Stones for the Rampart: Battle for Warsaw

Previously filmed as Operation Arsenal by Jan Lomnicki (1978), Aleksander Kaminski's landmark 1943 novel celebrates the Polish Scouting Association who fought alongside the Home Army against the occupying Nazis under the code-name "Grey Ranks". Director Robert Glinski remakes it with good intentions and exceptional widescreen photography, although the result is a sometimes overly flashy treatise on patriotic heroism that reduces acts of selfless courage to stylised set pieces. These owe more to video gaming than the proud tradition of Polish war cinema. The fact that the young heroes (Tomasz Zietek, Marcel Sabat and Kamil Szeptycki) are depicted as ordinary boys with adolescent curiosities and appetites caused some controversy at home, where the characters have a certain cult cachet. But Glinski is right to show them flirting with girls in between their minor acts of sabotage, as this makes the climactic rescue scenes in a Gestapo torture cell seem all the more noble and the ensuing fury and guilt all the more plausible.