Is this a war movie?

My name’s Robert Hutton. I write jokes about British politics, reviews of films, and books about spies. And like a lot of men whose hair is turning grey, I love war films. I grew up watching John Mills escaping from Colditz and trying to get a cold beer in Alexandria. I saw Jack Hawkins facing the cruel sea, Richard Burton going where eagles dared, and Alec Guinness trying to build a bridge over the Kwai. And most of all, I watched Michael Caine trying to get his tanks to Arnhem before Anthony Hopkins was forced to surrender.

My kids think these films are boring and refuse to watch them. But I think that like Westerns before them and the superhero films that came after them, war movies are a way to tell bigger stories. “Before the war the British cinema had no tradition,” wrote the critic Dilys Powell. “It took a war to compel the British to look at themselves and find themselves interesting.”

So each week I get together with my friend Duncan Weldon, and sometimes a guest, and watch a war movie. We talk about why it works, what it’s really about, which bits we’d want to be called in for, whether there are any female roles and, crucially, whether this was the operation that changed the course of World War 2.

We have a list of awards we give out, and we have an ever-growing list of films we’ve been asked to do. Mostly though, we have fun. Join us.