"Actor: Vadim Glowna"

• Cross Of Iron | DVD | (18/04/2005) from £6.94   |  Saving you £10.05 (144.81%)   |  RRP £16.99

  In Cross of Iron Sam Peckinpah weighs in on World War II from the German point of view. The result is as bleak, if not quite as bloody, as one expects from the director of The Wild Bunch, in part because this 1977 film was cut to ribbons by nervous studio executives. The assorted excerpts that remain don't constitute an exhilarating or even an especially thrilling battle epic. The war is grinding to a close, and veterans like James Coburn's Steiner are grimly aware that it's a lost cause. The battlefield is a death trap of sucking mud and barbed wire, and the German generals (viz., the martinet played by James Mason) seem to pose a bigger threat to the life and limbs of Steiner's men than the inexorable enemy. Not even Peckinpah's famous sensuous exuberance when shooting violence is much in evidence; the picture is a depressive, claustrophobically overcast experience. The bloody high (or low) point isn't a shooting; it's a wince-inducing de-penis-tration during oral sex. For a fun time with the men in (Nazi) uniform, try Das Boot instead. --David Chute, Amazon.com

• Four Minutes | DVD | (28/07/2008) from £5.01   |  Saving you £12.98 (259.08%)   |  RRP £17.99

  Tough young piano prodigy Jenny is serving time in a women's prison in Luckau, Germany when she meets her match in the elderly Traude, a Prussian woman who has been teaching piano to the inmates since the war.