Were it not for the bombs which rained down on Calais, its current Musée des Beaux-Arts would not exist. The 1966 building was part of a civic reconstruction programme, so it too is a war memorial of sorts. And it's now playing host to an exhibition dedicated to the idea of the monument which looks to commemorate the two world wars.

Georg Baselitz, the veteran German artist who likes to bait, provoke and raise hackles, most recently with an interview in Der Spiegel in which he said women artists couldn’t paint (he mentioned the few exceptions, which was generous of him), is enjoying a triple billing in London. 

Valery Gergiev once described Yevgeny Svetlanov’s USSR - later Russian - State Symphony Orchestra to me as “an orchestra with a voice”. Then Svetlanov died and the voice cracked. Which are the other big Russian personalities now? Gergiev’s own Mariinsky? I don’t hear it. Yuri Temirkanov can still bend the St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra to his own whim of iron. The Russian National Orchestra was never in the running. But the Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra of Moscow Radio, to give its full title, still sounds as deep and rich as it did when I last heard it live nearly 30 years ago.

Derived from Markus Zusak's bestseller, director Brian Percival's movie is well cast and brimming with good intentions, but it's too long, too safe and too uneventful to do justice to its subject matter. The story charts the rise of Nazi Germany through the eyes of Liesel Meminger and her adoptive parents the Hubermanns, but the horrors are sanitised and the anticipated emotional punch is never delivered.

The Nazi war machine had great taste: it wanted all of the world’s art treasure for itself. Someone had to stop them .Based on Robert M Edsel’s book, George Clooney and Grant Heslov’s screenplay takes a starry stab at telling a culturally serious World War Two story. Shot in both the UK and Germany, its moral values are high, but this tasteful war heist/thriller hits the ground flat-footed and doesn't get better.

The agony of war and of surviving it almost destroyed Eric Lomax. A British POW after the fall of Singapore who was put to work by the Japanese on the Burma Railway, he suffered brutal and prolonged torture, trauma he dealt with in subsequent decades by sealing it inside him, and plotting revenge on his abusers as he fell into troubled sleep. Lomax’s memoir The Railway Man describes this and the reconciliation with one of his captors which finally defined his life.

The week after Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, Jonathan Teplitzky’s film again shows a man’s extraordinary capacity for forgiveness. It also goes further than The Bridge Over the River Kwai, which Lomax thought sanitised, in indicating the relentless savagery which he forgave.

Casting Colin Firth as Lomax is the film’s great coup. Its producers wanted an actor who doesn’t quite exist anymore, someone like the deeply moving Robert Donat, whose quiet decency, dignity and humour exemplified Britain’s wartime ideal (and which Alec Guinness’s Kwai officer tragically perverted). After The King’s Speech, the more substantial wartime sacrifice of this hero combines Firth’s own instinct for tasteful reserve with his capacity for naked emotion.

As Canadian nurse Patti Wallace, Nicole Kidman thinks she is meeting a repressed British gentleman in her own Brief Encounter when she starts talking to Lomax on a train in 1980, and they swiftly marry. When Lomax writhes and screams with nightmares on the bedroom floor, and his retreat into himself brutally consumes their marriage, she realises stiff upper lips can snap and scar (a Lomax nightmare of being back in the camp is pictured above).

The initially charming Firth-Kidman romance (pictured left), and Kidman’s part in the film, are soon subsidiary to an extensive wartime flashback, first teased out of Stellan Skarsgaard’s fellow veteran. Jeremy Irvine matches Firth as the bespectacled, 21-year-old Lomax, a rail enthusiast thrust into horror far from his Scottish home. He rigs a radio to keep spirits up with news of the war’s changing fortunes, as the POWs chip a 250-mile rail line out of towering rock and jungle with picks and spades, in shocking heat and humidity. Over 9,000 British and Australian soldiers died doing so, and over 80,000 local workers. The British Empire also used “native” labour to carve out Asian railways, and the moral murk of a war between competing colonial powers is indicated in a script by Frank Cottrell Boyce and Andy Paterson. But the degree of ruthlessness of the Japanese, and the innocence of Lomax after the radio is discovered and his long torture begins, is unanswerable.

The Railway Man is uneven in tone and takes great dramatic liberties, creating a climax in which Lomax not only confronts his interrogator Nagase (Hiroyuki Sanada) at the Death Railway tourist site where he works in the film’s present, but cages and means to kill him (unlikely to be encouraged when the BBC filmed the actual meeting in 1993). These heightened dramatic leaps are justified because, like every performance and especially Firth’s, they serve Eric Lomax’s extraordinary story.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Railway Man