War

Intimate Enemies

3 Jul 2008

WAR (15) 100min (Contender DVD retail) Will the Algerian war turn the humanist lieutenant at the centre of Florent Emilio Siri’s film into a monstrous shadow of his former self? After being posted to Algeria, Terrien (Benoît Magimel), the…

Female Agents (Les Femmes Des Ombres)

19 Jun 2008

WAR/THRILLER (15) 116min Spring 1944, the lead up to the Normandy landings, and the technical planning and manufacture of a floating dock has been going on since January. When a British geologist ends up in a French hospital, the plan is thrown into…

I Served The King of England

22 May 2008

COMEDY/WAR (15) 119min Czech writer/director Jirí Menzel’s adaptation of Bohumil Hrabal’s novel depicts the life of aspiring hotelier Jan Díte (Ivan Barnev) as a non-stop cavalcade of good food and even-better sex enjoyed under the darkening shadow of…

Beaufort

24 Apr 2008

WAR/ACTION/DRAMA (15) 125min The Beaufort of the title refers to a castle built by the Crusaders during the 12th century in southern Lebanon. In 2000 this mountaintop fortress is occupied by IDF (Israeli Defence Force) troops, who are preparing to…

Stop-Loss

24 Apr 2008

DRAMA/WAR (15) 111min ‘Stop-Loss’ is the rule that stops American soldiers leaving a conflict even after they have completed their tour of duty. This fate befalls Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe), a former star college footballer, whose return from Iraq…

Black Watch

10 Apr 2008

WORLD TOUR Rothes Hall, Glenrothes, until Sat 5 Apr, then touring While many Scots disagree with the continuing troop presence in Iraq, there remains an undeniable sense of pride in and anxiety for our troops overseas, and it’s this sense of a shared…

Assembly

10 Apr 2008

WAR (15) 123min Chinese director Feng Xiaogang delivers an impressive anti-war epic based on a true story from the Chinese Civil War (1927-1950). The story begins in the winter of 1948 in northeastern China, where Captain Gu Zidi (Zhang Hanyu) leads…

Black Watch - John Tiffany

27 Mar 2008

Certainly the most phenomenal success produced by the Scottish theatre for a couple of decades, Greg Burke’s Black Watch has travelled the world since its first appearance at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2006. New York, Sydney, Los Angeles – it has become…

Redacted

13 Mar 2008

WAR/HORROR (15) 90min Could the war in Iraq be the first conflict to be lost, not at home or abroad, but on the internet? That’s the proposition featured in Brian De Palma’s Redacted, a disturbing account of how the war on terror has been ‘You…

Inglorious Bastards

14 Feb 2008

WAR (15) 87min (Optimum DVD rental/retail) ‘War’ as the French statesman, physician and journalist Georges Clemenceau remarked ‘is too serious a matter to entrust to military men.’ But then again he never met this raggle-taggle bunch of escaped…

Lust, Caution

4 Jan 2008

THRILLER/WAR/ROMANCE (18) 158min Just as he did with his Oscar-winning Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee has plundered a novella to make his first film in Mandarin since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in 2000. Eileen Chan’s largely autobiographical…

War

20 Sep 2007

ACTION/THRILLER (18) 102min War, as Edwin Starr once noted, is good for absolutely nothing, particularly when it’s a non-event of a smack-down between cockney tough-guy Jason Statham and celebrated martial arts star Jet Li. Pop promo director Phillip…

Destiny of a Man

6 Sep 2007

Probably best known for his six hour adaptation of War and Peace (also recently released on DVD), Sergei Bondarchuk’s 1959 debut feature is no meagre effort. As he tells the story of a Soviet citizen, Andrei Sokolov (played by the director himself…

David Kendall

(Robinson)

23 Aug 2007

This really is a weighty tome with over 500 pages of war comics culled from across the world and through the ages (from 1965–2006). Keiji Nakazawa sets the mood with his personal account of the bombing of Hiroshima in I Saw It, a poignant tale that…

Game Theory

23 Aug 2007

At the end of a war with some resemblance to the Yugoslavian conflict, a succession of scenarios unfolds. Three government officials negotiate fruitlessly over responsibility and territory, a woman returns to her abandoned, vandalised home with her two…

John Pilger

23 Aug 2007

In this day and age, journalist is a job title which is afforded a disdain from the general public on a par with estate agent, parking attendant and serial killer. Trust is a commodity that is lacking when it comes to relations between newspaper people…

Famous Last Words

16 Aug 2007

Two poets and a soldier face their mortality as an angry mob draws ever closer to the castle in which they are hiding. The soldier wants to die fighting and the poets wish to die writing, but before they go, they all want to tell their stories and leave…

Red State

16 Aug 2007

In an Arizonian drying-out clinic, a guilt-ridden US army veteran receives some visitors from his past. If you like clear-cut narratives, you’ll be severely disappointed. Asking big questions, like how far someone would go to preserve the image of a…

The Racket

16 Aug 2007

Richard Walker’s one-man, two character, show begins with Simon, a war correspondent, sharing his views on war and the suffering he has seen in Baghdad. No amount of Scotch can make up for the never-ending ‘racket’. The second half looks at free spirit…

Conflict Zone: Closing Time

Festival Fringe

1 Aug 2007

The young Israeli director, Michael Ronen is not cowed by the traditional inhibitions that most people would have about the mixing of conflicting cultures. The young company he’s formed, Conflict Zone Theatre, is in fact geared to creating theatre…

1971

DVD

21 May 2007

ACTION/WAR Debut writer/director Amrit Sagar’s factional action adventure, follows 54 Indian POWs gathered from Pakistan’s national prisons and herded into a secret POW camp close to the border, where Major Suraj Singh (Manoj Bajpai) leads a daring…

Letters from Iwo Jima

(15) 140min

12 Feb 2007

WAR/EPIC Clint Eastwood follows up his admirable but uneven World War II movie Flags of Our Fathers with a second, more accomplished, film looking at the battle for the Pacific island of Iwo Jima. This time the focus is on the Japanese as opposed to…

Star, The - DVD review

The Star

12 Feb 2007

WAR This is a disappointing Russian WWII film about a team of ‘scouts’ sent on a very risky mission behind German lines to check out the enemy’s equipment and tactics. Selling itself as a film in the tradition of Elem Klimov’s great war film Come and…

Grand Illusion, La - DVD review

La Grand Illusion

29 Jan 2007

WAR After La Grande Illusion won a prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1937, the Nazis declared it ‘cinematic enemy number one’, and when Germany invaded France a couple of years later Goebbels had prints of the film destroyed. Jean Renoir’s…

Ballad of a Soldier - DVD review

Ballad of a Soldier

15 Jan 2007

WAR/DRAMA/ROMANCE This long overdue DVD release of Grigori Chukhrai’s 1959 anti-war film arrives thankfully clear of the hideous dubbing that so marred previous incarnations of the film. It is not difficult to see why Chukhrai’s film picked up the…