Best "small-group" war movie ever

Rating: Null/10 (11 January 2004)

Every character learns hard lessons in this movie, and yet by the end we care about all of them. This is the movie Saving Private Ryan would have been with less of a budget and more of a sense of who people are and the real moral choices of war.
There are no big battles to follow here. A handful of American prisoners escape from a panicked massacre by German troops, and rescue a British pilot who has vital information that must be delivered to an allied command post.
However, this is the Battle of the Bulge, and they're behind German lines. And the best of them is a tortured young American who speaks German fluently, loves the German people, and is jittery from lack of sleep.
Not everybody is nice, and they don't get along all that well. But they need each other to survive, and they don't forget they're human even in the terror - and horror - of war.
The performances are superb - they may have been paying their actors with sacks of dimes, but that didn't keep them from doing their best work. And the writers and director never lost track of what this film was about. Real integrity and intelligence all the way through both script and filming.