Erich Maria Remarque's anti-war classic gets its first German-language adaptation for the screen, after the Hollywood versions of 1930 and 1979; it's a powerful, eloquent, conscientiously impassioned film from director and co-writer Edward Berger. Newcomer Felix Kammerer plays Paul, the German teenage boy who joins up with his schoolfriends in a naive patriotic fervour towards the end of the first world war, excitedly looking forward to an easy, swaggering march into Paris. Instead, he finds himself in a nightmare of bloodshed and chaos. ... All Quiet on the Western Front is a substantial, serious work, acted with urgency and focus and with battlefield scenes whose digital fabrications are expertly melded into the action. It never fails to do justice to its subject matter, though is perhaps conscious of its own classic status. Perhaps nothing in it quite matches the shudder of the brutal opening sequence of the war machine: a soldier is killed and his uniform is removed from his corpse, washed and mended with all the others and then dished out to raw recruit Paul with the dead man's name tag accidentally left on the collar, to Paul's bewilderment. ("Just too small for the fellow – it happens all the time!" explains the quartermaster hurriedly, snapping off the label.) The entire drama is flavoured with this grim premonition of death.