City Of Life And Death (Nanjing! Nanjing!) (2009)

There are a rare few films that have found a way to tackle some of the greatest atrocities ever committed by and upon the human race with such searing, unflinching emotional honesty that they move beyond the categorisations of drama or war movie to something that can best be described as bearing witness. Come And See and Schindler's List belong to this exclusive group, and so too now must Lu Chuan's extraordinary and harrowing City Of Life And Death.

It is 1937 in Nanking, former Chinese capital and scene of what is about to unfold as one of the greatest war-crimes in history (a massacre verging on genocide and an event which continues to sour Sino-Japanese relations to this day), but writer/director Lu Chuan is not here to analyse wider military events or stratagems. We open with the briefest glimpse of the Japanese assault on the city walls, and then before the credits have even finished rolling his camera is already patrolling the post-conflict city streets; a blasted, ruined landscape. His film picks up where the likes of The Pianist or Saving Private Ryan leave off, in the midst of a destroyed world, with the invaders and the surviving remnants of the defeated population already pitched together in a dangerous and disorientating mix of sporadic resistance battles, vast wretched prisoner encampments and perilously tenuous civilian "safety" zones.

Events are told in a masterful intercutting of macro and micro drama. We are introduced to only a handful of identifiable characters. Amongst them a Chinese bureaucrat trying to use his position to save his family, a young boy caught up in the resistance fighting, a naive prostitute (euphemistically referred to as comfort girls), one of thousands shipped to the frontline with no idea of the horrors awaiting them, and a single Japanese soldier with some semblance of conscience amongst his savage comrades. Their desperate personal stories intertwine inside the maelstrom of chaos and horror surrounding them.

The stunning black-and-white photography veers from stark, handheld and up-close, to vast and impressionistic sweeps that depict the large-scale massacres as nightmarish visions of some biblical apocalypse. The combined effect renders the feel of the movie as both something close to a rediscovered contemporary document and personal witness testimony, the small-scale drama illuminating the large-scale atrocity that might be beyond comprehension otherwise.

At times heart-stopping in its intensity and tragic almost beyond expressing. City Of Life And Death is a profoundly moving depiction of inhumanity at its most grievous. It simply should be seen.

Rating: 5/5

Dredd (2012)

Karl Urban gives good chin in a pleasingly grimy, ballsy, UK independent production that obliterates the rotten memories of Stallone's badly misjudged '90s take on this cult comic favourite. Dredd the movie, like Dredd the character, is not particularly smart, and somewhat heavy-footed, but gets by with an effective mixture of substantial brutality, wry, underplayed humour, and a healthy dose of scathing totalitarian dystopia. It may not live up to the very best of its kind, but when, at around the half-way mark, the writers steal an iconic line from Robocop, I had to admit, "yep, fair play, it's earned the right to do that". And that's pretty high praise in my view.

Rating: 4/5