A splendid war movie. The combat sequences are harrowing -- all the more so for the director's spare, sharp-eyed style -- and the performances are phenomenally fine.

This is a supreme example of how a filmmaker can make a work of fiction based on fact that, without didacticism or heavy-handed moralizing, leaves us feeling more connected not just with history but with what makes us human in the first place.

On the list of WWII stories criminally ignored by six decades of combat movies in the past 60 years, the heroics of French colonial soldiers ranks pretty high. But Rachid Bouchareb's powerful drama -- which won the 2006 Cannes Film Festival's best-actors award for its superb ensemble cast and was nominated for a best foreign-language-film Oscar, went a long way toward rectifying the situation, both on screen and in real life.

The ensemble cast shared the best-actor award at the 2006 Cannes film festival -- and rightly so.

Indigènes is a stupendous work--and why that new title stinks to heaven.

As directed by Rachid Bouchareb, himself born in France to Algerian immigrants, "Days of Glory" is a kind of a North African "Saving Private Ryan," a taut, involving film that delivers all the things we look for in war movies and does so with intelligence and integrity.

Its social impact is part of what makes this movie memorable. But as with almost any exceptional, truthful war picture, Days of Glory moves us because we know the soldiers -- because we share their fear, triumph and pain.

Not only a stirring history lesson and an action-packed war film, Glory is also a ferocious statement about enduring discrimination that resounds today.

Bouchareb's film helped shame the French government into raising pensions for more than 80,000 of these veterans. Here's that rare movie that really did change things. I'll be damned.

A movingly acted, terrifically old-fashioned World War II picture rethought as a post-colonial rebuke.

An unusually engrossing World War II epic.

A war film more of sober, grim reflection than balls-out escapades. Yet it grips consistently, its bursts of combat delivering gut-punches of veracity.

The performances are so passionate and the characters (even minor ones) so deftly sketched that it's impossible not to get swept up. You watch the battle scenes from behind your hands, just praying that these guys make it.

With strong visuals and even stronger emotions, Rachid Bouchareb's Days of Glory makes a powerful war film about a particularly unique subject.