Robert De Niro's and Christopher Walken's notorious Russian roulette scene looms large over Michael Cimino's astonishingly powerful and vivid epic about three men from Pennsylvania whose lives are changed irrevocably in the tragic devastation of War. One of Hollywood's earliest attempts to process the traumatic memories of the Vietnam War it remains a tough yet tender and sometimes optimistic depiction of the human capacity to endure.

It's 1968, Michael (De Niro), Nick (Christopher Walken) and Steven (John Savage), life long friends from a small American working class steel town are preparing to ship out overseas following Steven's elaborate wedding and one final hunting trip. Little do they know these are the last days of their lives that will truely belong to them as military deployment awaits. In Vietnam, any preconceived dreams they had of military honour are quickly shattered in a wall of noise and the brutal inhumanities of war. And at it's centre comes one of the most horrifying sequences ever created in cinema as the three are taken prisioner and forced to play Russian roulette whilst their captors gamble on their fate.

Winner of multiple Oscars this iconic movie remains one of the most emotionally shattering films ever made and a powerful examination of the impact this controversial conflict had on the lives of those directly involved.

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