The Trench

Without staging massive battle scenes or filling his characters' mouths with fiery rhetoric, novelist and first-time director William Boyd has made a powerful anti-war film. Using a strategy similar to that of DAS BOOT, Boyd distills the horror of war into the plight of a small group of terrified men confined to a tight, claustrophobic space: the narrow, winding trenches of Northern France. The date is June 29, 1916; the place, the Western Front. On the eve of the Battle of the Somme — WWI's largest offensive and the bloodiest battle in the history of the British Army — a group of English soldiers under the command of tippling Second Lieutenant Hart (Juli...