In Steven Spielberg’s War Horse, we find a God very close to Spinoza’s: He believed that God was not some kind of individual, but an impersonal process. This God is represented here as a horse. The plot unfolds with no friction, no resistance, no fuss (it’s a pure Spielbergian flow) in the Irish countryside. A proud drunkard (Peter Mullan) buys an expensive and very stubborn horse, which his soft-minded son (Jeremy Irvine) falls in love with. He then must sell it to an aristocrat, who goes to war, then it ends up in the hands of Germans, then in the care of a French girl and her grandfather—you get the picture. This is about God. He has four legs and a tail. This is what makes War Horse so great: It’s smuggling a little Spinoza into the multiplexes. (CHARLES MUDEDE)