Fifty-seven minutes into this hour-long programme entitled "Al Murray’s Great British War Films", our host put panellist Dan Snow on the spot and asked him to name his favourite war film. “Does it have to be British?” Snow wondered. For a second it looked like Murray and his other two guests might stick him in solitary confinement for a week, yet Snow’s dizzy reaction was not only (unintentionally) funny but also gave away just how much he’d switched off by now. And he wouldn’t have been alone.

The forces of death and life come up against each other in the strange, somehow impressive Slovenian war drama Silent Sonata. I say “Slovenian” only because director Janez Burger hails from there, and that’s where some of the filming took place (the rest was in Ireland, which was the major, but not the only European co-producer of the film), but the cast and crew are markedly international. And though we can see it’s a war situation loosely based on the former Yugoslavia, there’s no hint at what corner of that conflict it’s refering to.

The title of Sebastian Junger’s documentary comes from a casual remark made as a group of journalists set off towards conflict in the outskirts of the Libyan town of Misrata: it may sound like a standard question from a battle-hardened war correspondent, but the film that follows shows that Tim Hetherington, whose off-camera voice it is, was anything but that. It was April 11 2011, and that journey would prove fatal for the British photographer and filmmaker.

The silent-era Wings is not a subtle film. Director William A. Wellman’s action-packed World War One tale of loyalty, love and war is also, at just short of two-and-a-half hours, long. At the time of its release in 1927, the film news bulletin Movie Time News declared it “the spectacular epic of the year, the national box office sensation of 1927”. In 1929 it became the first film to pick up an Oscar for Best Picture, at the first Academy Awards ceremony.

Nikita Mikhalkov’s Burnt by the Sun was one of the few good news stories in Russian cinema in the Nineties. Made with his longterm scriptwriter Rustam Ibragimbekov, it picked up a main prize at Cannes in 1994 and the Best Foreign Film Oscar the following year. Its small Chekhovian story - adapted later by Peter Flannery for a successful run at London’s National Theatre - resounded far above its weight.

Russian director Karen Shakhnazarov has three decades of memorable film-making behind him, but remains much less known than he should be, at least in the English-speaking world: his edgy perestroika-era films like Courier and Assassin of the Tsar deserve far more atttention than they've generally received. Last year's White Tiger reunites him with longtime co-scripter Alexander Borodnyansky, and this time they've aimed resolutely for the mainstream, though it's a bid for the popular with an unusual twist.

Covering both sides of a conflict is never easy. Apart from the physical dangers, warring parties are wary of journalists who've reported on and established ties with the enemy. Afghanistan showed this as clearly as anywhere, when the US forces were suspicious of any journalists with Taliban contacts.

Veteran director Jerzy Hoffman is a chronicler of Polish history on the widest possible scale - still going strong, he turned 80 just after the 2011 3D release of Battle of Warsaw. His 1999 film With Fire and Sword caught earlier national heroics, from Poland’s 17th-century struggle with Ukraine, and tops Polish box office results to this day. His latest film captures the 1920 resistance of newly independent Poland to Red Army forces invading from the east, intent on spreading Communism through Europe.

Is Prokofiev’s 1938 score for Alexander Nevsky the greatest film music ever written? Not quite, if only for the fact that Sergei Eisenstein’s second sound-picture glorifying historical role models for the ever more tsar-like Stalin, Ivan the Terrible, is darker and more richly textured, and the music’s greater breadth reflects that.

Zero Dark Thirty could have easily gone by the name of the Danish thriller from last year, The Hunt, it’s so furiously single-minded. As it is, the film's striking title is a military term for half-past midnight - the timing of the Navy SEAL raid which shot dead Osama bin Laden in Pakistan on 2 May 2011. The shadowy, nail-biting recreation of that infamous operation forms the film’s finale and is its pièce de résistance.