Steineded How sad is this?

Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Scotty Burke It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

rkhen Pharoah's Army is a rare, realistic view of the American Civil War, which, like all wars, mostly happened "somewhere else". While almost all war movies focus on that "somewhere else", the pinpoints of battle and battlefields, this one courageously covers the other ninety per cent of the war, in the hills and countryside far from sweeping drama.The director's gift for understatement and getting complex emotions across without phoney speeches give it almost a documentary feel, as does his willingness to let the late autumn Appalachians have their own beauty, without staging or drawing attention to it. His most courageous choice was making the characters normal people: neither evil nor noble, just people, in a hopeless, hurtful time. The actors are incredibly powerful, all of them, down to the dog and the mule. People who know little about the American Civil War, and the scar it left on American society -- still deep in the national psyche, even today -- may find the movie thin; the director assumes viewers are well-informed on these points, and doesn't do any "teaching" on them. But Pharoah's Army is one of the best of its genre, and a badly needed perspective that few other directors have explored. It certainly commanded my attention, from start to finish.

MBT If you're even mildly interested in the War between the States, this film is worth watching. It is great historical story telling. No flashing sabres, no cavalry charges, no carnage -- just the story of a sorry group of Union soldiers stumbling into the farm of a Confederate woman and her son and taking as much as their captain's conscience allows. This quantity moves up and down as events unfold affecting his sense of humanity in conflict with his sense of duty to his men and his cause. Ultimately, he reaches a compromise that any of us would be hard put to top. I appreciate the historical treatment of the war in Kentucky, a slave state that tried to stay neutral but eventually opted to remain in the Union under mysterious political circumstances involving the detention of certain legislators. Roughly half the soldiers from Kentucky fought for each side, but there's never been much treatment of what it was like to have lived there through those times. This film makes a great contribution simply in the "look and feel" of the time and place.

randy-132 Thought provoking, humbling depiction of the human tragedies of war. A small, but altruistic view of one family's interactions with the enemy during the civil war in Kentucky. This movie lessens the "glamor" of war; showing it's effect on not only the soldier but the entire family unit.A lot of today's movies show war as an opportunity to highlight the "hero's" and other glamorous features of war, but very little attempts to show the true effect war actually takes on a community. This movie attempts this through a retelling of a person's memory of those days. This movie is stated to be loose translation of an actual events, when in reality, this movie is probably a factual reality of hundreds, perhaps thousands of "actual events" during the civil war. I highly recommend those interested in our civil war to watch this movie.

RodReels-2 This is one of my personal favorites, a rare little gem that seems to be undiscovered by the general population. Chris Cooper and Patricia Clarkson form the heart of the piece in what is a well-chosen cast. Few movies have ever captured the true hostilities that undergirded the Civil War, but this one seems to capture all the right tones and moods. If you're a fan of the book, Cold Mountain, try this movie out and see if you don't think it makes a good companion piece.