Stalingrad

It's impossible to overestimate the battle of Stalingrad's importance to the European theater outcome during World War II; the Soviet defense of their city in late 1942 was a decisive factor in the defeat of the German army on the Eastern Front. Filmmaker Fedor Bondarchuk's epic paean to that legendary fight boasts remarkable battle sequences, but is also so bombastic and cliché-ridden that it closely resembles the super-patriotic hokum that Hollywood studios were turning out during the war. Based loosely on historical incidents at Pavlov's House—an apartment building where holed-up Russian soldiers held off German assaults for a full two months—Stalingrad juxtaposes scenes built around the troops defending the bombed-out building, with others focusing on a “good German” officer (Thomas Kretschmann) who despises his commander's cruelty. On both sides, unlikely romance also sprouts (with actresses Maria Smolnikova and Yanina Studilina). The dialogue throughout is unfortunately riddled with banalities, the music score is overwrought, and a framing device—in which a Russian aid worker narrates the story while helping to rescue some German students trapped in the debris from a 2012 tsunami in Japan—is simply ill-advised. Joseph Vilsmaier's identically-titled 1993 epic (VL-3/13), although told from the German perspective, is a much better choice here. Optional. (F. Swietek)