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Guillermo Del Toro's blockbusting tale of a young girl struggling to make sense of the violent world around her was a big 2006 arthouse hit. Continuing his exploration of the impact of the Spanish Civil War on his generation (it was also the backdrop for his excellent ghost story, The Devil's Backbone) Del Toro's fantasy mixes strong horror with fairytale-style aesthetics to great effect, making Ofelia's escape into an imaginary realm a poignant response to the cruel realities of her existence. find out more...

Set in the Sino-Japanese war, Yasuzo Masumura's black-and-white anti-war film tells of an army nurse who sexually services an amputee and falls in love with a drug-addicted surgeon. This can't be recommended to the squeamish, but neither can its nuanced eroticism nor its passionate, unpredictable moral focus, be easily shaken off. Comparable with Altman's MASH, it suggests a less comic treatment of the same theme, how to preserve one's humanity in impossible circumstances, but its ethics are con find out more...

Spielberg continues to weave his magic over movie audiences with this WW2 blockbuster, being both a harrowing portrayal of the horrors of war, and a heartfelt, if unlikely, human drama. Matt Damon plays the young soldier, destined to almost certain death, who's unaware his three brothers have all been killed in battle in the past few days. Hanks and Sizemore are the caring Captain and battle-hardened Sergeant who are dispatched to find distraught Mother Ryan's only remaining son, and bring him h find out more...

'L'armée du Crime' focuses on the French Resistance ‘Manouchian group', Paris-based communists, led by the Armenian poet Missak Manouchian, and consisting of Jews, Hungarians, Poles and others who helped the armed struggle against Nazi occupation. The film describes the radicalisation and differing motives of Manouchian and his comrades and the execution of their mission – an ultimately fatal one as we know from the 22 names read out over the opening credits to the refrain of ‘Mort pour la Franc find out more...