Oscars for Best Picture, director Anthony Minghella and actress Juliett Binoche were among the many laurels showered on this adaptation of Michael Ondaatje's 1992 book. Romance blossoms between star-crossed lovers Count Laszlo de Almasy (Ralph Fiennes) and Katherine Clifton (Kristin Scott Thomas) in desert outposts during the Second World War, the couple's affair related in flashback by amnesiac, charred and dying Almasy to sympathetic nurse Hana (Binoche). A really sense of doom hangs over the couple and The English Patient boasts one of cinema's most moving endings.

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A film with all the clichés of heroism and overcoming disability, still leaves one with no doubt that Douglas Bader was a remarkable man. He had both his legs amputated after a flying accident in the early 30s and when war came, he flew for the RAF, being forced to bail out over Germany where he was taken prisoner, eventually placed in Colditz. This very British affair is made bearable by Kenneth More's humorous and inspiring portrayal of Bader. The moments that are particularly powerful are those in which he attempts to walk again with artificial legs.

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Vilsmaier's realist account of the battle of Stalingrad from the point of view of a weary and traumatized German platoon does for the Eastern Front what Das Boot did for the war at sea. After losing 338 of their 400-strong unit in the capture of a ruined stretch of the city, the survivors decide to desert. Vilsmaier makes no attempt to explain broader matters of strategy or politics, focusing instead on the disorientation, filth and terror that made up the daily life of the lower ranks.

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Noel Coward, who wrote, scored and co-ordnated this film, won a special Oscar for oustanding production achievement. The story of a sunken British destroyer, HMS Torrin, is told in flash backs by survivors as they cling to a life raft. Coward himself gives a characteristically clipped and somewaht expressionless performance as the captain of a destroyer, but the film is still a huge achievement.

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This Oscar-winning comedy plays the Holocaust for laughs, with Italian Jew Guido (Roberto Benigni) turning the horrific reality of a concentration camp into a vivid fantasy land in order to his shield his young son Joshua from the terrible truth. Although the film begins as slapstick, there are obvious undertones of darkness, and these ultimately serve to underline the atrocities committed within the concentration camps.

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