Fury

There's a scene in David Ayer's latest film where an ambush sends a vehicle up in flames along with everyone inside it. One soldier leaps out, burning, writhing and screaming in pain. He pulls out his pistol and shoots himself in the head. There's another where the inside of a tank is cleaned out post-battle to reveal a slice of someone's face plastered to the floor, the perfectly intact eye staring sorrowfully up at the camera.

Fury received praise for its unflinching depiction of the horrors of war but, at a certain point, its blood-and-gore approach seems less in service of historical realism and more a means of delivering the kind of masochistic machismo in which Ayer has a tendency to deal, with any insights on the trauma of warfare getting lost amid the chest-pounding, hoo-ahs and machine-gun fire.

There are two female characters. They don't speak English. Their lines are not subtitled. Bechdel be damned. [Ross McIndoe]