I suppose its fair to say that most German children were not exactly to blame for the Holocaust.

I suppose I should say that The Book Thief was a masterpiece of cinema and a very important film etc. but I did find it somewhat problematic.

As a child’s eye view of the horrors of Germany during WWII it performed admirably, if not somewhat apologetic most of the time (after all every German hid a Jewish runaway in their Cellar NOT, no one knew what was happening NOT etc.).

It did tend to gloss over the appalling nature of the Third Reich, but then from a child’s perspective the world is always somewhat limited and pure around them. I can forgive it therefore for not really being a serious holocaust piece and a reflection of the insular nature of youth.

I have never much enjoyed Geoffrey Rush, I have always found his acting pompous and over intense, he actually worked very well in this role as the loving father making the best of bad times around him.

Perhaps the worst decision in the film was the Narrator who popped up now and then in the style of a children’s story, warranted points for making him the grim reaper in a sort of twist on this style, but nevertheless the film would have been much better without it.

In some ways their are parallels in this film to Benigni’s Life is Beautiful, but where Life is a sick “humourous” twist on the Holocaust, this film manages to stay far enough away from it to not be tainted with the same brush.

Nothing much to see here, a fairly standard remake of the original remake of the famous St. Trinians films.

Standing out I suppose was Doctor Who (David Tennant) who made an otherwise pretty much unwatchable film not so bad.

This is a french film about…. you guessed it, their Special Forces!

It borrows very heavily from the Hollywood style and but for the French dialogue you could be mistaken for thinking this is a standard Hollywood action flick.

A nosey journalist gets kidnapped by the Taliban and because she’s female, all of France bends over backwards to rescue her. Then follows a major journey across the desert of Pakistan and snowy mountains to reach the safety of Afghanistan.

I know it sounds like I didn’t like this one much, but all in all (taking it for what it is) it is not a bad film with a pretty spectacular ending.

Ok this is not the best movie ever made, but taken from a book by Roger Zelazny and with a script written by Lukas Heller (Dirty Dozen, Flight of the Phoenix) it has a lot going for it.

This is a post apocalyptic movie starring George Peppard and Jan Michael Vincent. The third world war kicks off as the movie begins and we follow a team in a missile silo launching the nukes.

After the war the earth is laid waste and the group set about surviving at their military base. After a while, it appears simply out of boredom, they set off in massive land vehicles in search of a mysterious signal.

Now you might be saying, I have heard all this pretty much before, but remember Damnation Alley used this plot line back in the seventies.