Generally favorable reviews - based on 39 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 32 out of 39
  2. Negative: 0 out of 39
  1. Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers does a most difficult and brave thing and does it brilliantly. It is a movie about a concept. Not just any concept but the shop-worn and often wrong-headed idea of "heroism."
  2. 100
  3. Reviewed by: Ken Fox
    This is a powerful, important and, in the end, profoundly poignant movie dedicated to the lives of men and women who fight wars and shoulder the burden of becoming "heroes" to help the rest of us make sense of what remains incomprehensible.
  4. Reviewed by: Claudia Puig
    It is one of the year's best films and perhaps the finest modern film about World War II.
  5. 100
  6. Reviewed by: Scott Foundas
    To an extent, Flags of Our Fathers is to the WWII movie what Eastwood's Unforgiven was to the western -- a stripping-away of mythology until only a harsher, uncomfortable reality remains.
  7. 100
  8. Reviewed by: Richard Corliss
    Clint Eastwood has crafted a bold and meticulous epic.
  9. 100
    Stands with the best movies of this young century and the old one that preceded it: It's passionate, honest, unflinching, gripping, and it pays respects. The flag raising on Iwo might have indeed become a pseudo-event as it was processed for goals, but there was nothing pseudo about the courage of the men who did it.
  10. The picture is spectacular.
  11. 91
    Like "Private Ryan" and "Band of Brothers," it fills in our sketchy impression of that famously reticent generation of ordinary young men who were asked by a frightened world to accomplish an extraordinary feat. In this case, the homage takes the form not of a photograph or a statue but of a deeper, more sympathetic understanding of their experience. A finer tribute is hard to imagine.
  14. Reviewed by: David Ansen
    An epic both raw and contemplative, is neither a flag-waving war movie nor a debunking.
  15. Reviewed by: Todd McCarthy
    Ambitiously tackling his biggest canvas to date, Clint Eastwood continues to defy and triumph over the customary expectations for a film career in Flags of Our Fathers.
  16. 88
    A film of awesome power and blistering provocation.
  17. Eastwood's sepia-toned combat scenes are as graphic, if not quite as jolting, as those in "Ryan." And without a Tom Hanks-size star in the cast, "Flags" is not likely to do "Ryan's" blockbuster business. But "Flags," a true story directed by someone with far more faith in the audience's ability to empathize, is the better movie.
  18. Eastwood has made an honorable movie about honor, but the naivete of the conception - which some will call purity - keeps "Flags" at arm's length from greatness.
  19. Reviewed by: Ian Nathan
    Not as emotional as "Million Dollar Baby," nor as astounding as "Saving Private Ryan," but Eastwood remains the most astringent American filmmaker around.
  20. 80
    The flaws in Flags of Our Fathers are at least partly attributable to Eastwood's attempts to do too much. Still, even when he overreaches, he somehow hits the mark.
  22. Reviewed by: Joanne Kaufman
    The cheap perfume of sentimentality wafts through the closing moments of Flags of Our Fathers. It's all the more noticeable for having been avoided so well and so long. Mr. Eastwood knows that sort of thing doesn't mix with the stench of war.
  23. 80
  24. In the film, the music, beginning with a muted a cappella ballad, is from Eastwood himself.
  25. 75
    Character development is of secondary importance to narrative and theme. As a result, we never really get to know any of the film's protagonists.
  27. The trouble is, he's preaching to the choir -- or, at least, to a culture, profoundly influenced by Tom Brokaw's "The Greatest Generation" and Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan," that has already absorbed the lesson that ''the Good War,'' while it may have been noble, was never less than hell.
  28. 67
    What begins as a sophisticated meditation on the meaning of heroism gradually slumps into leaden repetition in the second half, as the point gets watered down and belabored. After such provocative beginnings, the film finally, dutifully raises its hand in salute.
  29. There's a tremendous amount of material here, and the script covers too much of it, often confusingly.
  30. 63
    An ambitious, powerful, somber picture, but it never quite moves you the way it should.
  31. Reviewed by: Ty Burr
    You come out of the theater impressed by the scope of Eastwood's reach and frustrated by how little remains in his grasp. As gifted as this filmmaker is, this isn't the sort of thing he does best.
  32. Eastwood keeps retracing the same pattern, intercutting from the battlefield to the bond circuit, from the appalling chaos where no one feels heroic to the catered dinners where heroism is the dessert that sweetens the mood and opens the chequebooks. By now, though, the twinned structure seems fragmented, and neither half gets a chance to gather any emotional momentum or to further develop the theme.
  33. It's a noble undertaking, and Eastwood is stylistically bold enough to create a view of combat based mainly on images that are clearly manufactured. (As with "Saving Private Ryan," the movie's principal source is "The Big Red One," whose director, Samuel Fuller, actually experienced the war.) But this is underimagined and so thesis ridden that it's nearly over before it starts.
  34. As painstaking as a documentary but without the satisfaction of a documentary or the impact of a drama.
  35. Reviewed by: Ethan Alter
    Flags of our Fathers really loses its way in the final half-hour, when the point-of-view abruptly shifts to James Bradley (played here by Tom McCarthy), who takes on the role of narrator, informing us of what happened to each of these men after the war ended and their names became yesterday's news. It's a jarring switch.
  36. Maybe we won't fully understand Eastwood's film until we see the second part of this project, "Letters From Iwo Jima," his companion film seen from the Japanese viewpoint expected in 2007. On its own, however, Flags of Our Fathers merely flags.
  37. Reviewed by: Dana Stevens
  38. 42
  39. 40
    What Flags of Our Fathers is not, however, is moving, evocative, or very unique.
User Score

Generally favorable reviews- based on 153 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 46 out of 62
  2. Negative: 4 out of 62
  1. Sep 4, 2011
    Ponderous (where's the battle?), navel gazing (not naval, unfortunately), sentimental, cliched, misses the big picture. Anything else? Actually, the battle scenes are quite impressive, even though the movie attempts to remove it from the screen altogether. The iconic photograph of the raising of the Stars and Stripes was somewhat inaccurate and was used as a part of US war propaganda? Got that? No? Then watch a movie that is two and a quarter hours long that bleats on about it. Alternatively.... look at the far superior Letters From Iwo Jima instead! Full Review »
  2. AlexL
    Feb 10, 2009
    Very very good movie. i love it. it made me cry.
  3. NickA.
    Aug 20, 2007
    'Flags of Our Fathers,' Clint Eastwood