The first part of Wajda's triology of films, the hopeful one, is set in Warsaw 1942, deals with the setting up of a youth resistance group and sticks very much to the CP line of courage, honour and self-sacrifice. These three films rank amongst the greatest achievments of contempory European cinema and Zbigniew Cybulski's performance is rated as one of cinema's greatest. find out more...

Part 1 of Wajda's trilogy of wartime films, the hopeful one, is set in Wola, a working-class area of Warsaw in 1942, and deals with the graduation of a bunch of semi-delinquent street kids, through individual acts of defiance and courage, into a youth resistance group. The heroism is not simple, neither loyalties nor self-sacrifice are assured, but united they will be. find out more...

Adapted from the classic, absurdist, anti-war novel by Joseph Heller. "Catch-22" is the story of Yossarian, a pilot who trys to opt out of flying bombing missions by being declared insane, the catch being that anyone trying to avoid bombing missions by being insane must be sane. This dark classic catches much of the flavour of the book, the insanity, the corruption and the absurdity of war. Think MASH, but non-linear - flawed but awesome. find out more...

A psychotic American commander worried about the subversive effects of water fluoridisation on his "vital bodily fluids" starts off an attack on the Soviet Union. No-one can stop the fighters and no-one, as yet, knows about the failsafe Doomsday Machine. Brilliant black comedy. find out more...

In Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo's brilliant and chilling re-write of history, Germany has won World War II and Nazi troops occupy England. Pauline, an apolitical nurse, hopes only that normal life will return to England. It is only after she accepts a nursing job with Nazis that she slowly begins to realize the horrifying reality behind the occupation. It Happened Here is a masterful, terrifying vision of what might have happened if the Allied effort had been in vain. find out more...

Part 2, and surely the greatest, of Wajda's trilogy describes the last days of the failed 1944 Warsaw uprising against the Nazis. The imagery of the sewers, to which the Polish fighters retreat, is superbly used to represent both their desperation and their new Soviet prison. Made in 1956 despite Stalinist censorship. find out more...

One of the greatest war films ever made; three captured French soldiers, one an aristocrat, one a mechanic and one a Jew, bond together when imprisoned together by German soldiers. Their attempts to escape and their relationships with their captors, especially that between the French aristocrat and his German counterpart, are superbly dramatised in this indictment of the mass slaughter that is war. Subtle, emotive and timeless. find out more...

An adaptation of the novella of the same title by celebrated French Resistance author Vercors, clandestinely written in 1942 during the Nazi occupation of France, which tells the story of a German officer billeted in the house of an elderly man and his niece. Resisting the intruder, the two refuse to speak to the German, who warms himself by the fire each evening espousing idealistic views about the relationship between France and Germany, views that disintegrate on a trip to Paris where the gri find out more...

A German woman on a ship coming back to Europe notices a face, of another woman, which brings recollections from the past. She confesses to her husband that she had been an overseer in Auschwitz during the war and that the woman had been an inmate, but perhaps her recollections have become confused with time. A study of guilt and retribution and the last film of talented Polish director Andrzej Munk who was tragically killed during the making of ‘Pasazerka'. It picked up Best Film at the Venice find out more...

One of Stanley Kubrick's earliest films, Paths of Glory is a seminal anti-war movie. Set during the First World War, the French general staff give the order for Colonel Dax (Douglas) and his men to attack a particularly well fortified German position. The order is little more than authorised suicide and when the remanants of Dax's men return, the high command, looking for something to distact from their murderous incompetence, decide to court-martial three of the surviving soldiers. The outra find out more...