Fine casting, rugged characters and authentic military detail make The Bridge at Remagen one of the best World War II action films of the 1960s. Based on actual incidents during the final Allied advance on Germany in March 1945, the story focuses on the US Army's exhausted 27th Armoured Infantry, assigned to seize the bridge at Remagen, on the Rhine river, to prevent 50,000 German troops from retreating to safety. Lt Hartman (George Segal) leads the mission, while a Nazi major (Robert Vaughn) defies orders by attempting to hold the bridge instead of blowing it up. With strong emphasis on war's harsher realities, the film's compelling characters illustrate the camaraderie of survivors and the heroism of mavericks in the thick of battle. Segal and Ben Gazzara effectively convey a hard-won friendship, and the film's dynamic action (filmed in Czechoslovakia and Italy) never overwhelms the story's emotional impact. This is highly recommended. -Jeff Shannon, Amazon. com.

A model for dozens of action films to follow, this box-office hit from 1967 refined a die-hard formula that has become overly familiar, but it's rarely been handled better than it was in this action-packed World War II thriller. Lee Marvin is perfectly cast as a down-but-not-out army major who is offered a shot at personal and professional redemption. If he can successfully train and discipline a squad of army rejects, misfits, killers, prisoners, and psychopaths into a first-rate unit of specialised soldiers, they'll earn a second chance to make up for their woeful misdeeds. Of course, there's a catch: to obtain their pardons, Marvin's band of badmen must agree to a suicide mission that will parachute them into the danger zone of Nazi-occupied France. It's a hazardous path to glory, but the men have no other choice than to accept and regain their lost honor. What makes The Dirty Dozen special is its phenomenal cast including Charles Bronson, Donald Sutherland, Telly Savalas, George Kennedy, Ernest Borgnine, John Cassavetes, Richard Jaeckel, Jim Brown, Clint Walker, Trini Lopez, Robert Ryan, and others. Cassavetes is the Oscar-nominated standout as one of Marvin's most rebellious yet heroic men, but it's the whole ensemble-combined with the hard-as-nails direction of Robert Aldrich-that makes this such a high-velocity crowd pleaser. The script by Nunnally Johnson and Lukas Heller (from the novel by E. M. Nathanson) is strong enough to support the all-star lineup with ample humour and military grit, so if you're in need of a mainline jolt of testosterone, The Dirty Dozen is the movie for you. [+]

To date Stanley Kubrick remains one of cinema's most controversial film-maker. This box set highlights some of his greatest work, from the visionary 2001:A Space Odyssey, the violent and highly-debated A Clockwork Orange, the chilling adaptation of The Shining, the acclaimed war drama Full Metal Jacket, to his final piece, the controversial Eyes Wide Shut. And to top it off, the treat of this box set, the fascinating Stanley Kubrick: A Life In Pictures. Stanley Kubrick was one of the most acclaimed and controversial filmmakers of his generation, but he was also an intensely private man who rarely gave interviews and produced most of his films under a shroud of secrecy, which tended to foster a great deal of rumour and speculation about his working methods. Jan Harlan, who worked as Kubrick's assistant and executive producer on several projects directed this feature-length documentary. Narrated by Tom Cruise, this offers a rare in-depth look into Kubrick's career as a filmmaker, structured around interviews with a number of actors, writers, technicians, composers, friends, and family who speak on the record about his relentless perfectionism, his creative vision, his life both on and off the set, his relationships with actors, his unrealised projects, and his importance and influence as an artist. Among those who share their thoughts in Stanley Kubrick: A Life In Pictures are actors Jack Nicholson, Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Malcolm McDowell, Peter Ustinov, and Keir Dullea; writers Arthur C. Clarke and Michael Herr; special effects artist Douglas Trumbull; composers Wendy Carlos and Gyorgy Ligeti; filmmakers Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Paul Mazursky, and Sydney Pollack; and Kubrick's spouse Christiane Kubrick. The choice of titles is undeniably spot on, and the extras really give a sense of who the man was, what his legacy is, and the privilege it was for the people who collaborated with him on his cinematic journey. - Jennifer Kilchenmann.

Based on the true story of Lord Louis Mountbatten's destroyer HMS Kelly, In Which We Serve is one of the most memorable British films made during World War II. Unfolding in flashback as survivors cling to a dingy, constantly strafed by the Luftwaffe, the film recounts the history of HMS Torrin through various battles to her sinking off the coast of North Africa, interwoven with the onshore lives of her crew. The film was the inspiration of Noel Coward, who desperately wanted to do something for the war effort, and he produced, wrote the screenplay, composed the stirring musical score and starred as Captain Edward Kinross. Coward also officially co-directed, though in reality he soon handed the reigns over to David Lean, whose directorial debut this became. There is a fine performance from Celia Johnson, anticipating her character in Lean and Coward's Brief Encounter (1946) and excellent support from John Mills, as well as a star-making debut from an uncredited Richard Attenborough. The use of real navy and army personal as extras, together with lavish studio production and authentic shipboard location footage lends the film a sense of realism unusual for the time. A landmark in the careers of many of the most important names in British film, this moving and occasionally harrowing classic has a vital place in the development of British cinema. On the DVD: The image is presented in a close approximation of the original 1. 37:1 Academy ratio using a print that is good for its age but which would benefit from some restoration, several scenes showing notable damage. The sound is robust mono, though the main title music is very distorted. [+]

In the tradition of such obsessively driven directors as Erich von Stroheim and Werner Herzog, Francis Ford Coppola approached the production of Apocalypse Now as if it was his own epic mission into the heart of darkness. On location in the storm-ravaged Philippines, he quite literally went mad as the project threatened to devour him in a vortex of creative despair but from this insanity came one of the greatest films ever made. It began as a John Milius screenplay, transposing Joseph Conrad's classic story "Heart of Darkness" into the horrors of the Vietnam War, following a battle-weary Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) on a secret upriver mission to find and execute the renegade Colonel Kurtz(Marlon Brando), who has reverted to a state of murderous and mystical insanity. The journey is fraught with danger involving war-time action on epic and intimate scales. One measure of the film's awesome visceral impact is the number of sequences, images and lines of dialogue that have literally burned themselves into our cinematic consciousness, from the Wagnerian strike of helicopter gunships on a Vietnamese village to the brutal murder of stowaways and the unflinching fearlessness of the surfing warrior Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall), who speaks lovingly of "the smell of napalm in the morning. " Like Herzog's Aguirre: The Wrath of God, this film is the product of genius cast into a pit of hell and emerging, phoenix-like, in triumph. Coppola's obsession (effectively detailed in the riveting documentary Hearts of Darkness, directed by Coppola's wife, Eleanor) informs every scene and every frame, and the result is a film for the ages. -Jeff Shannon Following the example set by his old pals Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola has revisited a classic that no-one ever thought needed enhancement and produced Apocalypse Now Redux, a remastered and extended version of his hallucinogenic Vietnam nightmare that adds some 50 minutes of extra material. On the plus side, certain extended sequences-such as Kilgore's bombing-cum-surfing raid and the final battle of nerves between Martin Sheen and Marlon Brando-add greater depth to our appreciation of the film. On the debit side, the lengthy French plantation interlude and the squalid fate of the Playboy bunnies simply underscore what we already know about war and hell and the depressing futility of it all. [+]

Hart's War is a serious, well-intentioned Second World War drama. It's finally unconvincing, but it will go down in the history books as marking future superstar Colin Farrell's first leading role in a major studio picture. It's late 1944 and Lieutenant Hart (Farrell) ends up in a POW camp where the senior American officer, Colonel McNamara (Bruce Willis), takes an instant dislike to him. When a black American officer, Lt Scott (Terrence Howard), is accused of murder, the commandant allows McNamara to conduct a politically motivated trial. Hart is made the defence attorney, but may be no more than a pawn to further McNamara's own agenda. In a film that chooses the ironic setting of a Nazi prison camp to examine racism in the American military, none of the characters are black or white, and in the tradition of The Shawshank Redemption there is more going on beneath the surface than meets the eye. Unfortunately, while Hart's War is extremely well made, various small plot holes and contrivances mean that ultimately it fails to ring true-a problem exacerbated by an over-earnest tendency to preach in key scenes. Nevertheless, Willis gives one of his best, most understated performances and Farrell, who went straight from this to Minority Report, delivers a truly star-making turn. On the DVD: Hart's War comes to DVD with a Dolby Digital 5. 1 soundtrack that's fine for a dialogue-driven film, while the anamorphically enhanced 2. [+]

Taken from the novel by Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front is a devastating portrait of a small group of German soldiers during World War I. In this 1979 made-for-TV version the star-studded cast is lead by Richard Thomas (The Waltons) as Paul Baumer, strongly supported by screen veterans Ernest Borgnine, Ian Holm and Patricia Neal. As both narrator and star, Thomas occasionally seems to reincarnate his familiar John-Boy persona, but does at least succeed in creating a character that has more levels than his television alter ego. After watching all of his high school buddies loose their lives, Paul returns home a changed man, conflicted in his feelings about the Army and war, and altered from an idealistic schoolboy into a fearful and humble veteran. Although Lewis Milestone's 1930 films remains the cinema's definitive version, director Delbert Mann (Desire Under the Elms, Marty) has done a workmanlike job bringing the novel to the screen. The scenery and costuming in this period piece are well done, and surely contributed to its winning the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture Made for TV. Also exceptional are the cinematography and special effects that, while realistically gruesome, truly emphasise the horrors of war. -Zachary Lively, Amazon. com.

Something of a swan song for the legendary Michael Powell-Emeric Pressburger partnership, 1956's The Battle of the River Plate is their penultimate film together (the following year's Ill Met By Moonlight was the last). Shot in a semi-documentary style that stands apart from the "magical realism" of much of their previous work-Canterbury Tales, A Matter of Life and Death, The Red Shoes-the film tells the story of the pursuit of the German pocket battleship Graf Spee by three British cruisers off the River Plate in Uruguay during November 1939. Incorporating actual wartime footage adds to the authentic air, albeit one that sits uneasily with the obviously studio-bound look of the rest. Among the solid cast Peter Finch stands out as the beleaguered Captain Langsdorff of the Graf Spee, while John Gregson is his counterpart, the stalwart British hero type. Things get a bit odd when Christopher Lee pops up in the unlikely role of a Latin-American nightclub boss. It's an atypical Powell and Pressburger picture and not exactly their best, but still a fine World War II picture that documents an important incident in the opening salvos of the war. -Mark Walker.