A raw bunch of Soviet conscripts are drilled into shape on the training ground and dropped into the thick of it in Afghanistan. A big box office hit in Russia this may, like films about the American invasion of Vietnam, be politically naive, but as a war drama it pulls no punchs and, with the possible exception of a silly, poorly edited final battle scene, delivers the goods in superb fashion. find out more...

The tragic story of a World War 2 operation that went wrong. As the Allies advanced, in late 1944, they attempted to form a bridgehead behind enemy lines by parachuting down and taking the Dutch-German bridge at Arnhem. This is a tale of the heroic failure of the many involved. Action-packed war movie. find out more...

A Chinese soldier's tale; Guzidi was a child of poverty who became a successful guerrilla soldier and then officer in the Liberation Army. After a fierce battle with the KMT Guzidi and his remaining 46 troops are sent to a front line defensive position, where they are abandoned by the main army corps to a fight to the death. After a heroic act in the Korean War Guzidi, riddled with guilt and loss of meaningful identity, fights a long battle to atone for the loss of his company by gaining recogni find out more...

October 1993, Mogadishu, Somalia and a force of elite American troops, under the banner of the UN, are sent into the city to abduct a warlord's henchmen. But the carefully laid plan quickly goes belly up and the soldiers are left fighting for their lives with little support and vastly out numbered. Black Hawk Down is a relentless slab of action and though based on true events, no attempt is made to explain the why or the wherefore beyond "badman" versus "goodman" and heroic stereotypes abound. A find out more...

 

Intense training begins for a team of Navy Seals who ready themselves for an unknown mission, with the only Intel that it will be top priority. With orders received from the Pentagon, the team lands at the US Air Base in Bagram, Afghanistan and learn their target will be known as Geronimo, AKA America’s public enemy number one, Bin Laden. find out more...

The true WW2 story of how a Jewish group led by the Bielski brothers, including many women, oldies and children, survived for 4 years in the then Polish, now Belorussian, forests, lived in dugouts, built a kitchen, a mill, a bakery, a bathhouse, a medical clinic for the sick and wounded and a quarantine hut for typhus sufferers. The film has rather twisted reality, introducing action and battle scenes that never took place, and totally ignores both the role of the Polish partisans, causing some find out more...

One of the very finest epics produced, equally impressive in terms of script and spectacle. Heston is aptly heroic as the 11th Century patriot destined to die in the fight to evict the Moors from Spain, Mann's direction is stately and thrilling and Miklos Rosza's superb score perfectly complements the crisp and simple widescreen images. Sobriety and restraint, in fact, are perhaps the keynotes of the film's success, with the result that a potentially risible finale, in which Cid's corpse is born find out more...

A moving and dramatic (if Hollywood) retelling of the Zionist struggle to reclaim their ancient home land and create the independent state of Israel in the aftermath of WW2, focusing in particular on the actions Ari Ben Canaan, a commander in the Israeli underground, as he attempts to bring 600 Jews ‘home'. An epic bit of propaganda. find out more...

Knowing that his father had been some sort of WW2 war hero writer James Bradley set out to discover the truth about him and the fellow marines who raised the flag over Iwo Jima for the now infamously 'fraudulent' photgraph. We follow this ironically socially heterogeneous group of men through the horrors of one of the most bloody battles of WW2, interspliced with the early return home of three of the 'heroes' to act as politically manipulated cheerleaders for further fundraising to continue the find out more...

1944, occupied Copenhagen; two young hit men are killing Danish Nazis and Germans whom their resistance commander has told them to on 'orders from London'. But things in war are never clear and no-one's motives are pure, even the heroic Flame's ideological abhorrence of the Nazis is revealed as part of a more complicated picture. Who's feeding information to whom? Why are these people being assassinated? As if opening a series of Russian Dolls, betrayals and loyalties are revealed, people are tr find out more...