The 50 best war movies of all time

One of the greatest Italian films of all time, and one of the best World War I films to boot, Mario Monicelli’s epic cocks a dubious eyebrow at such clichéd ideas as duty and patriotism to show what combat and military service really look like for the long-suffering footsoldiers. Its pair of unlikely heroes are played by comedic stars Vittorio Gassman and Alberto Sordi, a loafing double act with a knack for absenting themselves from the action. At least, most of the time. The battle scenes, overseen by super-producer Dino De Laurentiis, offer realism and scale to match Paths of Glory, All Quiet on the Western Front et al, too, as the outmatched Italians take on the formidable Austrian invaders.

Time Out Tip: Producer Dino De Laurentiis requested a scene depicting a truck full of prostitutes arriving in the village be removed.

One of the few things not rationed during World War II, propaganda films tend to depict the enemy in the kind of one-dimensional terms not usually the making of classic cinema. And, sure, the Nazis who invade an unsuspecting English village in this Ealing effort are little more than swivel-eyed swastikabots. But the rounded, doughty villagers who stand up to them offer a stirring time capsule for the lesser-heralded aspects of war: the bonds of community on the home front. The Home Alone-style fight back is pretty thrilling too.

Time Out Tip: The movie is based on a short story by Graham Greene.

Gregory Peck had already arrived as a magnetic onscreen presence by the time this minutely detailed WWII Air Force drama gave him his most ambitious role to date, as a stern disciplinarian whose leadership transforms a bomber unit into a well-oiled machine. The ultimate praise: The movie was required viewing at military-service academies for decades.

Time Out Tip: Stunt pilot Paul Mantz was paid $4,500 to crash-land a B17 bomber in the early moments of the film – at the time, it was the most a stuntman had ever received for a single stunt.

Two soldiers – one American, the other Japanese – are marooned on an uninhabited island in the Pacific Ocean during the height of WWII and must work together to survive. Director John Boorman crafts a potent existential parable out of their plight (Jean-Paul Sartre would be proud) while also allowing the great Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune to rage with crowd-pleasing gusto.

Time Out Tip: Marvin and Mifune both served in World War II, obviously on opposing sides.

A delicate Russian-made tribute to that nation’s staggering sacrifice during WWII, Grigori Chukhrai's drama concerns a teenage infantryman's journey back home for a six-day break, a reward for taking out two German tanks. He marvels at the rape of the land – and also connects with a beautiful girl. It's a film about the value of the fight.

Time Out Tip: Chukhrai was given a lighter touch by Soviet censors because Nikita Khrushchev was a fan of his previous work.

Made at the peak of Hollywood's studio system and a flawless example of robust mainstream entertainment, John Sturgess's protoblockbuster turned Steve McQueen into a marquee idol – he gobbles up the lens even before he jumps the barbed-wire fence of his WWII POW camp on a motorcycle. Amazingly, the story is a real-life one.

Time Out Tip: Paul Brickhill, the Australian fighter pilot who wrote the book on which the film is based, participated in planning a breakout from a Nazi-run prison camp but did not actually manage to escape.

In a metaphorical sense, this sun is setting: Japan’s Emperor Hirohito (Issei Ogata, bearing an almost cosmic weight of shame) sees his country ravaged by atomic bombs at the end of WWII. Alone in his thoughts, he is approached by General Douglas MacArthur to negotiate a surrender. Alexander Sokurov’s fascinating drama approaches war from the top down, with an emphasis on power in decline.

Time Out Tip: The Sun has been widely screened in Japan due to fears of violent protests from right-wing extremists over the depiction of Hirohito.

Two British tommies in World War I must race across enemy lines to deliver a message that will save the lives of thousands of their compatriots. Sounds standard, until you hear the hook, that director Sam Mendes shot the whole thing in a single take. (Or, at least, made it look that way.) Is it a feat of technical bravura or an empty gimmick? Admittedly, it’s like watching someone play a video game at first. As it continues on, though, it has the effect of dissolving the protective fourth wall that surrounds most battlefield sequences, bringing audiences closer to the horror of warfare than is comfortable. 

Time Out Tip: Filming was preceded by six months of rehearsals.

The second – and superior – of Clint Eastwood’s reversed perspective depictions of the battle of Iwo Jima in 1945 is a more unsparing watch than Flags of Our Fathers. Its Japanese troops are holed up inside a mountain like an army of doomed Gollums, their grim despair captured through the viewpoint of one footsoldier not so keen to die for the Emperor. Directing in a language he doesn’t speak, Eastwood brings a humanist eye to a desperate struggle. 

Time Out Tip: Although set in Japan, the movie was shot predominantly in Malibu, Barstow and Bakersfield, California, as Eastwood felt it would be disrespectful to the fallen Japanese soldiers to shoot on the actual island of Iwo Jima.

To audience members in love with the sea, this movie, taken from three of Patrick O'Brian's popular Napoleonic War novels, will rank much higher. At its heart is the Kirk-Spock relationship between Russell Crowe's fearless captain and Paul Bettany's thoughtful doctor. The naval battles are an action fan's wet dream.

Time Out Tip: The cast participated in a two-week boot camp in order to learn sword and boat skills, but Russell Crowe says the most difficult aspect was teaching himself to play violin.

Taking Tom Cruise seriously has always been a dicey proposition. But you can't fault him for this open-throated effort, portraying real-life Vietnam vet Ron Kovic, who returned home to Long Island paralyzed from the chest down yet unencumbered mentally and ready to rage. Only three years after Top Gun, here was a real actor.

Time Out Tip: If you think Cruise’s stunts in the Mission: Impossible franchise are crazy, he and Stone initially wanted to use a nerve agent to temporarily paralyze Cruise’s legs for real but couldn’t find any safe enough. 

This French heartbreaker popularized a storyline that would appear forever in war films: the strength of children to find a way through the muck. An orphaned five-year-old girl is befriended by a boy who helps her bury her dog. They tend to other dead animals in their small, makeshift cemetery, a poetic image that still wrecks.

Time Out Tip: Having originally been filmed as a short, young star Brigitte Fossey had to wear false teeth when the movie expanded into a full-length feature due to losing her baby teeth in the interim.

Studio Ghibli director Tokuma Shoten has vehemently denied that Grave of the Fireflies contains an anti-war message. Yet his devastating tale of two orphaned girls struggling to survive alone after the firebombing of Kobe is the epitome of a ‘war is hell’ narrative, one that ditches battlefield heroics to focus almost exclusively on the suffering endured by children in the aftermath of atrocity. A stirringly beautiful, emotionally gutting experience, this is masterful storytelling that, like its protagonists, finds traces of light in suffocating darkness… then promptly extinguishes it to devastating effect. 

Time Out Tip: The film was initially released in Japan as a double-feature with Hayao Miyazaki’s decidedly more lighthearted My Neighbor Totoro.

Fighting would become an insistent theme in the work of Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, the Soviet-era giant who opened the world to his nation’s more ambitious cinema in the ’60s and ’70s. But even though his other movies have become more popular (e.g., Solaris), it’s this one, his breakthrough, that remains his most emotional. It’s about a boy who becomes an army spy and loses his soul.

Time Out Tip: The movie features actual documentary footage of occupied Berlin, including images of the burnt corpse of Joseph Goebbels.

If war movies have become sophisticated, critical responses to the illusion of the gung-ho supersoldier, we have this Hollywood drama to thank. Taking WWII’s pivotal Battle of the Bulge as its subject, director William Wellman's chronicle found room for then-bold notes of uncertainty and fear – even a hint of desertion.

Time Out Tip: Screenwriter Robert Pirosh was an infantryman who fought in the Battle of the Bulge and based the script on his own experiences.

Charlie Sheen follows his father’s footprints into the heart of darkness, but Oliver Stone’s harrowing Vietnam drama is no mythic journey. Drawing on his own experiences in the war, the director strips away all metaphor and notions of heroism, leaving only overwhelming fear – and millions of ants. Few films about the conflict so heavily underscore how senseless it all was, particularly in the chaotic combat sequences, which blur the lines between allies, enemies and winning or losing. 

Time Out Tip: Stone, who conceived of the film as soon as he returned home from Vietnam, originally wanted Doors frontman Jim Morrison to play the role that eventually went to Charlie Sheen. Stone sent Morrison a first draft in 1971, and the script was in his possession when he died.

No proper war-movie list would be complete without an entry from the revered Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda, who produced a masterful trilogy that included A Generation (1955) and Ashes and Diamonds (1958), along with this Cannes prize-winner. It's the first film to (brutally) portray the sewer-based Warsaw Uprising against the the Nazis.

Time Out Tip: Director Wajda was himself a member of the Polish resistance and based several scenes on his own experiences.

Famously, this was Richard Nixon's favorite film, a potent counterbalance to the voices of the protesters and a manly peptalk of righteousness. (It wasn't enough to help the President with his problems.) George C. Scott is magnificent in the title role, railing iconically in his opening monologue before a huge American flag.

Time Out Tip: The screenplay for Patton was co-written by Francis Ford Coppola.

‘Not every gun is pointed at the enemy!’ read a title card in the trailer, and there was truth in advertising: Robert Aldrich's WWII psychodrama concerns the breakdown of order between a captain losing his nerve (Eddie Albert) and a mouthy lieutenant (Jack Palance) rising to the occasion. The military refused to cooperate with the production, yet the low-budget filmmakers prevailed.

Time Out Tip: Eddie Albert and Jack Palance were both World War II veterans. Albert was awarded a Bronze Star for rescuing 70 wounded Marines during the Battle of Tarawa in 1943.

As the director of Basic Instinct, Paul Verhoeven is familiar with using sex as a weapon, but the context is quite different in this loosely historically-based espionage thriller. Clarice van Houten, of Game of Thrones, is a Jewish singer turned spy, using her feminine wiles to shag secrets out of a Nazi commander in the occupied Netherlands. Like Verhoeven’s best-known work, it’s lurid, lusty and subversive, but also twisty and exciting like a classic wartime noir, making for a captivating melange.

Time Out Tip: Black Book is the most expensive Dutch film ever made, with a budget of €18 million.

To a degree, Robert Aldrich’s rugged classic blew up the traditional war film. Up to that point, the popular image of American soldiers in World War II was of well-scrubbed, upstanding young men fighting the good fight. The soldiers in Aldrich’s film are in the same fight, they just happen to be convicted murderers, psychotics, sexual predators and Charles Bronson. Gathered together for a suicide mission on the eve of D-Day, they prove more adept on the battlefield than expected. Save your ‘dad movie’ cracks – it absolutely rules.

Time Out Tip: Star Lee Marvin liked the movie but thought of it as ‘just a dummy moneymaker’.

Epic and meditative at once, David Lean’s Oscar-winning classic contains few battle sequences, but all it needs is one explosive moment to illustrate the insanity of war. Alec Guinness is a British POW forced to build a supply bridge by his Japanese captors – a project that becomes a point of prideful obsession for him, despite directly aiding the enemy. It builds to a climax that’s both an all-time great action scene and a crushing moment of clarity.

Time Out Tip: The movie is based on a book by French author Pierre Boulle, who also wrote Planet of the Apes.

This third take on Erich Maria Remarque’s World War I novel is by far the most ferocious, unsparing glimpse of the conflict on screen. Seen through the wide eyes of new conscript Paul Bäumer (the excellent Felix Kammerer) as he endures the hell of trench warfare, it brings new levels of bloody historical authenticity heightened by the fact that it’s entirely in German. Impressive in both its scale and visual power, Netflix’s big budget war movie is a weighty piece of work that also soars in its quieter moments of bonding and reflection. A haunting, visceral anti-war epic. 

Time Out Tip: The movie’s four Oscar wins is tied with Fanny and Alexander, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Parasite for the most in Academy Awards for a non-English-language film. 

In the spirit of war photography itself, Roberto Rossellini focused on the ravaged aftermath of a city's destruction (here, actual locations in Berlin). Thus we have one of the purest records of the violence of World War II, an invaluable time capsule as well as a neorealist landmark.

Time Out Tip: The movie is dedicated to Rosselini’s son, Romano, who died of appendicitis two years earlier at age 9. (Rosselini cast young Edmund Moeschke due to his resemblance to Romano.)

Peter Weir’s tragic, superbly mounted tale of two professional sprinters who join the Australian army circa WWI sheds some light on the casualty-heavy Turkish campaign. Weir's facility with action scenes is fully evident, especially during the gut-wrenching climactic battle. The film also helped to put a young actor named Mel Gibson on the international stage.

Time Out Tip: Unable to procure 400 male horse riders for the film, producers were forced to disguise 200 female riders in men’s clothing.

A mix of battlefield horror and coming-home drama, Michael Cimino’s Oscar winner received almost as much criticism as acclaim, primarily due to its notorious scenes of Vietnamese soldiers forcing American POWs to play games of Russian roulette. It’s a shame, because it’s not a movie that needs ahistorical embellishments to make its point. Sporting maybe the most stacked cast of the ‘70s – including Robert de Niro, Meryl Streep, Christopher Walken and John Cazale – there are few films that drill down quite as deep into the ways in which war destroys not just individual lives but whole communities, most of them working class. 

Time Out Tip: Over two dozen people died after reportedly being inspired by the film to give Russian roulette a try.

A strange outlier in the early career of David O Russell, Three Kings is a film of constant contradiction. Scene by scene, it jackknifes between realism and hyperstylisation, broad comedy and gut-wrenching drama, charisma and ugliness. Is it a comedy? An action heist flick? A meditation on America’s failed influence in the Middle East? The answer is all of the above: This is a film that earns the right to have its exploding cow and its political commentary on the same darkly comic platter. 

Time Out Tip: George Clooney and David O Russell clashed frequently on set, including a physical altercation over Russell’s perceived mistreatment of an extra.

Italy’s Neorealist genius Roberto Rossellini made a trio of essential WWII movies – this one falls in between Rome, Open City (1945) and Germany Year Zero (1948) and is undoubtedly the best of the bunch. It’s made up of six vignettes featuring soldiers, street urchins, prostitutes and priests. The total takeaway is aching humanity, even in the face of massive destruction and chaos.

Time Out Tip: Federico Fellini, who acted as assistant director, makes a cameo in the third episode.

A pacifistic masterpiece that showed the horrors of WWI trench warfare to a curious if unprepared audience, this epic (based on Erich Maria Remarque’s popular novel) also positioned the genre of the combat film as a Hollywood mark of pride: It was one of the first movies to earn a Best Picture Oscar.

Time Out Tip: The film was banned by the Nazi party and did not screen in Germany until 1956.

A late-career highlight for both star Lee Marvin and director Samuel Fuller, The Big Red One failed at the box office, but its reputation as a superlative war film has grown over the ensuing decades. Drawn from Fuller’s own experiences in World War II, it’s at once sweeping and intimate, focusing on a rifle squad led by a gruff division sergeant (Marvin) traversing North Africa and Europe. Constructed in diaristic fashion, the film depicts the troop’s increasingly tight bond through a series of vignettes that are alternately gripping and haunting.

Time Out Tip: In the 1980s, during the video nasty panic, British authorities seized copies of the film, mistaking it for a porno movie.

The director, Anthony Mann, was best known for his Westerns that pinned heroes in uncomfortable, craggy environments. When he tried his hand at a combat film (this was his first), he set the action in a Korean no-man's land where an American platoon led by Robert Ryan finds itself stranded. The result was an uncommonly tough movie for the Ike era.

Time Out Tip: The Pentagon condemned the film and refused to provide tanks and military extras.

They were called ‘The Greatest Generation’ for a reason and Steven Spielberg’s seminal war flick shows us what it was, in awe-inspiring and occasionally slightly awestruck fashion. Reams have been written about its game-changing opening battle scene on Omaha beach, and it remains terrifying to sit through, but the quieter middle section does the heavy lifting: establishing its weary squad of men as disparate, believable characters and unwilling heroes, there to do a job and go home. It pays off in the climactic defence of Ramelle – the Alamo with Nazis – as the characters come into sharp relief in their individual life-or-death struggles. 

Time Out Tip: The town of Ramelle is fictional, and the sets for it were constructed on the grounds of the Hatfield Aerodrome in Hertfordshire, England.

Brian De Palma has always struggled with his reputation. Sometimes he’s made things worse by being extra salacious in movies like Body Double, Femme Fatale and Scarface. But with this horrific Vietnam War drama – about an American squad gone rogue and dipping into sex slavery – he was swinging for the critical fences. Michael J. Fox does superb work, grappling with situational ethics.

Time Out Tip: John C Reilly, making his feature film debut, was originally hired as an extra before replacing Stephen Baldwin as Private First Class Herbert Hatcher.

Well ahead of its time as a long-form TV series (it was part-financed by German broadcasters and has recently been successfully reinvented for the small-screen), Wolfgang Peterson’s U-boat masterpiece has endured as stubbornly as oil on a bosun’s rag in its three-hour movie form. Riding shotgun with its young submariners in all their fear, suffering and comradeship in a form of hellish lockdown below the surface of the Atlantic remains a sofa-arm-grippingly tense experience.

Time Out Tip: Robert Redford and Paul Newman had both been attached to star at separate times. 

Terrence Malick’s return to filmmaking after 20 years of silence was met with a rapturous response – and the movie truly deserves it. You don’t get the brilliant action sequences of most war pictures. Rather, here are soldiers in WWII’s Pacific theater, stunned by their own brutality, pondering the natural world and wondering when they’ll be back home. The cast is jaw-dropping: George Clooney, Adrien Brody, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, Jared Leto, John C Reilly, Jim Caviezel, Nick Nolte, John Travolta. 

Time Out Tip: Mickey Rourke, Bill Pullman and Lukas Haas were also among the all-star cast but had scenes cut from the film. Adrien Brody, meanwhile, believed himself to be the star of the movie and was shocked to discover his role significantly downsized in the final cut. 

To make a war movie (not just a propaganda piece) at the same time when the real-life war is still in progress takes enormous courage. Fortunately for viewers of this Korea War drama – about a group of bickering soldiers holed up in a Buddhist temple – its writer-director was Samuel Fuller, himself a combat veteran. Hollywood must have seemed like a cakewalk after getting shot at.

Time Out Tip: The script namedrops Fuller’s actual army unit from World War II: the 16th Infantry Regiment, 1st Division.

You might already know how the May 1940 evacuation of France’s Dunkirk turned out, but the power of Christopher Nolan’s harrowing dramatic re-creation is that it tries, with real success, not to make any of this feel like just another war movie. Instead there’s an uneasy sense of a strange event unfolding in that unknowable way that those on the ground might have experienced it. Dunkirk is awe-inspiring and alienating, as it should be.

Time Out Tip: A dozen ships that participated in the actual Dunkirk evacuation appear in the film.

Kathryn Bigelow had already proven her ability to orchestrate high-adrenaline action with the best of them, but her history-making Oscar-winner about bomb defusers in Iraq operates on a whole other level of tension. It’s basically scene after scene of ‘is Jeremy Renner about to get blown up?’ but it drives home the personal toll of spending every day staring death in the face. No matter how many times it repeats itself, you’ll need a reminder to breathe through it all. 

Time Out Tip: The film was shot in Jordan and employed Iraqi refugees as extras.

These days, Christian Bale is as huge as it gets: multiple Oscar nominations (and a win for The Fighter), the Batsuit, etc. But when he debuted as a 12-year-old in Steven Spielberg’s surreal WWII Shanghai drama – beating out 4,000 other kids for the role – all the talent was there. His character, Jim, is obsessed with war planes and sees his internment camp as a playground. Still he’s not above fear, and, by film’s end, he’s lost his innocence.

Time Out Tip: David Lean was originally slated to direct and worked on the film for nearly a year before stepping away and turning the reins over to Spielberg.

The kind of film that can force you to revise your idea of whole careers – even decades of work – this assiduous, unshowy portrait of the fighting men of the Philippines builds a quiet impact out of small, keenly observed moments. Our heroes, mainly John Wayne's junior-grade lieutenant, wind away the small hours in Manila, waiting for an assignment to the fight. They don't realize, of course, that these are the good times; when news comes of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the tone shifts to one of a stoic ode to workmanlike sacrifice. Director John Ford, normally a sentimentalist behind the camera, reigns in his impulses, while Wayne (still closer to dewy at this point) shows depths that hadn't been tapped.

Time Out Tip: During filming, Ford broke his leg, and star Robert Montgomery, who actually commanded a PT boat during the war, took over as director for three weeks. 

Robert Altman’s classic comedy comes sugarcoated in associations: with the TV show, with that cloying laugh track, with Alan Alda. But to consider how truly subversive the movie was, you only have to compare it with the other elephantine war drama playing across town during those same weeks in 1970: Patton is about a misunderstood genius of carnage, and a somber vindication of the asshole-in-charge. MASH has no battle scenes whatsoever. It does end in a climactic, zany football game. Amazingly, both movies came from the same studio, 20th Century Fox. But by throwing out Ring Lardner Jr.’s conventional script and inspiring his ensemble to play, Altman devised an entirely new on-set process that would change American satire forever. This is the first real film of the 1970s.

Time Out Tip: Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland tried to have Altman fired on account of him spending too much time filming secondary characters.

No truly great war film will ever strike a tone of total conviction; that's the realm of imperialist propaganda. Howard Hawks's massively popular drama (released only months before America’s entrance into WWII) takes the exact opposite tack: It's the story of real-life First World War soldier Alvin York, a Tennessee simpleton who hoped to avoid enlistment on the sincere grounds of his religiosity and pacifism. His request denied, York proves himself on the battlefield as a singularly talented sharpshooter and wrestles with the killing gift God has given him. Gary Cooper's tortured performance won him an Oscar and continues to inspire a conversation about situational ethics.

Time Out Tip: The actual Alvin York showed up on set and began sobbing when a crew member asked him how many people he had killed.

This unblinking depiction of the Imperial Japanese Army’s collapse in 1945 was initially greenlit by its studio, the great Daiei Film, on the misapprehension that it would be an action movie. And, in fairness, there is at least one scene of actual combat in there, if you look closely enough. In the main, though, director Kon Ichikawa faithfully fashions war veteran Shōhei Ōoka’s novel into a broken, tubercular soldier’s weary trudge through a hellish landscape. Critics at the time dismissed it as a vision just too bleak to digest, but it has since evolved into an anti-war classic that’s shot through with stark humanity and bone-dry wit. The Charlie Chaplin-esque shot of a pair of disintegrating army boots passing from one pair of feet to another is as striking a metaphor for the degrading effect of war as any on screen. 

Time Out Tip: Star Eiji Funakoshi willingly starved himself during filming to get into character. He eventually collapsed, shutting down production for two weeks.

It's likely you'll want to avert your eyes during Russian director Elem Klimov’s terrifying WWII epic about the Nazi occupation of Belarus. Yet it weaves a mesmerizing spell, from the opening image of two children digging in a field for abandoned rifles. One of those boys is taken from his home by partisans to fight the Germans. It's the start of a nine-circles-of-hell odyssey that culminates with a dreamlike encounter with the ultimate persecutor. But before that finale, we're subjected to a staggering succession of atrocities (ear-shattering explosions, corpses piled high, a village systematically destroyed) that would be unbearable were it not for the film's entrancing, near-surreal aesthetic.

Time Out Tip: The original title of the film was ‘Kill Hitler’. Soviet authorities forced Klimov to change it. 

Rediscovered in 2006 with the fanfare usually reserved for unearthing a lost classic (which was pretty much the case), Jean-Pierre Melville's cool-blue portrait of French Resistance fighters makes a beautiful case for honor among wanted men. Back-room beatings and drive-by shootings spark a mostly conversational film about the sacrifice of spies. Melville's reputation had previously rested on chilly, remote gangster pictures like Le Samouraï (1967), but to see his canvas widened to national politics was a revelation. And the reason the movie had been ignored in the first place? Fashionable French critics had dismissed it as too pro-De Gaulle. What comes around...

Time Out Tip: Director Melville was himself a member of the French Resistance during World War II.

Stop snickering: There's a real reason why this sci-fi actioner is so high on our list. Never before (and probably never again) had the monied apparatus of Hollywood been so co-opted to make a subversive comment about its own fascist impulses. Director Paul Verhoeven cackled all the way to the box office as giant bugs were exterminated by gorgeous, empty-headed bimbos; when Neil Patrick Harris showed up near the end of the movie in a full-length Nazi trench coat, the in-joke was practically outed. Source novelist Robert Heinlein meant his militaristic tale sincerely; meanwhile, the blithe destruction of humankind on display here could only be intended as a sharp critique, both of soldiering and of popular tastes. Return to it with fresh eyes.

Time Out Tip: On a dare, director Verhoeven himself disrobed for the co-ed shower scene.

With 1957’s Paths of Glory, Stanley Kubrick issued one of cinema’s most poignant antiwar statements. Clearly, the world didn’t get the message. So three decades later, he decided to say it louder for the imperialists in the back. Shifting from World War I to Vietnam, Kubrick doesn’t just depict the horrors of the battlefield – he condemns the entire war machine itself. It’s no accident that the first half of the film, set in basic training, is even more nightmarish than the bombings and firefights that follow. As with the soldiers themselves, the desensitisation is the point. Once you’ve stared into the hollow eyes of Vincent D’Onofrio’s tormented Private Pyle reaching his endpoint, the more impersonal atrocities of militarised conflict seem like a stroll through the tulips. Until, of course, you’re forced to look the ‘enemy’ in their eyes.

Time Out Tip: The battlefield sequences, set in Hue during the Tet Offensive, were actually filmed in a disused industrial area near London.

Jean Renoir, the great humanist of cinema, cowrote and directed this superlative WWI story about two French aviators who are captured by a German captain (Erich von Stroheim, perfectly cast as a mannerly despot) and shuttled between prisons. The duo plans a great escape, but this isn't a simple tale of heroes and villains. Class conflict is prevalent: One of our heroes is an aristocrat and easily befriends his warden. The other, meanwhile, is a rough-hewn everyguy – a charismatic ranter against the system. Yet Renoir places no one character above another. Indeed, the film is sympathetic to all perspectives, even as it sagely questions how these combative circumstances came about. For its pointed generousness, the movie was awarded numerous prizes and earned the ire of Joseph Goebbels who declared it ‘Cinematic Public Enemy No. 1.’

Time Out Tip: Co-star Jean Gabin wears a flight outfit Jean Renoir wore as a member of the air force during World War I.

The battles behind Francis Ford Coppola's surreal war movie are well-documented: the nightmarish, multiyear shoot; star Martin Sheen's heart attack and recovery; a cackling press corps that sharpened its knives for a turkey of epic proportions. Coppola would have the last laugh. So much of the vocabulary of the modern-day war picture comes from this movie, an operatic Vietnam-set tragedy shaped out of whirring helicopter blades, Wagnerian explosions, purple haze and Joseph Conrad's colonialist fantasia Heart of Darkness. Fans of the Godfather director, so pivotal to the 1970s, know this to be his last fully realized work; connoisseurs of the war movie see it (correctly) as his second all-out masterpiece.

Time Out Tip: Coppola put up $30 million of his own money to finance the movie – a drop in the bucket compared to the $120 million he invested into 2024’s Megalopolis.

The top of the top – our No. 1 pick – is the ultimate statement on man’s inhumanity to man. Is it any surprise that it comes from Stanley Kubrick? So much of the director's filmography was devoted to depicting military folly (and believe us, we toyed with including Barry Lyndon, too). Elevating Paths of Glory above the fray – and above every other title – was not its brutal scenes of WWI trench warfare but its scalpel-scarp indictment of the pride that comes with battle. Kirk Douglas's lawyer-colonel is tasked with mounting a courtroom defense of three innocent soldiers who just happened to be part of a losing skirmish. Based on a real-life episode of French soldiers executed for ‘cowardice,’ Kubrick's movie so angered France's government that it couldn't be screened publicly there until 1975. The film's lesson is universal and timeless, though: If warfare turns us into monsters even off the battlefield, then we have no purpose waging it.

Time Out Tip: Stanley Kubrick met his wife, German actress Christiane Harlan, on set; she portrays the French singer at the end of the film.