World War II movie conceived on the small scale and small budget of the likes of The Desert Rats, Attack, Hell Is for Heroes: half a dozen survivors of a Reconnaissance and Intelligence squad are holed up in a strategically placed chateau in the Ardennes Forest. Its contemporariness, its separateness from an entire generation of low-budget post-war war movies, is affirmed beyond doubt by some self-conscious surrealist touches (the death-embrace of a fully upright G.I. and Nazi frozen into a sort of tableau mort, the emergence of a foot-scuffling fawn from the cavernous depths of the abandoned chateau) and some self-conscious absurdist touches (the snowball fight between the Americans and Germans, the Christmas-carol sing-a-long in the middle of no-man's-land) and some self-conscious literary narration distilled from the William Wharton novel ("I was having my usual trouble: noticing how beautiful the world is, just when I might be leaving it"). It's a pity that, out of a generally likable cast including Peter Berg, Kevin Dillon, and Arye Gross, the narration and central role fell to Ethan Hawke, whose gulping, breath-catching, eye-blinking "sensitivity" marks him as a worthy successor to Andrew McCarthy (worthy successor, in turn, to Robby Benson, Michael Sarrazin, others). Still and all, the movie should be given credit for trying to do something a little different, and, once it gets over the "novelistic" doubling back and filling in, and settles down to the situation at hand, succeeding in doing something a little diverting, a little suspenseful, a little poignant. Directed by Keith Gordon. (1992) — Duncan Shepherd
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