It's a war that never ends – cinematically speaking, that is. The second world war may have ceased hostilities on 2 September 1945, with the formal surrender of Japan in a ceremony on the USS Missouri, but the film world has never stopped fighting. Nearly 70 years on, the demand for second world war movies appears unstoppable, the supply inexhaustible. Last year saw the release of films about Germany during the war (The Book Thief), British soldiers imprisoned by the Japanese (The Railway Man), and the confrontation between Nazi and Soviet forces at Stalingrad (Stalingrad). By the end of 2014 we will have had films about the race to recover stolen artworks (The Monuments Men), a US tank crew fighting their way across Germany (Fury), a US soldier who survived shipwreck and a PoW camp (Unbroken), a biopic of pioneering codebreaker Alan Turing (The Imitation Game) and a fictional account of the German occupation of France (Suite Française)...