Empires of The Sun (1987)
By Steven Spielberg, Starring Christian Bale, John Malkovich, Miranda Richardson, and others... (including Ben Stiller)
This is my all time favorite since childhood. It has many stories and plots in one movie, progressing and told nicely along the movie. It didn't scar the audience emotionally or try to feed you with something. This is a mild yet heavy movie that anyone can just go and watch, while expecting something big.
It tells the story of J.G. Ballard during Japan's occupation of China. He is a British boy who was separated from his parents in the middle of chaos after Japan invaded the rest of Shanghai in the end of 1941. Much of the stories revolves around his experience in Japanese internment camp in Suzhou until his liberation much later in 1945. So it is an adventure movie, a very plain basic one.
I give it a good 9/10.
5 Days of War (2011)
By Renny Harlin
Starring Rupert Friend, Richard Coyle, Andy García, Val Kilmer, Emmanuelle Chriqui, and others
Is a movie by Finnish director about South Ossetian war in 2008. The movie is heavily biased and could be Georgian propaganda. Amongst the mindless audience that watch the movie with me in public theatre, many quipped "That was cruel Russians."
Loosing all political tie-ins, the movie is actually quite good. It is well prepared, the storyline is pretty much comprehensive, and action is up to standard. But realism is very questionable: you got homing FFARs (S-8) and Su-25s randomly wasting its payload for attacking civilian houses, while operating under Russian budget. You can see many Russian military hardware here doing its things. The film is quite gory, it showed many Russian-paid armed militia committing war crimes, which is depicted in detail.
All in all, because the movie tries to be a political one, just look at the tagline: "The first casualty of war is truth," quoting Senator Hiram Johnson of California, 1917.
I give it a generous 4/10.