Without giving away the story, it's a pretty deep film on many levels from pain, to to hate to revenge and retribution to entitlement and remembering and forgetting all the reasons why we hate certain people in the first place.

Top class acting by Chris Cooper and Patricia Clarkson. Also very great performances by Kris Kristofferson and Richard Tyson. A film worth seeing and perhaps even, learning from.

This is one of my personal favorites, a rare little gem that seems to be undiscovered by the general population. Chris Cooper and Patricia Clarkson form the heart of the piece in what is a well-chosen cast. Few movies have ever captured the true hostilities that undergirded the Civil War, but this one seems to capture all the right tones and moods. If you're a fan of the book, Cold Mountain, try this movie out and see if you don't think it makes a good companion piece.

Pharoah's Army is a rare, realistic view of the American Civil War, which, like all wars, mostly happened "somewhere else". While almost all war movies focus on that "somewhere else", the pinpoints of battle and battlefields, this one courageously covers the other ninety per cent of the war, in the hills and countryside far from sweeping drama.

The director's gift for understatement and getting complex emotions across without phoney speeches give it almost a documentary feel, as does his willingness to let the late autumn Appalachians have their own beauty, without staging or drawing attention to it.

His most courageous choice was making the characters normal people: neither evil nor noble, just people, in a hopeless, hurtful time. The actors are incredibly powerful, all of them, down to the dog and the mule.

People who know little about the American Civil War, and the scar it left on American society -- still deep in the national psyche, even today -- may find the movie thin; the director assumes viewers are well-informed on these points, and doesn't do any "teaching" on them. But Pharoah's Army is one of the best of its genre, and a badly needed perspective that few other directors have explored. It certainly commanded my attention, from start to finish.