Days Of Glory

On the list of WWII stories criminally ignored by six decades of combat movies in the past 60 years, the heroics of French colonial soldiers ranks pretty high. But Rachid Bouchareb's powerful drama — which won the 2006 Cannes Film Festival's best-actors award for its superb ensemble cast and was nominated for a best foreign-language-film Oscar, went a long way toward rectifying the situation, both on screen and in real life. It follows a handful of the nearly 250,000 colonial soldiers, many of them North African Muslims, who served France during World War II. Routinely denied leaves, passed over for promotions, and humiliated by white soldiers and officers, thes...