The Trench (1999 William Boyd & scr)

Screened appropriately enough on Remembrance Sunday, Boyd's lesson of life in the trenches on the eve of the Battle of the Somme is quietly powerful, like being punched hard in the gut without you knowing it. Featuring Paul Nicholls, Daniel Craig, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Danny Dyer, James D'Arcy, Cillian Murphy, Ben Whishaw.

Boyd on set: his only film as a director

Julian Rhind-Tutt and Daniel Craig making impressions as alky officer and teetotaller sergeant.

Photographed by Tony Pierce-Roberts, music by Evelyn Glennie and Greg Malcangi - their simple effective rising chord sequence is creepy (this isn't nearly a good enough descriptor: the rising repeated pattern conveys inexorability and is unsettling, and it also seems to convey to me something almost medieval and religious, like a simple psalm or something beyond my knowledge) - and edited by husband and wife team Jim Clark (who was called off to cut Bond) and Laurence Méry-Clark. Personally I thought the decision to shoot purely inside the trench was a good one. And may I rebut the IMDB reviewers who claim the trench is too dry and tidy with this from Jim Clark's Dream Repairman: "Will maintained that research had proved that the trenches on the Somme in the summer of 1916 were dry as a bone and in immaculate condition. No-man's-land was a lush unmown meadow full of wildlife without a puddle to be seen, and Will was determined to undermine the clichéd view of the trenches as knee deep in mud."

The moment when a captured German soldier thanks the troops for a cigarette and is led away and they unanimously chime "See yer later" is funny and heart-breaking at the same time.

This, for Boyd, is where the twentieth century actually begun; he's keen to share this War with us (and indeed references moments from his own novel The New Confessions in a couple of places). Did he smile grimly as he plotted the final fate of his protagonists?

For me though it was Julian Rhind-Tutt's officer who stayed with me for days after it was all over.

Postscript 18 Jan 2014. Indeed, it's one of those films that doesn't leave you. The best kind.