The History Files

11/07/2025

The contribution to history of Black women has often been overlooked, so it’s always heartening when a film-maker attempts to redress the balance. Theodore Melfi did it with Hidden Figures (2016), which dramatised the role played by three Black female mathematicians in Nasa’s 1960s space programme. Now writer-director Tyler Perry (best known for Diary of a Mad Black Woman and the Madea series) takes a similarly stirring, if slightly less glamorous true story: the clearing of an immense backlog of second world war mail to and from US troops fighting in Europe by a battalion of dedicated Black women from the Women’s Army Corps, who faced widespread institutional racism and sexism.

11/07/2025

The greatest ever making-of documentary is now on re-release: the terrifying story of how Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam war masterpiece Apocalypse Now got made – even scarier than Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams, about the making of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. The time has come to acknowledge Eleanor Coppola’s magnificent achievement here as first among equals of the credited directors in shooting the original location footage (later interspersed with interviews by Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper), getting the stunningly intimate audio tapes of her husband Francis’s meltdown moments and, of course, in unassumingly keeping the family together while it was all going on.

11/06/2025

Nolan’s Dunkirk has that kind of blazing big-screen certainty that I last saw in James Cameron’s Titanic or Paul Greengrass’s United 93. It is very different to his previous feature, the bafflingly overhyped sci-fi convolution Interstellar. This is a powerful, superbly crafted film with a story to tell, avoiding war p**n in favour of something desolate and apocalyptic, a beachscape of shame, littered with soldiers zombified by defeat, a grimly male world with hardly any women on screen.

11/06/2025

‘All Quiet on the Western Front’: This “Western Front” places its faith in big set pieces and powerful images. Even the scope has been widened. Berger cuts between Paul’s experiences in the trenches and cease-fire talks between Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl), who chaired Germany’s armistice commission, and Marshal Ferdinand Foch of France (Thibault De Montalembert). The 72-hour deadline that Foch gives Erzberger to sign adds an element of ticking-clock suspense to the overall narrative, albeit by departing from Remarque’s first-person point of view.

11/05/2025

Saving Private Ryan got the praise – but The Thin Red Line wins the battle of the war films. In 1998, two rival Second World War epics were released within months of each other. But while Steven Spielberg’s ‘Saving Private Ryan’ soaked up Oscars and is receiving a splashy cinema re-release this week – to mark its 25th anniversary – Terence Malick’s poetic ‘The Thin Red Line’ remains divisive. But one is clearly more visionary than the other.

11/04/2025

The second world war. The US is caught on the back foot after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The Japanese are better equipped; the American fighter planes are creaky crates, and their torpedoes have all the destructive power of conkers. But, as this macho war w**k from Roland Emmerich argues, the US had one thing in its favour: its men. All the most enormous, jutting, chiselled chins in Hollywood are called up to do their duty, and armed with lines of dialogue that sink like depth charges. In fairness, the screenplay, by Wes Tooke, was never intended to be the main attraction here; the priorities in this account of the Battle of Midway are the admittedly impressive aerial battle sequences, featuring numerous gut-churning plunges as the US pilots dive-bomb the enemy ships.

Check out the official Midway Trailer starring Nick Jonas! Let us know what you think in the comments below.► Buy or Rent Midway: https://www.fandangonow.com...

11/01/2025

Greyhound is a very traditional and indeed traditionalist movie, with Hanks beginning and ending his first day in battle kneeling in prayer. Yet the action itself sticks largely and somehow expressionistically to the tense, claustrophobic world of the bridge with the captain barking all manner of opaque naval jargon. In some ways it resembles a kind of ocean-going stage play: the other, distant ships and the vast heaving grey sea are rendered digitally. But it’s effective and watchable, with some genuinely tense moments as Hanks has to make split-second decisions about two N**i torpedoes heading his way from different directions, and then desperately bellow his orders over the wind and rain. He is very much the sort of mythical figure that Walter Mitty might imagine himself being.

10/28/2025

Flags Of Our Fathers Was A Better Movie Than Its Box Office Would Suggest But Critical Acclaim Did Not Translate To Box Office Success. As a fascinating exploration of heroism, Flags of Our Fathers explored both the earned and manufactured nature of era-defining imagery and stood as an accurate and thoughtful tribute to the men who fought at the battle of Iwo Jima. Made on a budget of $60 million, audiences did not turn out for Flags of Our Fathers, and it flopped at the box office with a gross of just $65.9 million. This was an underwhelming disappointment, which certainly didn’t reflect the power and appeal of Eastwood’s work on the film.

10/28/2025

Let’s cut right to the chase and answer the burning question “Was 1917 filmed in one take?” The quick answer is no. But it sure looks like it was thanks to director Sam Mendes and his DP Roger Deakins. But knowing it wasn't actually a single take only begs another question: how did they film 1917? In fact, Mendes had known from the inception of 1917 that it would take place in real time and be filmed to appear as one shot.

10/28/2025

All Quiet on the Western Front is a substantial, serious work, acted with urgency and focus and with battlefield scenes whose digital fabrications are expertly melded into the action. It never fails to do justice to its subject matter, though is perhaps conscious of its own classic status. Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war classic gets its first German-language adaptation for the screen, after the Hollywood versions of 1930 and 1979; it’s a powerful, eloquent, conscientiously impassioned film from director and co-writer Edward Berger.

10/28/2025

Sam Mendes’s 1917 is an amazingly audacious film; as exciting as a heist movie, disturbing as a sci-fi nightmare. Working with co-writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns, he has created a first world war drama of the Western Front and a terrible journey undertaken by two boys like a ghost train ride into a day-lit house of horror, periodically descending into night and then resurfacing into an alien world, bright with menace.