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The Battle of the Chosin Reservoir (as the Americans called it) was one of the great American military defeats of modern times, where the People's Liberation Army sent the US Marines on a miserable retreat from North Korea. This is the Chinese government's commemoration of the battle, Hollywood style.

This is a big budget CGI-laden action fest, plenty of explosions and Rambo style flag-waving super-heroics. If you're looking for the Korean War (aka The War to Resist America and Aid Korea) given the video game treatment, and plot, characters, and historical realism are low on the list of things you care about, this might be worth your time. Plenty of explosions, shooting down fighter planes with bazookas, etc.

For a decent Korean War film from a non-Western perspective, check out Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War (2004).

It's 1940 with bombs falling on London and a sullen, depressed mother puts her sullen, depressed son on a train to the safe countryside. They're depressed and sullen because they don't really want to be apart and, presumably, because the Blitz is a depressing time to be alive. That's about as much depth and detail as we get from these main characters unless you count the fact the the boy is (half) black and the mother liked to dance in jazz clubs in happier times. Are race and openness to interracial dating stand-ins for character depth? In the absence for anything else, I guess they'll have to do.

The shallowness of characters is matched by an emptiness of plot and story. The sullen boy jumps train and heads for home. The sullen mother goes looking for the boy. Some mildly intriguing personalities and vaguely sinister situations, all half-drawn and quickly discarded, are encountered on the way to the predictable conclusion. For a historical period so steeped in drama, the script is remarkably bland and lacking in emotional stakes. What's that you say, the director also wrote the script? Whether it's ego or simple contempt for the art of writing that makes directors think that being good at choreographing scenes and managing personnel also makes them talented script writers, seeing "directed AND written by" credits is more often than not the first clue that you're in for a mediocre ride. As far as direction goes, the costumes and sets look fabulous. McQueen is not a good director of actions scenes. Whether it's burning buildings or a jumping dance floor, the action is all close-up shots that undermine the visual impact and emotion. If you go into a film called "Blitz" expecting to glimpse the horror that was The Blitz, prepare to be disappointed beyond a few brief CGI set pieces and the some lame fire fighting scenes.

What is the point of "Blitz?" A cynic or someone with a political axe to grind might point out that where the film excels is representation. It's good at showing us that people of all colours (and shapes and sizes) inhabited England in the '40s. And let's not forget people were also quite a bit racist back then. But divisiveness is what Hitler wants, and we're all in this together. It's easy to focus on the "race and representation" theme because there's so little else going on in the film, but that's giving the film too much credit. It actually has little interesting or non-superficial to say about race or race relations beyond the usual cliches. The main problem with "Blitz" is that it's a bland film with a lifeless script and not much dramatic insight on the historical period or the lives of the people caught up in it.

Contemporary with America's Vietnam War, the British Army in Northern Ireland was mired in a guerilla war with Republican paramilitaries seeking the end of what they saw as British colonial occupation. "Say Nothing" doesn't try to tell that history. It tells the more intimate story of Dolours Price: daughter of Republican revolutionaries, disillusioned by the failure of the non-violent civil rights movement against anti-Catholic discrimination, she chooses the path of armed resistance as a soldier in the IRA. This is a true story, or at least as true as Dolours Price herself was willing to tell, and that is not at all beyond dispute.

Dolours and her sister Marian were deep in the dirty war, part of a special unit run by (she claimed) none other than Gerry Adams, future leader of Sinn Fein (he would deny ever being a member of the IRA). She played a role in some of the most controversial and well-known operations of the IRA's war, for which she would pay a heavy price. Her story is dramatic enough for a Le Carre novel but the strength of this being a true story is that it isn't burdened with the need to throw in trite cliches involving love interests, family angst, or easy redemption. The plot moves along sharply, it's witty and hip and of course the actors are all young, attractive and vibrant. But the excitement and glamour of young people doing violence for a cause is never far from the tragedy and moral ambiguity of this violence.

Dolours and her sister Marian are very much sympathetic characters but the writing is smart enough not to take a side: whether the sisters were terrorists or freedom fighters is left to the viewers and their own political sympathies. The writing stays true to their story in that, to the end, the sisters never doubt the answer to this question.

Highly recommended as a companion piece is the 2018 documentary "I, Dolours" that covers many of the same events in Dolours Price's own words.