war film
Graham Fuller
Walter Summers (1892-1973), formerly Lt. Summers of the East Surreys and a highly decorated veteran of the Western Front, had already directed the Great War reconstruction films Ypres (1925) and Mons (1926) for Harry Bruce Woolf’s British Instructional Films when he embarked on BIF’s docudrama The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands (1927). This silent but thunderous war film, galvanized by Simon Dobson’s tense new score, is remarkable for its impartiality.Though it centres on the two devastating naval confrontations off South America in late 1914, convincingly recreating what happens Read more ...
emma.simmonds
As the bald title suggests, Fury is a work of righteous, focussed rage. It's a combat film which swaps preaching and profundity for pure anger at the brutalising, destructive war machine, and still manages to be illuminating. For, even at its most thrillingly Hollywood, Fury retains a keen sense of the waste of life. Director David Ayer's fifth film features explicit, immersive and impactful violence and works best when it's pummelling the audience and Nazis alike, with deafening, meticulously executed action that threatens to punch a hole through both the screen and your ear-drum.Set in Read more ...
Andy Plaice
Fifty-seven minutes into this hour-long programme entitled "Al Murray’s Great British War Films", our host put panellist Dan Snow on the spot and asked him to name his favourite war film. “Does it have to be British?” Snow wondered. For a second it looked like Murray and his other two guests might stick him in solitary confinement for a week, yet Snow’s dizzy reaction was not only (unintentionally) funny but also gave away just how much he’d switched off by now. And he wouldn’t have been alone.For all that it promised – a comedian with a love of history and three panellists sit in lovely Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The forces of death and life come up against each other in the strange, somehow impressive Slovenian war drama Silent Sonata. I say “Slovenian” only because director Janez Burger hails from there, and that’s where some of the filming took place (the rest was in Ireland, which was the major, but not the only European co-producer of the film), but the cast and crew are markedly international. And though we can see it’s a war situation loosely based on the former Yugoslavia, there’s no hint at what corner of that conflict it’s refering to.There’s a risk with such projects that the result becomes Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The title of Sebastian Junger’s documentary comes from a casual remark made as a group of journalists set off towards conflict in the outskirts of the Libyan town of Misrata: it may sound like a standard question from a battle-hardened war correspondent, but the film that follows shows that Tim Hetherington, whose off-camera voice it is, was anything but that. It was April 11 2011, and that journey would prove fatal for the British photographer and filmmaker. Only weeks earlier he had been in the very different setting of Los Angeles: Restrepo, the remarkable film in which Hetherington and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The silent-era Wings is not a subtle film. Director William A. Wellman’s action-packed World War One tale of loyalty, love and war is also, at just short of two-and-a-half hours, long. At the time of its release in 1927, the film news bulletin Movie Time News declared it “the spectacular epic of the year, the national box office sensation of 1927”. In 1929 it became the first film to pick up an Oscar for Best Picture, at the first Academy Awards ceremony.As one of the extras on this new edition makes clear, the path which led to Wellman helming the film was collaborative and needed to be Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Nikita Mikhalkov’s Burnt by the Sun was one of the few good news stories in Russian cinema in the Nineties. Made with his longterm scriptwriter Rustam Ibragimbekov, it picked up a main prize at Cannes in 1994 and the Best Foreign Film Oscar the following year. Its small Chekhovian story - adapted later by Peter Flannery for a successful run at London’s National Theatre - resounded far above its weight.Red Army hero-general Sergei Kotov (Mikhalkov himself, a fine actor, main picture) felt the chill winds of the Stalinist 1930s. The reappearance of Mitya (Oleg Menshikov), a friend now turned Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Russian director Karen Shakhnazarov has three decades of memorable film-making behind him, but remains much less known than he should be, at least in the English-speaking world: his edgy perestroika-era films like Courier and Assassin of the Tsar deserve far more atttention than they've generally received. Last year's White Tiger reunites him with longtime co-scripter Alexander Borodnyansky, and this time they've aimed resolutely for the mainstream, though it's a bid for the popular with an unusual twist.Shakhnazarov's first venture into locally popular World War II territory, White Tiger is Read more ...
terry.friel
Covering both sides of a conflict is never easy. Apart from the physical dangers, warring parties are wary of journalists who've reported on and established ties with the enemy. Afghanistan showed this as clearly as anywhere, when the US forces were suspicious of any journalists with Taliban contacts.British film-maker Olly Lambert’s Syria: Across the Lines strode confidently over that hurdle, giving a unique insight into the people on both sides of Syria's civil war as it continues to veer in and out of the headlines after two years of fighting and more than 70,000, mainly civilian, deaths. Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Veteran director Jerzy Hoffman is a chronicler of Polish history on the widest possible scale - still going strong, he turned 80 just after the 2011 3D release of Battle of Warsaw. His 1999 film With Fire and Sword caught earlier national heroics, from Poland’s 17th-century struggle with Ukraine, and tops Polish box office results to this day. His latest film captures the 1920 resistance of newly independent Poland to Red Army forces invading from the east, intent on spreading Communism through Europe.Principle players here are Ola (Natasza Urbanska), star singer in a Warsaw cabaret Read more ...
David Nice
Is Prokofiev’s 1938 score for Alexander Nevsky the greatest film music ever written? Not quite, if only for the fact that Sergei Eisenstein’s second sound-picture glorifying historical role models for the ever more tsar-like Stalin, Ivan the Terrible, is darker and more richly textured, and the music’s greater breadth reflects that.Yet you can’t fault Prokofiev’s spirited response to every war situation in this propagandist masterpiece about the stalwart 13th century prince who sees off an invasion of Teutonic knights in a battle on a frozen lake. It was made at a time when the German threat Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Zero Dark Thirty could have easily gone by the name of the Danish thriller from last year, The Hunt, it’s so furiously single-minded. As it is, the film's striking title is a military term for half-past midnight - the timing of the Navy SEAL raid which shot dead Osama bin Laden in Pakistan on 2 May 2011. The shadowy, nail-biting recreation of that infamous operation forms the film’s finale and is its pièce de résistance. But Zero Dark Thirty also gives us the undisclosed story of the 10-year search for bin Laden: the moments of discovery and revelation, as well as the frustrations and deadly Read more ...