The war genre has a long history in cinema. Though the designation is controversial, the 1898 (very) short film Tearing Down the Spanish Flag is sometimes considered the first war movie and, given that it's also a bit of Spanish-American War propaganda, it also points to some of the pitfalls the genre has easily fallen into. D.W. Griffith's 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, was a shockingly bold (and sadly successful) attempt to rewrite the history of the Civil War for white audiences, a relatively early example of the rousing power of war narratives. Sergei Eisenstein's pro-Soviet epic Battleship Potemkin, a decade later, is as effective as they come.
French critic and filmmaker François Truffaut said in 1975 that "every film about war ends up being pro-war," whether they intend to or not, because even ostensibly anti-war movies need to entertain, and hold interest. Still, just as war is never just one thing, war movies cover a lot of ground; deeply personal stories, tragedies, and thrilling adventures involving very big guns.
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
There's not really any actual war in this absolute classic, but that doesn't make it any less potent as a war film. Released just a year after the conclusion of World War II, William Wyler's drama tells the stories of three United States servicemen re-adjusting to civilian life following tours overseas. Al left home as a successful bank employee, but risks his post-wartime promotion with excessive drinking and his soft touch when it comes to giving loans to fellow vets; Fred suffers from PTSD and has trouble finding a job, while Homer lost both hands and struggles with being an object of pity. Given the era and the timing, it's almost shockingly prescient about the struggles that veterans would face following not just WWII, but each war that would follow.
Where to stream: Prime Video, Peacock, Freevee
Stalag 17 (1953)
The POW camp movie became something of a sub-genre of its own, inspired in large part by Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion from 1937, and a raft of British movies that followed. Billy Wilder's wildly successful take, though, largely defies categorization: there's brutal violence and nearly slapstick humor. Instead of feeling like a hodgepodge, though, it seems a bit more like we're experiencing the absurdity of life during wartime. It also keeps us off balance the entire time, and the thriller element, involving a potential informant in the midst of the American POWs, is undeniably thrilling.
Where to stream: Tubi, The Roku Channel
The Battle of Algiers (1966)
A shockingly relevant film about the tensions between Algerian nationalists and French forces in North Africa, a conflict that erupted into a three-year war. Director Gillo Pontecorvo's hyper-realistic film is thrilling on one level, but also deeply challenging. While the movie's morality leans very slightly toward the Algerians trying to reclaim their home from the French, it's also clear that the shocking acts of violence perpetrated by the guerrilla fighters render any discussion of heroes or villains ridiculous. Many war films struggle to portray the moral ambiguities of war, but few succeed as well as The Battle of Algiers.
Where to stream: Max, The Criterion Channel
Saving Private Ryan (1998)
Steven Spielberg's WWII epic takes a nearly cinema vérité approach, taking what could have a schmaltzy story of an army captain (Tom Hanks) tasked with bringing home a family's last surviving son, and imbuing it with a deep ambivalence about war, as well as stomach-churning violence that brings the realities home. Tom Hanks gives one of his very best performances, and the opening depiction of the Omaha Beach landing is as effective a dramatization of those events as has ever been put to film.
Where to stream: Paramount+
From Here to Eternity (1953)
At the outset, director Fred Zinneman's Oscar-winning epic feels a bit more like a romantic melodrama than a war picture—the film's iconic image being, of course, Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster making out on the beach. But that's all in service of drawing us into the lives of the the people in the orbit of Schofield Barracks on Oahu, played by an all-star cast including Lancaster and Kerr, as well as Montgomery Clift, Frank Sinatra, Donna Reed, and Ernest Borgnine, among others. By the time the bombs start to drop, we're deeply invested in these characters' lives and fates, and the earlier soap opera elements come to feel far more purposeful.
Where to stream: Digital rental
Beasts of No Nation (2015)
Writer/director Cary Joji Fukunaga's film (from the novel by Nigerian-American author Uzodinma Iweala) follows young boy Agu, whose family members are either forced to flee or are executed during a brutal civil war in his country. Captured by military-aligned rebels, Agu (Abraham Attah) is forced to fight for the rebels as he finds his humanity slowly stripped away. Though fictional, the movie addresses the costs of war on the youngest, particularly where child soldiers are seen as acceptable.
Where to stream: Netflix
The Fortress (2017)
Squid Game creator and director Hwang Dong-hyuk crafts a war movie that avoids looking much like a war movie at all, taking place during Imperial Qing Dynasty invasion of Joseon in 1636. The Joseon state of Korea had maintained a relatively stable relationship with the earlier Ming dynasty of China, but came under intense pressure from the Qing prior to an all-out invasion. The film follows the end of that story, with King Injo and his retainers seeking refuge in the title's fortress. This isn't the story of an Alamo, though, and is instead one of moral compromise and politics as the fort's defenders fight to navigate between two larger powers while under literal siege. The movie was a massive hit in South Korea, picking up several major awards.
Where to stream: Netflix
Inglourious Basterds (2009)
Quentin Tarantino pays tribute to 1960s Hollywood war epics like The Dirty Dozen while throwing the history books out the window for this bloody, sometimes quite absurdly funny, story of a ruthless and savage bunch of fighters dropped behind Nazi lines. It begins with an interrogation and a brutal execution, and ends with a deeply satisfying bit of revisionist history. In between is one of Tarantino's most audacious films (which is saying quite a bit), and also one of his most thoroughly entertaining.
Where to stream: Digital rental
All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
The 2022 version is quite good, but it can't eclipse the 1930 adaptation of the Erich Maria Remarque novel. With Lew Ayres in the lead, the original All Quiet remains a harrowing experience—a recreation of the events of World War I so realistic, it stands as one of the true, great anti-war films of all time. So impactful was the movie that the Nazis immediately moved to censor the film and shut down screenings, often with violence, being very concerned that the film's anti-war message could disrupt the party's growing plans for Europe.
Where to stream: Tubi
Judgement at Nuremberg (1961)
The all-star cast can be a little distracting, but Stanley Kramer’s courtroom drama remains powerful and depressingly relevant in its depiction of normal, everyday, average people driven to commit horrifying atrocities with only minimal encouragement. The movie fictionalizes one of the twelve Nuremberg Military Tribunals conducted in 1947 to uncover and expose the crimes against humanity by senior members of the Nazi regime. Spencer Tracy, as Chief Judge Dan Haywood, reminds us, ultimately, that it can absolutely happen here.
Where to stream: Prime Video, Tubi, MGM+
The Deer Hunter (1978)
Though it's discussed less often than some of its 1970s-era contemporaries, The Deer Hunter remains an emotionally shattering look at the devastating moral and emotional consequences of the Vietnam war, with brilliant performances from Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, and Meryl Streep. It also remains controversial in its politics and its sense of history, but even that feels like a strength, harkening back to a time when a hit movie could be bothered to push buttons.
Where to stream: Digital rental
Dunkirk (2017)
Set in 1940, Christopher Nolan's film tells the story of the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from northern France after the catastrophic title battle. It might have been a movie about the pluck and heroism of the many private and small boats who heeded the call to rescue British soldiers; it is that, but it's also a believably senses-shattering picture of a wildly chaotic place and moment in history, with impossibly high stakes that Nolan never lets us forget, for even a moment.
Where to stream: Peacock
Atonement (2007)
Dunkirk is at the heart of this Oscar Best Picture nominee, which turns on the act and accusation of a 13-year-old girl, one done partly out of spite and partly out of pure misunderstanding. It echoes through the decades in this adaptation of the Ian McEwan's World War II-era period novel, ultimately placing Robbie (James McAvoy) right in the middle of that chaotic evacuation. The film makes the case that a single act of cruelty, no matter how inadvertent, can cascade throughout the lives of multiple people—and isn't that the secret story of every war?
Where to stream: Digital rental
The Big Red One (1980)
Samuel Fuller’s 1980 WWII epic is as much about camaraderie and character building as it is about battle, with time devoted to the simple interactions that happen between the big fights. (This is especially true in its restored version. The movie was cut by more than an hour, without the director's permission, and not put to right until 2004.) One of the movie's key scenes involves a conversation about the dangers of lit cigarettes in a war zone at night and the imagined appearance of an enemy propaganda radio host building to a combat sequence—the human element here is never an afterthought, it's the whole point.
Where to stream: The Roku Channel
Overlord (1975)
A dreamy, restless inevitability hangs over the unique and under-seen Overlord, from director Stuart Cooper. Originally conceived as a documentary, the film blends newsreel and archival footage with the fictional narrative of a sensitive young soldier on a journey from his enlistment to the D-Day invasion at Sword Beach; a soldier who becomes something of a stand-in for everyone who died that day. It's mournful and haunting, and generally unlike any other WWII film.
Where to stream: The Criterion Channel
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1961)
You may well have seen this as an episode from the fifth season of The Twilight Zone and, if so, you didn't miss much: the nearly dialogue-free short film from France was purchased by Rod Serling & co. to be aired with only very minor editing. The Civil War-era Ambrose Bierce short story is rather well-known, so suffice to say that it's about a military execution, and a second chance that's anything but.
Where to stream: Tubi (for the original film), or Paramount+ (for the fifth-season Twilight Zone episode)
Da 5 Bloods (2020)
Wildly kinetic, Da 5 Bloods is a nearly three-hour movie that doesn't feel nearly as long as that runtime. Revisiting the Vietnam War film genre with an insistent focus on the (often ignored) experience of Black Americans, Spike Lee brings new relevance to the story of the period by drawing some stark and straight lines between then and now with the story of four veterans who return to Vietnam to find the remains of their fallen squad leader, and the gold he helped them hide. Every actor here is incredible, including (and not surprisingly) Chadwick Boseman in one of his very last roles.
Where to stream: Netflix
Kesari (2019)
Writer/director Anurag Singh's Kesari is a genuinely rousing story of military courage and heroism in the face of impossible odds The film follows the events around the Battle of Saragarhi, during which 21 Sikh soldiers of the British Raj fought 10,000 Afghani attackers, 300-style, in 1897. The movie's portrayals of its Muslim characters are a bit problematic, but the performances are top-notch, and the battles are impeccably choreographed.
Where to stream: Prime Video
1917 (2019)
Sam Mendes' World War I drama might well have fallen flat, given that its premise includes a bit of a gimmick: It's presented as though it's been filmed in just two continuous takes, with no cuts in between. Rather than feeling like a video game, the conceit brings an uncommon, harrowing immediacy to the story of two soldiers—Will Schofield (George MacKay) and Tom Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman)—desperate to deliver a message that would cancel an offensive that they know to be doomed.
Where to stream: Paramount+
Paths of Glory (1957)
There's no noble sacrifice in Stanley Kubrick's anti-war masterpiece—only politics, bureaucracy, and a chain of command more interested in covering its own ass than in trying to accomplish anything meaningful. Or perhaps there's nothing meaningful to accomplish? Set during World War I, a commanding officer orders his subordinate to plan a clearly suicidal attack; a subordinate who, in turn, orders the deeply skeptical Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas) to make the plans. When it all ends in predictable disaster, the General demands the death by firing squad of three random soldiers because, after all, someone has to take the blame.
Where to stream: Tubi, MGM+
Full Metal Jacket (1987)
Kubrick's memorable Vietnam-era war movie is split right down the middle: following J.T. “Joker” Davis (Matthew Modine), we first experience with him the intentionally dehumanizing process of basic training, joined by R. Lee Ermey's ruthless Gunnery Sergeant and Vincent D'Onofrio's mentally precarious "Private Pyle." The second half sees Joker trying to maintain whatever humanity is left to him, even as his world descends into chaos.
Where to stream: Max
Spartacus (1960)
One more for Kubrick: The director's Roman Republic-era epic was released at the tail end of an era when sword-and-sandal flicks were a dime a dozen, but Spartacus dodges those conventions in favor of a story of freedom and nonconformity. Of course, there's also a dual layer here: set during the first century BCE, during the Third Servile War, the movie was written by blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo, and challenged not only Roman-style slavery, but the then-modern Communist witch hunts.
Where to stream: Digital rental
Ran (1985)
One of Akira Kurosawa's later films, and his last real epic, Ran is still among the director's most beloved, blending Japanese history and folklore with hints of Shakespeare. Set in the 16th century, Kurosawa fictionalizes the story of real-life daimyō Mōri Motonari by blending it with King Lear. Elderly warlord Ichimonji Hidetora (Tatsuya Nakadai) decides to divide his kingdom between his three sons, only to discover that greed and lust for power are more powerful than loyalty. It was the director's most expensive film, with lush cinematography and elaborate period design, along with an enormous cast. The title translates to "chaos," but Kurosawa was never more in control.
Where to stream: Digital rental
The Hurt Locker (2008)
Kathryn Bigelow's Best Picture/Best Director Oscar-winning Iraq War story doesn't wear any particular opinions about that war on its sleeve, instead crafting a narrative that's often unbearably tense, and oddly claustrophobic given than so many scenes are set right out in the open. Jeremy Renner's lead performance as a normal-seeming guy driven to the edge by his experiences is spectacular.
Where to stream: Prime Video, The Roku Channel
The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
In David Lean's Best Picture Oscar winner, a contingent of British prisoners of war navigate life at a Japanese camp in Thailand toward the waning days of World War II. The camp commandant orders the prisoners to construct the title's railway bridge, resulting in a fascinating give-and-take between the Japanese leadership and the British prisoners. William Holden is technically the lead here, but it's Alec Guiness who gives the performance of a lifetime as the British commander who becomes increasingly obsessed with the project, determined to prove British superiority by, paradoxically, building infrastructure for the enemy.
Where to stream: AMC+
The Woman King (2022)
Set in West Africa in 1823, and based on the real-life Agojie (also known as the Dahomey Amazons), the movie stars Viola Davis as General Nanisca, leader of the Dahomey's army, forced to navigate complicated regional politics even though her skills lie mostly in whooping colonialist ass.
Where to stream: Netflix