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 find out more...

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 find out more...

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 find out more...

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 find out more...

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". find out more...

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. find out more...

The greatest prisoner of war adventure of them all. Behind the barbed wire fences of Stalag Luft the Allies plan a mass break-out by digging three tunnels. Discovery by the Germans when only one is completed means the chances of escape are thin. Yet 76 make the attempt in this epic adventure.

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A truly terrible sub-TV film, supposedly based round the diaries of Captain Ernest Gordon, a survivor of the infamous "Railway of Death". Despite the reality of the experiences these British, Aussie and American prisoners stay remarkably well fed, free of jungle sores etc, while occasionally acting incredibly stupidly, having very nasty things done to them, making self-sacrifices, learning the harsh side of Bushido and spouting incredibly rubbishy meaning of life statements. find out more...

Bresson's remarkable and detailed account of the brilliantly conceived escape of imprisoned and condemned to death real-life resistance fighter Andre Devigny. The intensity of the direction is augmented superbly by the music; Mozart's Mass in C Minor. Superb. find out more...

Olympian Louis “Louie” Zamperini, along with two other crewmen, survive in a raft for 47 days after a near-fatal plane crash while on a bombing raid in WWII, but it is when they are caught by the Japanese and sent to prisoner of war camp that Louis’ endurance test really begins. A rather ‘worthy’ dramatisation of the man’s biopic. 

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