This haunting small-scale war movie, given a very limited release 20 years ago and available for the first time on DVD and Blu-ray, is based on a widely praised novel by William Wharton, who was wounded serving in the US infantry during the Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 1944-45, the setting for the film. An ironic, at times surreal fable about the madness of war, it centres on a six-man intelligence and reconnaissance squad dispatched by a reckless, vainglorious major (a mortician in civvy street) on a dangerous mission on the snowbound border of France, Belgium and Germany in the Ardennes, and how they become involved with an equally disillusioned Wehrmacht unit who want to negotiate a separate peace. The film's witty, intelligent narrator is Sergeant Will Knott (Ethan Hawke), and the plot's twists are matched by the sharpness of its moral insights.

The writer-director, Keith Gordon, a former juvenile actor, mostly works in TV (most recently on US version of The Killing). But in addition to this flawed gem he directed the equally offbeat Mother Night (1996), based on a novel by another veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. It is said that Steven Spielberg (in order to keep his project a secret) used the script of A Midnight Clear when auditioning actors for Saving Private Ryan.