coast in a sub looking to destroy Hollywood. Lots of familiar faces pop up in here including Slim Pickens who plays Hollis Wood, a Christmas tree farmer. Pickens has some very funny scenes. Of course, it wouldn't be a late 70's/early 80's movie without Eddie Deezen. Tim Matheson is a serviceman who cannot fly…

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  Review by Josh Lewis ★★★ 4

  Spielberg goes Robert Zemeckis and John Landis mode and delivers a very strange, exhausting, and bombastic Hollywood analog cartoon object in service of juvenile American excess and jingoistic hysteria. As far as the actual content of its wartime satire goes this ranges from passively amusing "what a mess!" mayhem to pure conservative boomer fantasy nonsense (something he has in his own movies sometimes but so pronounced here I have to imagine that's some Milius' music I'm hearing), and Spielberg has a machinelike approach to gags that kinda prevents this from having the fully spontaneous freewheeling chaos it thinks it has. So I completely get anyone just stone-faced checking out but still... What a mess! You know? And the sheer technical commitment to it. Can't help but be a little impressed even during the annoying parts.

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  Review by Graham J ★★ 6

  I've watched 1941 so you don't have to.

  Spielbergs notoriously unfunny war 'comedy' aims for one gag every other second - which at just shy of 120 minutes is about 3,500 gags.

  I laughed two times. More of a 'hur' than a laugh when I think about it.

  People slip, trip, honk, scratch, shout, shoot, flirt, squeak and fight and none of it makes any sense and none of it is at all funny. It's an overblown try-hard. For a film to squeeze no comedy out of John Belushi, John Candy or Dan Aykroyd is clearly doing something very wrong. BUT.

  It looks great: Spielberg is clearly revelling in the excess of a bigger budget, but it just makes the…

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  Review by anna nomaly ★★

  Drawing influence from disaster movies, ensemble epics, and any number of WWII pictures, 1941 is more ambitious in scope and scale than most films ever dare to be. I would not call it a success—maybe 20% of its anarchic antics elicited laughter from me, and that’s a pretty low batting average for what is ostensibly a comedy—but in spite of that, I spent much of its bloated running time with a different kind of smile on my face, gazing upon one of Hollywood’s ultimate “blank check” projects, admiring how fully Spielberg committed to the grandeur of its Panavision photography and to the chaos of its practical effects. It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad war, and if nothing else, the production captures that spirit.

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  Review by Mr. DuLac ★ 9

  This has not been honorable...
  -Colonel Akiro Mitamura

  It's Steven Spielberg! There's no way this film can be as bad as people say! He made this smack dab in the middle of Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T.! People are probably just unfairly comparing it to those films and it just doesn't measure up. I mean it's Spielberg! Late 70s/Early 80s Spielberg! It can't possibly be THAT bad!

  It is though... it really is. I watched in awe as one joke would seemingly take so long to set up that by the time the punchline finally came you had actually already guessed it about 15 minutes earlier. It's not only one joke…

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  Review by CinemaJoe ★½ 1

  I think the commercials Crackle made me watch were better than this movie.

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★½ 1

  In which Steven Spielberg uses all of his Jaws/Close Encounters clout to unleash Gale/Zemeckis into unsuspecting America (or at least a version of Preminger's In Harm's Way, sort of). I get why people often dislike this one, given that it is not consistent funny enough, but Zemeckis/Gale script (with an assist from John Millius, a different type of right wing anarchist) central concept of WWII saving US from its own boredom has a good mix of distasteful and sharp satire that serves rather well as a chorus to Spielberg's perfectly choreography series of destructions. This often gets compared to It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, but the film it truly ressembles is Landis' The Blues Brothers which come out…

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  Review by Rafael "Parker!!" Jovine ★★ 6

  Action!: The Caps Of Mr. Spielberg

  Picture this: you are a director that after a decent road trip, a thrilling chase movie, you get the chance to film a movie that despite the one trillion production issues manages to not only become a hit but it turned a slow season as was the case of Summer into one of the most awaited and greatest of them all for cinema (2020 notwithstanding). Your film helped coin a term that about 40+ years still being used to not only define a season, but entire type of movie. Then you make one of the most beloved sci-fi films that arguably invented ringtones. You are literally the king of the f**king world. You can…