The Filth and the 'Fury' - or, 'Das Boot' on caterpillar tracks.

So there was I thinking that 'Inglourious Basterds' was the last word in second world war movies when along comes 'Fury', with Brad Pitt still killing Nazis in Germany - this time in a tank.

The 'Fury' is a Sherman tank helmed by Pitt, who has led his crew through the best part of the conflict. Logan Lerman is the wide eyed innocent forced to join this battle hardened crew.

Director David Ayer is no Tarantino and this is not as multi-layered as 'Basterds' but fortunately he does understand that what makes this sort of drama work is not the battle scenes but the camaraderie between a group of men who know they could die at any moment.

The cast are uniformly great. Pitt achieves something of a career best here. He plays Don 'Wardaddy' Collier very differently to his Lt. Aldo Raine. This character is stalwart in front of his men whilst teetering on the edge of breakdown in private. Other 'A' listers would have turned the role into a show off piece but Pitt is wise enough to play it subtly; blending into the background but always making his presence known. We get a real sense of the psychic toll the conflict has taken on him as much as his will to get the job done right. Logan is cleverly cast as the greenhorn - it really is as if someone has just thrown Percy Jackson into the frontline. He is the film's conscience. Shia LaBeouf method acts to his heart's content in the background but does more than enough here to silence his haters. Like Pitt, he's not over the top. There's no "look at me acting" ticks - just someone really understanding the part and living it.

It's one of the filthiest, dirtiest, grungiest films of its type and progresses the "authentic" aesthetic of films like 'Saving Private Ryan' and 'Das Boot' to the level where you can actually taste the mud, blood and gasoline in your mouth. The attention to detail and the "lived in" feel of the design is just incredible. If Sergio Leone had ever got to make a spaghetti war film (he did try) it would certainly have looked like this.

I once fell asleep in the cinema during 'The Fast and The Furious' (by the same director funnily enough) but there's no way anyone could nap through this. It's LOUD as hell. Every shell fired seems to make the walls of the cinema quake. Really worth seeing this on a big screen if you can. It's also visually rich and I applaud the director and cinematographer Roman Vasyanov for making the cramped interior shots as interesting as the exterior carnage. There's a bravura opening sequence which is as powerful a mood setter as anything I've ever seen. The last shot is pretty good too.

You can feel the gears begin to crunch a third of the way into the film as the pace drops for some lengthy character scenes. This will lose some of the audience no doubt, especially the "show us the gore" crowd (and there is plenty of gore), but these will be the same people who find Tarantino "too talky". Screw you if you can't put up with a bit of talking. The middle part of the film turns to that most modern of movie cliches - 'the uncomfortable dinner table scene'. It's actually very well done but doesn't crank up the tension to the same degree as similar scenes in 'Inglorious Basterds' (and I promise that this is the last time I will mention that film, or Mr T, in the write up of this one - sorry but it's difficult not to reference it repeatedly). It's a necessary scene in my opinion as it shows the two leads trying to hold on to a scarce moment of normality but I'm not sure it pays off to the extent it should. It felt like a manipulative device, a cliche, and that lessened the emotional impact. There's a lot of different ways that scene could have ended and you suspect in real life it would have turned a lot nastier. But that is always the trouble with films like this. Make the milieu as brutal and as authentic as you can but then sweeten it to make it more palatable/watchable for audience. That's fair enough though; otherwise you'd end up with the cinematic equivalent of a Sven Hassel novel. Nobody wants that.

The final part of the film where this single tank has to hold its position against insurmountable odds is one of the most realistic combat sequences ever filmed and also a preposterous '300'-ish war story fantasy. It's a stunning piece of film-making though, by anyone's standards, and rivals 'Gravity' for that cumulative bad-situation-made-worse effect.

In short, if you like your war-is-hell films then you'll love it. It has the claustrophobia and unrelenting tension of 'Das Boot', the cynicism of 'Cross Of Iron' and the mise-en-scene of 'Saving Private Ryan'. If you don't like war-is-hell movies then I don't know....Brad Pitt takes his shirt off...what can I say? The Box Trolls is playing on another screen. Maybe you should see that. Let me know how it was.