Michael Cimino's bold and brilliant Vietnam war epic The Deer Hunter is re-released; 36 years on, the film's combination of sulphurous anti-war imagery, disillusion and patriotic melancholy is even more striking. (I haven't watched this since it first came out in 1978; this time I literally gasped at how beautiful a 29-year-old Meryl Streep is in her pink bridesmaid's gown.)

Three Pennsylvania steelworkers, Mikey (Robert De Niro), Nick (Christopher Walken) and Steven (John Savage), obey Uncle Sam's call to fight in Vietnam, leaving behind wives and sweethearts, including shopworker Linda (Streep) who may be in love with more than one of them. Before they leave, they attend Steven's wedding: a ceremony in which, without realising it, they are saying goodbye to their old lives. These guys like nothing more than a laugh, a drink and hunting deer in the mountains. Here is where Mikey and Nick have a dimly conceived belief that the hunter's vocation is austere and manly and the deer's death noble and ennobling, unlike the gruesome chaos of war in south-east Asia, where they are captured and forced to take part in a hideous Russian roulette death cult.

Of course, this is just as much a fantasy as Francis Ford Coppola's Wagner-fuelled helicopter attack in Apocalypse Now, and The Deer Hunter has been criticised for this literal inaccuracy and showing Vietnam in terms of American victimhood. But for me, those macabre Russian roulette sequences stunningly proclaim war to be dehumanising and arbitrary. A simple, much-forgotten fact slaps you in the face after watching The Deer Hunter. Vietnam was different to Iraq and Afghanistan in one vital respect: the soldiers were drafted. They had no choice. The idea of sacrifice permeates everything, along with the cruelty and horror. This is Cimino's masterpiece.