Trick question: when did the Second World War start? The answer: that depends on nationality and historical perspective. For China, it was in 1937, while most of Europe was playing appeasement and America was happily isolationist. The end of that year saw the biggest single massacre ever known: the Rape of Nanking.

In 1944 a young Englishman, George Hogg (Rhys Meyers), having been in China since the start of the war, lead sixty orphaned boys on a journey of a thousand miles and across the Liu Pan Shan mountains to safety on the edge of the Mongolian desert. It's definitively a road movie. In the course of it, Hogg has to rely on and befriends a wide variety of characters, including: Chen (Chow Yun Yun-Fat), the leader of a group of Chinese partisans; Lee (Mitchell), an Australian adventurer-cum-nurse; and Madame Wang (Yeoh), an aristocratic survivor.

This has everything: adventure, danger, courage, children, awesome and exotic scenery, and of course love, so there's something in it for everyone. It's even based on a true story. I'll definitely be seeing it, and not just to find out how accurate my description of it is.