AS a war film, this must rate as one of the very best of recent years.

Recreating the final days of Hitler and the Third Reich in April/May 1945, it leaves no stone unturned as the grotesque fate of the Nazis is played out in the Berlin Fuehrerbunker with the Red Army onslaught raging above.

Detailed attention has been paid to faithfully recreate every historical, geographical and spatial fact.

It sounds like a recipe for what would essentially be a rather fastidious docu-drama.

But so powerful is the true story of those last throes of tyranny against the backdrop of the surreal, crushing atmosphere in the bunker, that the film is utterly riveting.

Bruno Ganz as Hitler is phenomenal.

Ganz plays Hitler as human - deeply deluded but not clinically mad, as previous screen depictions would have you believe.

It's one of the most powerful performances of Hitler ever.

Alexandra Maria Lara as Trudl Junge, Hitler's young secretary, is also excellent.

Junge got well and truly sucked into the whole Nazi philosophy and later spoke candidly of her ridiculously fawning and nave faith in Hitler.

She bitterly regretted her youth.

But in the DVD extras, Alexandra Maria Lara says it's easy to criticise Junge with hindsight.

But can all of us honestly say that had we been swept up in a Nazi Germany led by a revered "father figure", we would have acted any differently to her?

It's a terrifying question and one of many posed by this masterful film.

JS