It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

His name is Tom.. He could have been anyone. My father's story closely followed the general storyline of Tom, called up into the Army and who's first experience of conflict was the D-day landings on sword beach. While he told of his experiences. Much of the soldierly life was missing. This is where the film scores as it shows Tom's slow inexorable progress from civy street to training and preparation, mental as well as physical, for WAR, not in a wild action movie style but from the perspective of a quiet ordinary lad called up and sent to fight. Thankfully it does not ponder the rights and wrongs of war, after all, that was not a luxury a lad like Tom could afford. This is where the stock footage plays a major part in the movie as it presents a back drop to what Tom is being asked to face. Tom is a scared teenager who has a real sense that this day could very well be his last.

This review contains a potential spoiler.In honor of Ken Burns' The War I pulled out the recent DVD release of Stuart Cooper's Overlord to see things from the English perspective Overlord concerns a soldier named Tom from the point at which he leaves home to report for military service to the landing on D-Day. We follow as Tom trains, makes friends and generally waits for his part of the war to start. Shot in black and white to match a great deal of inserted footage from the time this is a soldier's life during wartime English style.Re-released in the US a year or so ago I remember the reviews being nearly perfect and I looked forward to getting the chance to see this "lost classic". Finally watching the film I'm left wondering what all the shouting has been about. Don't get me wrong, its a good film, its just the great one that some pundits, like Roger Ebert seemed to make it out to be.Essentially a film about waiting this film is merely a slice of life for the English soldier on the eve of the great invasion. We watch as Tom and his men are shunted around, we see their training, we see footage of the war from the air, and we watch as the men just wait around. There is more to it than that but for me its an 80 minute march to a foregone conclusion. It great to look at with some stunning sequences of old footage (flights over the countryside and air combat) that looked great on the 42 inch TV in the living room, but the film really didn't have much beyond that. Tom the central character and emotional center is too melancholy and morbid (he's certain he's going to die) that the film seems more incredibly sad if not incredibly distant. Why would any one want to be around him when he seems mostly to sulk and brood, even when he's falling in love with a girl he meets at a dance. The film looks stunning and on a technical level its a masterpiece of combining old with new footage.Clearly we are there, but with a central character such as the maudlin Tom Beddoe its not really a place we want to be no matter how good it looks.A disappointment (its good but not great) thats worth a look.

"Overlord" is one of the most disembodied and surreal war movies ever created. It's the story of a soldier, Tom, who joins the British Army, trains, then gets sent to the D-Day Invasion (Operation Overlord) and is promptly shot.What makes the movie remarkable, however, is that it uses stock footage of the war interspersed with original footage, strange and original sound-mixing, and discontinuous editing to trace the soldier's progress of mental states to that moment of clarity right before he dies. Past, present, and future are all collapsed into one moment, and an image that provokes a response earlier has a key relationship with an image that comes later. Death, sexuality, and despair are clumped together as well, creating one of the most artful and poetic works ever made on war--which is important, considering that pseudo-poetic "antiwar" movies are made all the time that often break down into over-indulgent action films. No, this movie shares a lot more with Dziga Vertov's "The Man with a Movie Camera" than "The Sands of Iwo Jima".--PolarisDiB

I caught Overlord on IFC as a programming homage to Jerry Harvey and the Z Channel (thanx to Xan Cassavetes). If you are a WWII buff who loves the History Channel and interesting experimental films you'll enjoy this movie. The stock war footage is so seamlessly interwoven that it is almost a verite experience. I love when you catch something so offbeat and refreshing that you can't believe you had never heard of it before. Do they still make Fresca soda? I need 10 lines to post this. I hope I never encounter a rabid dingo. I wonder if Spielberg has seen this movie. I wonder if Spielberg digs Fresca soda. I wonder if I should've eaten that last mushroom cap.Check it out.