A US oil company operating in an unspecified corner of South America urgently needs to move tons of nitroglycerin from one of its warehouses to a well burning after an accident, in the hope that a blast could put the fire off. Four men from a nearby town, all foreigners, are hired…

The Big Red One is the nickname of the First Infantry Division of the US Army, which played a key role in the American effort to win World War Two. Four great moments of this war divide the narrative: the Allied forces’ landing on the North Africa coast in November 1942…

A gang of street urchins loiter on the platforms of the Shimonoseki railways station, filching their ways to survive under the commandment of a one-legged lout as the Japanese struggle to get over their defeat at the hands of the Allied forces. They notice a repatriated soldier…

Japan comes across first as a wild, verdant, gorgeous landscape, waves pounding against rocky cliffs that are topped by lush grass and rice paddies. Men look tiny as they scramble over the paths leading to the sea or to caves or to villages. They rush…

The love story behind this stern title unfolds over fifteen years, from 1949 to 1964. It starts and ends in Communist-ruled Poland but there are stints in the former East Germany and Yugoslavia and, above all, in Paris. The lovers meet as the new Polish regime born after World War Two…

There is a kind of double beginning to the film as two completely different sequences are juxtaposed after sober opening credits. The camera first pans over a stretch of shingle bordering a quiet sea and focuses on a couple of men sleeping. One of them wakes up; he is a knight coming back from the…

The hat, dirty, battered and with a hole, is the first thing shot, in close-up, filling the screen. Then the head wearing it sticks out, a round face with a beard and the wrinkles of combat fatigue. This is Sergeant Zack, the only survivor of an attack by the Communist forces he and other soldiers sent by the UN…

Henri-Georges Clouzot claimed he didn’t want to shoot a detective story but a narrative based on criminal law and analysis. Yet his film does describe a convoluted and intriguing police investigation which concludes with an unexpected twist – after all, film producer Georges Brignon…

An unemployed samurai arrives in a village where people hide inside their houses and business is disrupted because of the endless fighting between two rival gangs. Each is led by men claiming they have the right to rule the place after the death of the previous village chief…

On May 4, 1954, a French army platoon leaves the outpost it has been holding on the frontier between Cambodia and Laos, then parts of the Indochinese colonial system, to reach a distant, bigger, base. It is made up in large parts of indigenous recruits and is led by Lieutenant Torrens, a rookie…

“Dodes’kaden” is not a noun but an onomatopoeia; “clickety-clack” could be a rough translation; this is the sound Roku-chan makes to imitate the engine of the tram chugging across the slum he lives in. Each day, the young man drives it, after checking the mechanics at dawn. He is proud of his job and…

Russell leaves a party at his best friend’s home to spend the end of a Friday evening in a gay nightclub. The next morning, in his flat, he makes the coffee for the man he has picked up, Glen. They start talking – and will keep talking and walking in their city of Nottingham…

The key information about Zacarias is given when his voice reads the letter he is writing to his parents, well after the film started on the coast of Mozambique he has reached with other soldiers after a long, harsh sea voyage. The very young, thin, and frail…

This is about quiet lives it seems: in a slightly grainy black and white, with the light of sky remarkably bright, a family is pictured moving around the countryside in a truck and then attending a kind of ceremony at a vast house, with the somehow…

This is not an ordinary film. In a move that had been surely unusual in the Japanese cinema it was not produced within the studios system. Funds had been gathered by a trade union, a left-leaning group of teachers precisely, and support was provided by the…