ENEMY AT THE GATES (2001). Jean-Jacques Annaud's attempt at epic is the Battle of Stalingrad as staged by Masterpiece Theatre. The clichés kick in from the get-go, as an Alistair Cooke-like voiceover describes Stalingrad as "a city on the Volga where the fate of the world is being decided." And though German and Russian language and culture could not be more different, here everyone converses in the Queen's English, which makes you wonder what they're fighting over. The player clichés include a beautiful Russian Jewess named Tania (Rachel Weisz) who fights alongside the men and a double-agent kid named Sacha (Gabriel Marshall-Thomson) who's a dead ringer for the boy in the Warsaw Ghetto photograph. The plot has the Davy Crockett-like sharpshooter Vassili (Jude Law) taking on his German counterpart Major König (Ed Harris) while all Stalingrad watches breathlessly, unmindful of the half a million or so who are dying. Meanwhile Danilov (Joseph Fiennes) is making Vassili a newspaper legend as Annaud pays ludicrous tribute to The Front Page; and both men are falling for Tania. Other anomalies include the appearance of Nikita Khrushchev (Bob Hoskins), whose name no one can pronounce correctly, and John Williams's theme from Schindler's List, which permeates the film even though the score is credited to James Horner. Hitler should have given Stalingrad a pass -- and that's your cue for this overblown movie.

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