Saving Private Ryan

(DreamWorks)

There's no doubting the horror of Steven Spielberg's D-Day landing on Omaha Beach: the troops are butchered in a merciless hail of bullets, with blood splattering the camera lens and everything else. But that leads Spielberg to ponder the value of a single human life, and so he sends Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) and a picked, stereotyped band of seven out after Private Ryan (Matt Damon) after it's discovered Ryan's his family's last surviving son. Miller's squad roam through the chaos of no man's land, bumping into anecdotes ranging from the poignant and heartstopping to the predictable and pat. And there's a sentimental frame -- an old man tottering through the rows of white crosses at the present-day Normandy beachhead memorial -- that entombs the trauma to come in retrospective glory and mawkishness.