Apocalypse Now
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
1979
No production has ever gone further off the rails or shown it more clearly: Coppola's Vietnam abandons the war film for pure hallucination, and the helicopters over the trees are permanent.
★ 9.7
The Movies canon
Sourced and screened.
Every film chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 731 films or filter by genre, director, place, and year.
Browse all 731 films or filter by genre, director, place, and year.
Dr. Strangelove
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
1964
Nuclear annihilation has never been this funny, and never will be again: Kubrick worked out that the strategy was already absurd, and simply let his generals talk.
★ 9.6
Saving Private Ryan
Directed by Steven Spielberg
1998
War films look different since the first twenty minutes of this one: Spielberg put the camera in the surf at Omaha Beach and veterans left cinemas unable to speak.
★ 8.8
Come and See
Directed by Elem Klimov
1985 · Russia
No other war film can follow it: Klimov put a boy's face through the destruction of Belarus and let it age visibly, and nobody watches it twice lightly.
★ 8.6
Grave of the Fireflies
Directed by Isao Takahata
1988 · Japan
Nobody recommends this one lightly: Takahata put two children through the last months of the war in Japan, and being animated makes it harder to bear, not easier.
★ 8.4
Paths of Glory
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
1957
France stayed uncomfortable enough to keep it out of cinemas for eighteen years: Kubrick tracked the camera down the trenches and staged an injustice that still makes people furious.
★ 8.3
Full Metal Jacket
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
1987
The first half is the most quoted boot camp ever filmed: Kubrick found a real Marine drill instructor, let him write half his own material, and made basic training terrifying.
★ 8.3
The Bridge on the River Kwai
Directed by David Lean
1957
Lean built an epic about the seduction of a job well done: a British colonel in a Japanese prison camp finds a strange satisfaction in building their bridge properly.
★ 8.2
Das Boot
Directed by Wolfgang Petersen
1981 · Germany
No war film has ever been this claustrophobic: Petersen ran a camera the length of a U-boat again and again until the steel walls start pressing in on you.
★ 8.1
The Deer Hunter
Directed by Michael Cimino
1978
Cimino spends a whole first act on a steel town and a wedding, so that when the war arrives it lands on people you already know by name.
★ 8.0
Inglourious Basterds
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
2009
Christoph Waltz plays four languages and makes every one of them frightening: Tarantino builds his scenes as long conversations where somebody at the table already knows too much.
★ 7.9
The Battle of Algiers
Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo
1966 · Italy
Both armies and revolutionaries have studied it as a manual: Pontecorvo staged the Algerian insurgency so plainly that audiences have always mistaken parts of it for newsreel footage.
★ 7.9
The Pianist
Directed by Roman Polanski
2002
Polanski escaped the Krakow ghetto as a child and waited sixty years to film any of it: a pianist left alone in the ruins of Warsaw, and no heroism anywhere.
★ 7.4
The Hurt Locker
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
2009
Bigelow made war feel like an addiction rather than a duty: a bomb disposal sergeant works without much fear, and every defusal is stretched until the room turns physical.
★ 7.3
Platoon
Directed by Oliver Stone
1986
Oliver Stone served in Vietnam and made this to correct everyone else's version: no glamour, no clarity, and a platoon that splits between two sergeants and stays split.
★ 7.3
Zero Dark Thirty
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
2012
Bigelow filmed a decade-long manhunt as pure procedure and let the audience sit with what it cost: the torture scenes started an argument that has never been settled.
★ 7.2
The Thin Red Line
Directed by Terrence Malick
1998
Malick came back after twenty years and made a war film about grass, light and the voices in men's heads: Guadalcanal, filmed as though the island were the subject.
★ 7.2
Rome Open City
Directed by Roberto Rossellini
1945 · Italy
Rossellini shot it in the streets months after the Germans pulled out, on mismatched surplus stock scrounged from an army supplier: this is where Italian neorealism arrives.
★ 7.2
Letters from Iwo Jima
Directed by Clint Eastwood
2006
Eastwood made two films about the same battle, and the Japanese one is the better: shot almost entirely in Japanese, with a general nobody in America had heard of.
★ 6.9
MASH
Directed by Robert Altman
1970
Altman's overlapping dialogue turns up fully formed: army surgeons in Korea behave appallingly in order to stay sane, and the film was really about Vietnam all along.
★ 6.8
The Great Escape
Directed by John Sturges
1963
Captivity has never looked like this much fun: Sturges rebuilt a real 1944 breakout from a German camp into tunnel engineering, forged papers and men who refuse to sit still.
★ 6.8
Glory
Directed by Edward Zwick
1989
The Civil War film that finally noticed who else was fighting it: the 54th Massachusetts fights for boots, for pay equal to white soldiers, and for permission to be used at all.
★ 6.7
Downfall
Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel
2004
Bruno Ganz plays Hitler as a man rather than a symbol, and Germany argued about the film for a year: the last twelve days in the bunker, filmed without comment or consolation.
★ 6.7
All Quiet on the Western Front
Directed by Lewis Milestone
1930
The Nazis sent brownshirts to disrupt its German screenings and banned it outright once in power: the first great sound film about war, told entirely from inside a German schoolboys' trench.
★ 6.5
Doctor Zhivago
Directed by David Lean
1965
Critics savaged it on release and audiences ignored them completely: Lean shot the Russian winter in Spain, and Maurice Jarre's balalaika theme was inescapable for a decade afterward.
★ 6.5
Patton
Directed by Franklin J. Schaffner
1970
Coppola co-wrote it before The Godfather and George C. Scott refused the Oscar: a monologue in front of an enormous flag opens the most ambivalent film Hollywood ever made about a general.
★ 6.5
Black Hawk Down
Directed by Ridley Scott
2001
Ridley Scott stripped out almost everything a war film normally has: no arcs, barely any backstory, just eighteen hours in Mogadishu in 1993 rendered as continuous, disorienting noise and dust.
★ 6.3
To Have and Have Not
Directed by Howard Hawks
1944
Hawks bet Hemingway he could film his worst book, and hired William Faulkner to help: Bacall was nineteen, met Bogart on set, and says the whistle line straight to him.
★ 6.2
From Here to Eternity
Directed by Fred Zinnemann
1953
The kiss in the surf was scandalous enough to define the decade: Pearl Harbor sits at the end of it, and Sinatra took a role for almost nothing to save his career.
★ 6.1
Three Kings
Directed by David O. Russell
1999
Russell shot it on bleached film stock so the desert looks radioactive: four American soldiers go looking for Kuwaiti gold in the days after the Gulf War stops, carrying a stolen map.
★ 6.0
Stalag 17
Directed by Billy Wilder
1953
Wilder made a POW comedy in 1953 and refused to soften the Americans in it: a barracks works out that somebody inside is trading information to the Germans, and starts looking around.
★ 5.8
Empire of the Sun
Directed by Steven Spielberg
1987
Christian Bale was thirteen and carries the entire film: Spielberg follows an English boy separated from his parents in occupied Shanghai, and never lets the war become an adventure.
★ 5.4
Born on the Fourth of July
Directed by Oliver Stone
1989
Ron Kovic wrote the book and then the screenplay with Oliver Stone, who had been to the same war: a Long Island boy enlists in 1967, and Tom Cruise abandons his own image.
★ 4.7
Good Morning, Vietnam
Directed by Barry Levinson
1987
Robin Williams was handed a microphone and the cameras simply ran: an armed forces disc jockey lands in Saigon in 1965, and everyone above him wants the broadcast back the way it was.
★ 4.1
The Big Red One
Directed by Samuel Fuller
1980
Samuel Fuller fought in the division he is filming and waited thirty-five years to tell it: a squad from North Africa to Sicily to Normandy, filmed as a job that does not end.
★ 3.3
Where Eagles Dare
Directed by Brian G. Hutton
1968 · United Kingdom
Alistair MacLean wrote it as a screenplay first and a novel second: Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood go into an Alpine castle after a captured general, and the cable car fight is superb.
★ 2.8
Cross of Iron
Directed by Sam Peckinpah
1977
Sam Peckinpah's only war film, told entirely from the German side of the Eastern Front: Orson Welles called it the finest anti-war film since All Quiet on the Western Front.
★ 2.7
Hamburger Hill
Directed by John Irvin
1987
The least mythologizing Vietnam film anyone made: ten days in May 1969 taking one hill that the army abandoned immediately afterward, filmed as almost pure exhaustion and mud.
★ 2.0
Mrs. Miniver
Directed by William Wyler
1942 · United Kingdom
Roosevelt had the vicar's closing speech printed on leaflets and dropped over occupied Europe: an English family absorbs the first year of the war, and America was watching very closely.
★ 1.4