War Horse

Directed by Steven Spielberg. Starring Jeremy Irvine, Emily Watson, Peter Mullan, David Thewlis, Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hiddleston, Eddie Marsan, Toby Kebbell, Niels Arestrup 12A cert, general release, 146 min

THERE’S A lull in the fighting when soldiers on both sides see the horse tangled in barbed wire out in No Man’s Land. They call out from the trenches, but the animal is simply too injured to move.

Finally, a young Geordie grabs a white flag and goes over the top to attend to the traumatised creature. There he meets a German soldier with the same idea. Both men have been shooting at each other for the duration of the Second Battle of the Somme. But now they’re happy to work together as their fellow soldiers cheer them on.

For those of you who sat scowling through Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skullor wondering what to buy for supper during The Adventures of Tintin,we say: behold, Steven Spielberg's back and this time he's brought a pony.

Adapted from Michael Morpurgo's award-winning children's novel and an acclaimed National Theatre production, War Horsemarks a welcome return for the director of ETand Empire of the Sun. The distinction is important: this is not the work of Steven Spielberg Inc, a leading provider of such profitable serviceable entertainments as War of the Worldsand Jurassic Park.

And mind the subject matter: War Horseis a first World War story, but it's also a family film. Horrors occur off-screen or are deftly obscured to ensure younger audience members stay in their seats, not under them. The actions of a firing squad are rendered PG thanks to Spielberg's exquisite use of a windmill; the trenches hide much of the senseless slaughter above. Think of it as the film the director of Saving Private Ryanand Schindler's Listmade when he went back to being Spielberg.

The A material helps. It’s virtually impossible to turn the pages of Morpurgo’s horse-narrated novel without weeping oneself into dehydration. Our evolutionary ties to the horse are not lost on the director who repeatedly frames the animals with a romantic post-John Ford sweep and calls attention to the bizarre inappropriateness of running a cavalry charge at a tank. One of John Williams’s grander tear-jerking scores and lingering shots of backbreaking labour compounds the notion of slaughtered innocents.

Like the book, the title character retains the spotlight as he moves from a Devon farm and life with his beloved Albert (Jeremy Irvine) to the frontline, where he is alternately adopted by dashing British cavalry officers, deserting German teenagers and a sickly French girl.

Wisely eschewing the Mr Edroute, Spielberg and his wrangling team extract winning performances from their equine cast as they zigzag across warring armies. The human cast, too (Liam Cunningham, Peter Mullen, Emily Watson, Benedict Cumberbatch) appear to have been enlisted for their fiendish abilities to make audiences cry.

Don't sweat the weepie factor. It's true that War Horsebreaches the sad, awful destiny of millions of military animals in a sad, awful conflict but it does coalesce into a compelling, all-ages fable before it carries us off into the sunset.