When newly-commissioned SS Lieutenant Kurt Gerstein (Ulrich Tukur) witnesses the chemical disinfectant he's helped perfect being used to systematically murder interred Jews, he has no choice but to act. The only sympathetic ear Gerstein is able to find is that of young Father Riccardo (Mathieu Kassovitz), a priest with deep ties to the Vatican. While Riccardo takes on the obstructive Vatican hierarchy, Gerstein must walk a tightrope between documenting and enabling the atrocities his fellow SS o
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L'ARMEE DES OMBRES (1969)
Certification12 Our Rating
We follow the everyday travails of a group of WW2 French resistance fighters in Marseille, including their engineer leader and a middle-aged woman who sets up anti-German attacks without telling her husband or daughter, as they do battle against the occupying Nazis, collaborators and traitors in their own camp. This tense and atmospheric classic, based partly on Joseph Kessel's novel and partly on Melville's own experiences as a resistance fighter who later escaped France to join the Free French
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LA GRANDE ILLUSION (1937)
CertificationU Our Rating
One of the greatest war films ever made; three captured French soldiers, one an aristocrat, one a mechanic and one a Jew, bond together when imprisoned together by German soldiers. Their attempts to escape and their relationships with their captors, especially that between the French aristocrat and his German counterpart, are superbly dramatised in this indictment of the mass slaughter that is war. Subtle, emotive and timeless.
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PASAZERKA (1963)
Certification15 Our Rating
A German woman on a ship coming back to Europe notices a face, of another woman, which brings recollections from the past. She confesses to her husband that she had been an overseer in Auschwitz during the war and that the woman had been an inmate, but perhaps her recollections have become confused with time. A study of guilt and retribution and the last film of talented Polish director Andrzej Munk who was tragically killed during the making of ‘Pasazerka'. It picked up Best Film at the Venice
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RESCUE DAWN (2006)
Certification12 Our Rating
The incredible true story of Dieter Dengler, a German-born US pilot shot down over Laos at the beginning of the Vietnam war and held captive in a beastly POW camp, and his subsequent escape to 'freedom'.
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STALAG 17 (1952)
CertificationPG Our Rating
World War Two and a group of American soldiers reside in the infamous Stalag 17, a German prison camp designed to hold the most rebellious of inmates. It soon becomes apparent that there is a traitor amongst them and the most obvious choice is a cynical, opportunistic fellow prisoner, always on the scam and the only man on nodding terms with their German captors. Stalag 17 is classic war time drama, tense and claustrophobic, with William Holden justifiably winning an Oscar for his performance in
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STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE (2008)
Certification15 Our Rating
With over two years of investigation, including the collection of a million and a half words of interview transcript, 'Standard Operating Procedure', from director Errol Morris, is the story behind the infamous photographs taken by US soldiers in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. Not as interesting or revelatory as you might hope, and hamstrung as Morris is by the fact that most of those interviewed aren't that bright or able to verbalise why they did what they did, and are only clear that they were hun
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THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PYJAMAS (2008)
Certification12 Our Rating
It's 1942 and eight-year-old Bruno knows nothing of Germany's Final Solution and the Holocaust, only that his father was promoted and he has been moved from a comfortable home in Berlin to a house in a desolate area. Here there is nothing to do and no one to play with, that is until he meets Shmuel, a boy who lives a strange parallel existence on the other side of a wire fence, and who, like the other people there, wears a uniform of striped pyjamas. Bruno's friendship with Shmuel takes him from
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THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI (1957)
CertificationPG Our Rating
Guinness restores the morale of British PoWs by building a bridge which is of military value to the Japanese, and then attempts to thwart the RAF's destruction of it! A classic film which swept 7 Oscars including "Best Picture".
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THE COLDITZ STORY (1955)
CertificationU Our Rating
Colditz was the P-O-W camp where the Germans put the bad boys, the prisoners, Brits of course, who repeatedly tried to escape. This is their story; a first class tale with British stiff-upper-lips to the fore, nationalistic but heroic.
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