Marlon Brando, James Mason, Richard Burton and, more recently, Ralph Fiennes have all given us their portrayals of grey-uniformed, heel-clicking evil.Some cooler, and perhaps more honest, pictures of wartime were made towards the end of the war itself; for example, Howard Hawks's Air Force (1943) and John Ford's They Were Expendable (1945), but most were morale-boosting exercises. U-571was filmed in Malta and chronicles a commando raid on a submarine and an attempt to snatch a Nazi de-coder.While fascination with the last war, and in particular with the Nazis as villains, has never gone away, it has been some time since cinema has handled the subject head-on.The current photographic exhibition, The Nazis, running at London's Photographers Gallery, is testament to the monocles, scars and sadistic sneers of the silver screen's array of SS comandants. Even the Sherlock Holmes mysteries made at that time customarily closed with a stirring speech about the importance of stamping out fascism.Traditionally, war films have feted valour in the field, but many honourable exceptions began to portray the real experiences of the men on the frontline, for example, Objective Burma! (1944) or A Walk in the Sun (1945, Lewis Milestone), The Steel Helmet (1950, Samuel Fuller) and Attack! (1956, Robert Aldrich). Directed by Terence Malick, it will feature some heavy box office artillery: George Clooney, Sean Penn, Woody Harrelson, Nick Nolte, John Travolta and John Cusack.A submarine adventure is the third of the war movies with an imminent release date.

It was to have opened this winter, but is now expected to reach the screens in March next year. Yet the director's gritty approach also marks a new and more sophisticated cinematic attitude to the Second World War. The passing of half a century appears at last to have allowed the subject to be addressed without a propagandist slant."It is hard to say whether there is a change in mood or whether all these war films are just coincidence," commented Tony Safford, senior vice-president of acquisitions at Twentieth Century Fox.The next film to be released in the war film genre is Twentieth Century Fox's remake of the 1964 Montgomery Clift film The Thin Red Line, set in the South Pacific. Tom Cruise is also thought to be developing a screenplay, provisionally called With Wings of Eagles, about a German officer who flouts an order to kill a group of prisoners.

Finally, The Emperor's General will tell of a plot to assassinate a powerful Japanese officer.As a result, the wide-lapelled suits and disco glitter balls that marked cinema's brief love affair with Seventies retro chic are all being returned to the props cupboard in favour of army fatigues and carbines.The leader of the pack, Saving Private Ryan, which begins with brutally realistic scenes from the Allied D-Day landings on Omaha beach in June 1944, made pounds 19m in its first weekend in the US and is a virtual certainty for Oscar recognition next spring.Based on the real-life events that surrounded a high-profile US army mission to rescue the only surviving brother in a family of four young soldiers, Tom Hanks is cast as the platoon leader sent behind enemy lines to retrieve Matt Damon, who plays the eponymous private.Spielberg's attention to grim and gory detail has disconcerted many cinema-goers, both in the US and at special screenings held in Ireland, where the film was made. It also provided a significant overall boost for the peace process, with many people in Omagh in particular clearly drawing a degree of comfort from it.Even some cynics who went prepared to mock the visit stayed to applaud, for whatever his weaknesses Bill Clinton undeniably produced strong chemistry in Northern Ireland. The Northern Ireland Secretary, Mo Mowlam, will build on that with her tour of the US this week, seeking further investment in Ulster. Bill Clinton's visit, together with the new Trimble-Mallon chemistry and the agreement's unexpected robustness, suggest it will be strong enough to survive the many buffetings ahead..