DVD: A Midnight Clear (15)

"I'm having my usual trouble, noticing how beautiful the world is just as I might be leaving it," Ethan Hawke's Will Knott narrates in Keith Gordon's strikingly photographed Second World War movie from 1992.

It's 1944 and a depleted squad of young soldiers (including Kevin Dillon, Frank Whaley and Peter Berg), are stationed in the snowy French countryside. These twitchy soldiers and the Germans they're stalking have lost their appetite for the fight, but can both sides engineer it so that no lives are lost? A bold plan is set in place, but it goes horribly wrong. A Midnight Clear, based on William Wharton's novel, is like its participants, an above-intelligent war movie.