Overlord [re-release]

Unlike "Saving Private Ryan" and other dramatizations based on D-Day, Overlord is an intimate film, one that focuses closely on Tom Beddoes (Brian Stirner), who enters the British army, goes through basic training and is one of the first ashore on D-Day. (Reviewed in 2004)

It's still a feat of period filmmaking. More than that, Overlord's revivification of a wasteland Europe offers up a powerful whip lesson for the postwar complacent: that the waging of war, even this most romanticized of conflicts, means bringing a corpse-mountain hell to someone's home neighborhood.

Like its hero, who is brave without a trace of bravado, Overlord is unusually quiet and thoughtful. The scale and ambition of combat movies has usually been epic, but this one is disarmingly lyrical and subjective.

The overriding themes of the film are never broadly stated but are subtly revealed, and the horror and reality of war are quietly played out on both the human and panoramic levels with disturbing effect.

Overlord feels like a small but vivid tragedy inside an epic container.

US director Stuart Cooper gives it the right understated, unheroic feel. (Review of Original Release)

Overlord is an ambitious, important experiment that has come to light after three decades of neglect.