Prisoner of the Mountains
There's a beautiful irony in the way that the most specific war tales are often the most universal. Set high in the imposing, isolated  Caucasus mountains, where the 20th century meets ancient lifestyles, Sergei Bodrov's drama of the Chechyn war finds two opposing cultures locked in conflict for so long that the reasons seem moot. Young Russian grunt Vanya (Sergei Bodrov Jr., the director's son) and his jaded veteran Sergeant (Burnt by the Sun's Oleg Menshikov) survive an ambush by Chechyn guerrillas and wind up hostages of a village elder, a war-weary widower who has lost almost everything to fighting and wants merely to swap them for his POW son. Bodrov's humanism is directed with empathy and stirred with harsh realism--he takes no sides and offers no fantasies of happy endings, only small miracles of kindness that refuse to be swallowed in the destruction and mistrust.--Sean Axmaker