Rescue Dawn

Werner Herzog's sensational narrative version of the story he told in his acclaimed 1997 documentary "Little Dieter Needs to Fly," about former real-life Navy pilot Dieter Dengler, is a wartime escape movie to top all others. Set in a thick Laotian jungle, Dieter (Christian Bale) becomes the only American to ever break out of a POW camp during the Vietnamese War thanks to his naive indomitable spirit and mental fortitude. Jeremy Davies ("Saving Private Ryan") gives a riveting performance as one of Dieter's emaciated fellow prisoners, but it's Steve Zahn that surprises with what is arguably his first real acting job, and man is he great. Herzog is back with a vengeance, and this movie is incredible.

Rated PG-13, 125 mins. (A) (Five Stars)

300

Apart from its pro-war propaganda, that comes in the form of unrelenting voice-over narration, "300" is a dog of a movie where cookie-cutter CGI battle scenes show thirty actors pretending to fight to the death. Adapted from Frank Miller and Lynn Varley’s graphic novel, "300" is based on the famous battle of Thermopylae wherein Spartan King Leonidas (Gerard Butler) and 300 career soldiers held off hundreds of thousands of Persian troops. Director Zack Snyder ("Dawn of the Dead"- 2004) pushes into the realm of camp with buff soldiers wearing leather briefs that make them look like male strippers at the end of their act. The evil Persian King Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) provides a camp coup de grace with plucked eyebrows, a megaphone voice and lots of gold chains to solidify Snyder’s torpid war porn mini epic.

Rated R, 117 mins. (D) (One Star)

Flyboys

Director Tony Bill’s "Flyboys" plays like a poor CGI relation to Howard Hughes' superior "Hell’s Angels." James Franco plays Blaine Rawlings, a Texas cowpoke that takes off for France to defend against the Germans during WWI. Blaine gets a crash course as a fighter pilot with the Lafayette Escadrille Squadron of the French Air Service before becoming distracted from his military duties by local farm girl Lucienne (Jennifer Decker). Blaine’s flying skills improve much faster than his command of the French language as his fellow pilots are gradually shot down during the film’s interminable dog fight sequences that repeat at regular intervals. "Flyboys" is a fluffy war movie that regales a brand of ‘civilized’ warfare that no longer exists and that has no bearing on the way ‘wars’ are fought today. The characters, although based on real life people, are one-dimensional stereotypes that exist for the sole purpose of presenting indistinguishable flesh-and-blood pilots for superabundant air battles.

Rated PG-13, 139 mins. (C+)

Jarhead

Director Sam Mendes delivers a full-blooded rendering of Marine Anthony Swofford’s unvarnished meditation on war with a theatrically bound story that could work well as a stage play. With a script version (by screenwriter William Broyles Jr.) based on Swofford’s book, Mendes apprehends the character driven motivations of confusion, boredom, fear and self-loathing that torment a group of ‘every-soldiers’ waiting for months in the Arabian desert for the Gulf War to begin so they can kill something, anything. "Jarhead" is the most unconventional anti-war film ever made because it candidly reveals the mental condition and attitudes of its participants without ever fetishizing or glamorizing violence. Practically all of the brutality we witness is of a psychological nature. ‘Once you go to war -- you will always be at war,’ is the clear message of this brilliant film.

Rated R. 115 mins. (A-) (Five Stars)