Film Shapes

The Guardian recently ran an article on the ten best World War II films, as voted by respondents to a Deltapoll for The War Movie Theatre podcast (see their list and link at the end of this piece). As this year is 80 years since the end of hostilities, I thought it might be interesting to run down my top twenty World War II films. Here we go: 20.  Empire of the Sun   (Steven Spielberg - 1987)  This China-set drama of expats during the war in the Pacific theatre was Christian Bale's first big role at the age of 13. He's pretty bloody good too, as are most of the cast, including John Malkovich and Nigel Havers. Spielberg saw this J.G. Ballard story as a chance to make a comparatively 'darker' film about the loss of innocence and it turned out to be one of his very best. 19.  The English Patient   (Anthony Minghella - 1996)  All the press for this film was the love story angle between dreamy Ralph Fiennes (pre-Voldemort, of course) and elegantly icy Kristin Sc...

Biopics are tough to get right. For every Lawrence of Arabia , there's a Diana , for every Raging Bull , there's an Ali . The film Lee shines some natural light of the life of renowned war photographer Lee Miller, played by Kate Winslet. She gives it full welly in this - physically and emotionally nude, with camouflage painted boobs, close-ups with no make-up, moles, wrinkles, rage and tears. It's very much the kind of 'brave' performance that the Academy loves to reward. The film starts with Miller crustily answering questions to a young man in 1977, and as she remembers things from her past, we head to flashback territory. It seems a fairly cack-handed framing device until we realise why it's happening. A modicum of research reveals that the film is a pretty accurate retelling of Miller's life - first her carefree bohemian days in pre-WW2 France (including her intro to future hubby, Roland Penrose, played by Alexander Skarsgård), then how she started with...

This harrowing documentary follows a group of war correspondents in the besieged city of Mariupol in south-east Ukraine. It starts as the Russian invasion gets underway and creeps towards devastation as the frontline gets ever closer. It's an extremely tough watch. The writer/director, Mstyslav Chernov, doesn't shy away from showing us children dead from shelling, parents absolutely bereft from grief, and the complete loss of hope that's riddled through the doctors and nurses. It almost feels redundant to talk about technique here but this film holds a straightforward doco structure that opens with a hint of the 'big moment', then a diary style unfolds (the 20 days), before returning to the beginning to show us how it all panned out. That focal point is an impending attack on a hospital that the crew are holed up in, followed by a frantic dash to find a Red Cross convoy rumoured to be leaving the city. Some of the most striking detail in the film is that if you'...