A big, impressive slab of drama -- maybe not a masterpiece or an epic, but a colorful story that sweeps you up and covers a lot of ground at a fast clip.
The Big Red One
The real glory of war is surviving
1980 · 1h 53m · R
Drama, War
Directed by
Samuel Fuller
Overview
A veteran sergeant of World War I leads a squad in World War II, always in the company of the survivor Pvt. Griff, the writer Pvt. Zab, the Sicilian Pvt. Vinci and Pvt. Johnson, in Vichy French Africa, Sicily, D-Day at Omaha Beach, Belgium and France, and ending in a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia where they face the true horror of war.
Director and cast
- Samuel Fuller Director
- Lee Marvin as The Sergeant
- Mark Hamill as Pvt. Griff, 1st Squad
- Robert Carradine as Pvt. Zab, 1st Squad
- Bobby Di Cicco as Pvt. Vinci, 1st Squad
- Kelly Ward as Pvt. Johnson, 1st Squad
- Stéphane Audran as Underground Walloon fighter at asylum
- Siegfried Rauch as Schroeder (German sergeant)
- Serge Marquand as Rensonnet
- Charles Macaulay as General / Captain
- Alain Doutey as Broban (Vichy sergeant)
Critics on Rotten Tomatoes
Top critics, in their words
'The Reconstruction,' which clocks in at 2 hours, 43 minutes, with not a single extraneous frame, elevates the work from a robust genre film to a full-blown epic.
To see this seamless 'reconstruction' -- consisting of some 15 entirely new sequences as well as augmentations to 23 others -- is to behold a masterpiece revealed.
Even though it has gained more than 45 minutes, it doesn't feel longer. Scenes that were choppy or half-baked are now allowed to play out as Fuller intended.
The director's gift for bare-knuckles lyricism rescues scene after scene.
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Black Hawk Down (2001)
Action · History · War · R
When U.S. Rangers and an elite Delta Force team attempt to kidnap two underlings of a Somali warlord, their Black Hawk helicopters are shot down, and the Americans suffer heavy casualties, facing intense fighting from the militia on the ground.
- Runtime
- 2h 25m
- Director
- Ridley Scott
- Cast
- Josh Hartnett, Ewan McGregor, Eric Bana











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