One thinks of the great opening line of that great novel The Good Soldier: "This is the saddest story I have ever heard." Like many such tales, this one is worth taking to your aching heart.

Sverak's sheer technical finesse, and ability to spin on a dime between comedy and tragedy, the personal and the historical, makes Dark Blue World succeed where other similarly themed movies, from "Battle of Britain" to "The Blue Max," seem heavy-handed by comparison.

The last word you'd expect for it is "sweet," yet it is exactly the right one. That may come as no surprise to some, since the director is Jan Sverak, who brought sweetness to his breakthrough film "Koyla," but it caught me by total surprise.

A crackerjack combination of live action, special effects and recycled footage.

Dark Blue World's warm story and beautiful photography almost hits the mark, and it has a great ending.

Dark Blue World is "Pearl Harbor" without the product placements, without the Hollywood bombast, and certainly without the $100-million-plus budget.

The film mixes unashamed kitsch, thrilling airfight scenes and dark historical drama. But what gives it a special charge is its portrait of the Czech RAF group: what happened to them before, during and after the war.

A bittersweet world, and it's frankly one to which we've been before, but seldom do we see it rendered with such exquisite, if pained, craftsmanship.

This is a sensitive and at times gently humorous love-and-war story; the flight scenes are exciting and exquisitely crafted, the characters lovingly drawn.

Whatever Dark Blue World lacks in pyrotechnics it makes up for with richly drawn characters, high drama and pointed historical ironies.

It's a mixed blessing.

Has some terrific aerial sequences and exciting dogfights. But the clichés in the script by Zdenek Sverak (the director's father) keep the film firmly grounded when the action's not aloft.

It's hardly a foreign film; this is our common history, and it's a film well worth looking out for.

As it stands, Dark Blue World -- for all the considerable skills of the Sveraks and their colleagues on both sides of the camera -- occupies that treacherous territory between art film and popular epic.