The Best War Movies

Era: The CrusadesAfter reigniting the swords-and-sandals genre in Gladiator, legendary director Ridley Scott delivered a full-on historical war epic set during the Crusades. Orlando Bloom plays Balian of Ibelin, a French blacksmith pulled into the religious conflict, becoming a leader and fighting against the forces of the Sultan Saladin. Avoid the theatrical edition – the completely-overhauled and much more satisfying Director's Cut significantly deepens the characters and rounds out the story. For the ultimate experience, watch the Roadshow Cut – which features the Director's Cut of the film, plus opening overture and mid-movie intermission.Buy here on Amazon

Era: The Napoleonic WarsSergei Bondarchuk's spared-no-expense depiction of the Battle Of Waterloo is filmmaking at mind-boggling scale. Before the time of CGI, the filmmaker wrangled 17,000 extras drafted in from the Soviet Army to depict the bloody Belgian battle, with Rod Steiger as Napoleon, Christoper Plummer as the Duke of Wellington, and Orson Welles as France's King Louis XVIII. Its ambition ultimately proved too big – the film couldn't hope to recoup its production costs, though it did go on to become a major inspiration for the way Peter Jackson approached the battles in his Lord Of The Rings adaptations.Buy now on Amazon

Era: World War IThis early Stanley Kubrick film explores the illogic of war itself, as examined through the pointlessness of the First World War at large. The action largely takes place around the attempted siege of a German 'anthill' position – a mission that results in the French soldiers being hit by Allied artillery, while survivors are court martially with charges of 'cowardice' in the aftermath. An anti-war movie that's just as cinematic as you'd expect from the master director.Buy now on Amazon

Era: World War IPresented as one extended, fluid take, Sam Mendes' soldier-centric tale is no mere technical exercise. George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman are Lance Corporals Schofield and Blake, dispatched on a race-against-time mission across No Man's Land in order to stop an ill-conceived battle that will result in thousands of British soldiers dead. For an extra personal kick, Blake's older brother is among the troops set to go over the top. Mendes crafts astonishing tension and incredible immersion with a non-stop tour through the hell of trenches, battlefields, and war-torn towns, with jaw-dropping cinematography from the legendary Roger Deakins.Buy now on Amazon

Era: World War IIn a similar vein to Kubrick's Paths Of Glory, Lewis Milestone's near-century-old adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's novel is about the futility of war and the innocent young soldiers who lost their lives en masse to the conflict. It's not only one of the definitive and formative war films, but also one of the most notable early 'talkie' features as the medium entered the era of sound.Buy now on Amazon

Era: World War IAfter depicting war-torn fantasy landscapes in The Lord Of The Rings, Peter Jackson turned his attention to real-life footage from the First World War. With his team, he created a system for smoothing out the jerky framerate of very early film reels, and used it to turn traditionally 'old' looking footage from the Imperial War Museum into something more recognisably modern, before colouring it and adding dialogue with the help of lip-readers. The result is a deeply humanising look at the frontlines of the war, bolstered with interviews from soldiers who survived the conflict.Buy now on Amazon

Era: World War IIFor his first war movie, Christopher Nolan depicted the rescue of thousands of British and Allied soldiers pinned down on a Dunkirk beach by a fleet of boats, many civilian vessels among them. As ever, the filmmaker plays with chronology, presenting three vantage points on the rescue – land, sea, and air – each taking place within a different timescale, slotting together like a finely-tuned watch. It's a war film with minimal soldier-on-soldier combat – more a war-set survival thriller on the epic scale that Nolan pulls off like few others.Buy now on Amazon

Era: World War IISteven Spielberg's tale of American soldiers searching out the last remaining son of a mother whose other children were killed in combat presents an emotional journey through Nazi-occupied France. If it's full of memorable, emotional sequences, it's the opening D-Day scenes that hit hardest – a frenetic, graphic, and deeply disorientating trudge from sea to shore in a hail of bullets, death and chaos. Once seen, you'll never shake it.Buy now on Amazon

Era: World War IIReleased a matter of months apart, Clint Eastwood directed a pair of films about the 1945 battle of Iwo Jima in the Pacific, one told from the American side, and the other from the Japanese perspective. Viewed together, it results in a more well-rounded exploration of how the war played out in the East, a rare Hollywood-funded movie that literally offers equal resources to telling a non-American side of the story.Buy now on Amazon

Era: World War IILegendary filmmaker Terence Malick turned his preoccupations with mortality, love and the natural world to an adaptation of James Jones' novel, marking his return to directing after a 20 year absence. Featuring an epic cast – Sean Penn, Adrien Brody, George Clooney, Woody Harrelson, John Travolta, Jared Leto and more among them – The Thin Red Line follows a group of American soldiers on the Pacific entering the Battle of Guadalcanal. Told across a near-three-hour runtime, it's a monolithic work.Buy now on Amazon

Era: World War IIMost war films depict the hellish conditions of the battlefield. But Wolfgang Petersen's German U-boat movie depicts the claustrophobic nightmare of submarine warfare, all metallic, cramped interiors, conjuring a genuinely oppressive atmosphere that makes the inevitable coming combat all the more tense – culminating in an unforgettable finale. There are various versions from over the years – but the most widely-available is the near-three-and-a-half-hour director's cut.Buy now on Amazon

Era: World War IIIt's less an outright war movie than a war-adjacent movie, but few films have documented the atrocities of the Holocaust with such resonance, detail, and purpose as Spielberg's historical drama. Set against the backdrop of the Second World War, Liam Neeson stars as industrialist Oskar Schindler who turns his factory into a refuge for Jewish people, saving over 1000 lives. If the story is somewhat hopeful in the face of near-total devastation, Spielberg doesn't shy away from gut-wrenching, visceral details as the true horror and scale of the concentration camps and the liquidation of the ghettos becomes apparent. Completely remarkable.Buy now on Amazon

Era: World War IILegendary director David Lean looks away from the frontlines, instead telling a story of British prisoners of war being held by the Japanese forces and put to use building a railway bridge in Thailand. Little do the POWs know that Allied forces are planning to blow the bridge to ensure it can't be used by their enemies. It's as epic as you'd expect from Lean – but also a film that burrows into the increasingly fractured psychology of Alec Guinness' Colonel Nicholson.Buy now on Amazon

Era: World War IIThe refrain of The Dam Busters March remains one of the most instantly-recognisable music scores in movie history – and the film it soundtracked is just as memorable. Michael Anderson's film tells the story of British soldiers who team up with an inventor who has designed a 'bouncing bomb' – one that could skim along water, and therefore be used to attack Germany's industrial dams. Note: the film does include an animal character with a deeply racially-insensitive name, which was also part of the real-life story. This has not been changed or censored for its current home release, and instead has been presented in historical context – however, the BBFC recently re-rated the film at PG to reflect its inclusion of racist terms.Buy now on Amazon

Era: World War IIRichard Burton and Clint Eastwood star in this action-packed war movie that's filled with twists, turns, double- and triple-crosses, directed with brio by Brian G. Hutton. The pair play Allied soldiers dispatched to Germany to rescue an American general with knowledge of the planned D-Day operation who's being held captive in a Nazi fortress. Except, it soon becomes clear that there's a lot more to their mission than they know.Buy now on Amazon

Era: World War II'Harrowing' is not a word you'd typically associate with the films of Studio Ghibli. But Isao Takahata's animated story of young Japanese siblings attempting to survive in the wild after their home is destroyed in a bombing raid is devastating stuff. It's a film suffused with pain, exposing not only the tragedies that occur as a result of conflict, but the national failure to support those in need in the years after the war ended too.Buy now on Amazon

Era: World War IITo say it's not historically accurate would be an understatement – but Quentin Tarantino's movie establishes itself as a war fairytale right from its opening card: 'Once upon a time, in Nazi-occupied France…'. His take reimagines a world in which the war was won by French cinema fanatics and Jewish renegade soldiers, culminating in a fiery finale that's none-more-Tarantino. Plus, Christoph Waltz's Colonel Hans Landa is an all-time-great QT character, and the La Louisiane chapter is masterful.Buy now on Amazon

Era: Cold WarSet almost entirely in the chilly confines of the 'War Room', Stanley Kubrick's dark comedy satirises fears of nuclear obliteration over escalating tensions between America and the Soviets, taking a legitimate thriller concept (a route taken in Fail Safe, also released in 1964) and cranking it up with ludicrous dialogue. Peter Sellers is deliriously funny across three roles – British RAF officer Lionel Mandrake, US President Merkin Muffley, and the mad former-Nazi scientist Dr. Strangelove himself.Buy now on Amazon

Era: Vietnam WarFrancis Ford Coppola's psychological war epic adapts the basic tenets of Joseph Conrad's Heart Of Darkness – a journey downriver into madness and humanity at its ugliest – into a Vietnam War story, the filming of which famously spiralled out of control and nearly made Coppola become unhinged himself. Martin Sheen is Captain Benjamin Willard, dispatched to track down Marlon Brando's rogue Colonel Kurtz, who may have lost his mind in the heart of the jungle. It's epic on an external and internal scale, with a sticky, sweltering atmosphere. Following the original cut and the considerably extended 2001 Redux edition, last year brought Coppola's Final Cut – with a runtime that falls somewhere between the previous two versions.Buy now on Amazon

Era: Vietnam WarFilmmaker Oliver Stone channelled his own experiences in the Vietnam War into this Oscar-winning exploration of the morality of an extensive conflict that proved devastating to the American people and its national consciousness. Charlie Sheen, Willem Dafoe and Tom Berenger are among those entering the jungle, with the typically unrestrained Stone delivering a film whose central idea is summed up in its iconic tagline: "The first casualty of war is innocence."Buy now on Amazon

Era: Vietnam WarKubrick's take on Vietnam is a literal film of two halves, exploring the dehumanisation of soldiers in the face of combat. For the first hour it's a gruelling journey through bootcamp and the spittle-flecked fury of R. Lee Ermy's Sergeant Hartman, before heading onto the frontlines in act two. A film full of iconic characters, performances, and visuals that continue to resonate. Buy now on Amazon

Era: Iraq WarKathryn Bigelow's Oscar-winning tale of a bomb disposal squad taking on a series of missions in the battlefields of Iraq is the definition of heart-stopping cinema. Bigelow cranks the tension to unbearable heights in a world where every misstep could result in explosive death, and the wrong wire snipped could spell disaster. There's no fluff, no faff here – Bigelow lets her setpieces do the talking, a macro view on the War On Terror that speaks to a much bigger picture.Buy now on Amazon

Era: Fictional Future War (2020)Taking the time-loop premise of Groundhog Day and applying it to a war in which humanity is being attacked on Earth by marauding aliens, Doug Liman's sci-fi adventure convincingly conjures the chaos and disorientation of frontline combat. Tom Cruise plays a cowardly officer unexpectedly dispatched to the warzone, stuck reliving the same battle over and over – teaming up with Emily Blunt's tough-as-nails Rita Vrataski to train himself up and eventually win the day. Together they make for a great pair of action heroes, delivering gripping boots-on-the-ground war sequences.Buy now on Amazon

Era: Fictional Future War (23rd Century)Paul Verhoeven turned his propensity for sci-fi-fuelled satire to the intersection of war and fascism with this tale of humanity waging war with an alien race of giant bugs. It may be (purposefully) outlandish, but Verhoeven expertly skewers glossy American propaganda, jingoism, and the true impact of violence, with lashings of gore and an unashamed B-movie aesthetic.Buy now on Amazon