The 31 Best War Films Ever Made

Not every war film is about the soldiers. We're going to stick our necks out here and say that this is probably the greatest artwork about the Cold War: more chilling than Dr Strangelove, more moving than The Lives of Others, more nightmarish than Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. In this kitchen sink apocalypse an ensemble of normal Sheffield folk go about their business – getting pregnant, bickering with neighbours, feeding their pet birds. Meanwhile, on the edges of things, a war in the Middle East gets hotter and hotter. The Steel City gets nuked about halfway in, and that somehow ends up being a relatively jolly bit. On we go, through nuclear winter to the breakdown of civilisation itself. It's genuinely extraordinary.

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's epic wartime romance packs in not one, not two, but three separate wars.

Martin Scorsese is a huge fan of its "very sweet, eloquent sadness" and even among Powell and Pressburger's other classics like The Red Shoes and A Matter of Life and Death, it stands out for its inventiveness and anti-nationalistic outlook.

The Ministry of Information was dead against it even being made, and urged Winston Churchill to step in against it – he kept it from being distributed overseas for months.

We follow Colonel Blimp from the Boer War to the Second World War, wrestling with the right way to fight a war and, at the same time, wondering about the right way to be an Englishman.

Peter Watkins' revolutionary drama-documentary took its stylistic cues from the burgeoning new school of on-the-ground war reportage from Korea and Vietnam which had made far-off conflict feel distressingly close. Watkins pulls the same feat off with the far-off past. The 1746 battle which ended the Jacobite uprisings and Bonnie Prince Charlie's claim to the throne is retold by newsreel-style vox pops with players in the battle, from the very toffermost to the lowliest clansman. It's innovative, brutal and still fresh.

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Spike Lee's typically pointed addition to the war movie canon follows five Vietnam vets trying to track down a treasure they lost when their leader – an incendiary Chadwick Boseman, in one of his final roles – was killed in a firefight. Through flashbacks, we see their memories of the war and the kinks in left in their lives, as Lee's direction drums home how conflict, once lived through, never quite leaves you.

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Studio Ghibli's depiction of the last, burning days of the Second World War starts with one of the main characters dying of starvation, and the bones of his sister being launched into a field. It's not a cheery watch. It is, however, achingly sad and hauntingly gorgeous. Seita and Setsuko are caught up in the firebombing of Kobe and scrabble hard to survive. Both nightmarish and lyrical.

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Alfred Hitchcock's adaptation of John Steinbeck's short story follows the survivors from a torpedoed ship who manage to make it to a lifeboat, where the whole film takes place. Then the commander of the U-boat that sunk them clambers on board too. Though controversial in its time for humanising a Nazi – Hitchcock later reflected that the reviewer Dorothy Thompson "gave the film ten days to get out of town" – it's a prime example of how Hitchcock could make the daring and experimental thrillingly accessible.

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Ever the stickler, Stanley Kubrick made the Full Metal Jacket shoot almost as harrowing as the war it depicted. The Vietnam scenes were shot on a London gasworks that was earmarked for demolition, probably because it was riddled with asbestos and toxic chemicals. The result is a claustrophobic view of conflict, as Kubrick's marines hunt a sniper in the ruins of Hué. The film earns its spot on this list in the first half, though, in which our new recruits endure the brutality of basic training, where they either transform into killing machines or – in FMJ's most iconic scene – completely fall apart.

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When Private Kelly (Clint Eastwood) discovers the existence of a cache of gold in a bank vault 30 miles behind enemy lines, he enlists a rag-tag bunch of outsiders and misfits to liberate it including a hippyish tank commander (Donald Sutherland), a motormouth sergeant (Don Rickles) and an unwilling master sergeant (Telly Savalas). It's a caper which turns into a bleak treatise on the horrors of war and back again, and also inspired a really, really good Black Grape song.

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King Lear, but make it feudal Japan. Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece (well, one of his masterpieces) was the most expensive Japanese film ever made when it was released in 1985, and it's still arguably the most ambitious. When an ageing lord decides to divide up his kingdom between his three sons, fraternal jealousy quickly pits brother against brother, and then, against father. Though Ran is an astonishing technical achievement – Kurosawa recruited armies of extras, built life-size fortresses and then burned them to the ground – really it's the tale of how one man, and one mistake, can foment chaos that lasts for generations.

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This is Russell Crowe's best film. There, said it. It's his best film. He's Captain 'Lucky' Jack Aubrey, the charismatic heart-of-oak type in command of HMS Surprise during the Napoleonic Wars. He's on the tail of the French ship Acheron, which jumped him and his crew and ghosted away. It manages to be both very big and very small at the same time: big in its staggering battle sequences, all splintering oak and gunsmoke; small in its subtly turned characters, and particularly the friendship between Aubrey and ship's surgeon Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany).

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The phrase 'movie magic' is hacky and awful and rubbish, obviously, but there are moments when it might be the only way to describe the transportive thrill that film can give you. The point where Peter Jackson's extraordinary World War I film transforms from flickering, jerky century-old black and white footage to smooth, high-definition colour, with recreated sound, is one of those moments. It is absolutely jaw-dropping.

They Shall Not Grow Old is not an exhaustive history of the war, or even a selective study of a small portion. It's not about the specifics; it's a broad sense portrait of the day-to-day realities of life on the Western Front, built on testimony from veterans. We move from the jollity of signing up in August 1914, to the trenches, to the mud, to the horrors which become mundane, to the moment of going over the top. It's a staggering achievement.

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It isn't peak Tarantino, but his tale of a gang of Jewish Nazi-hunters, marauding through Germany during the Second World War, finds the funny amid the horror without ever minimising the seriousness of its source material. As you'd expect from Quentin, it's also a love letter to war movies, touching on everything from contemporary propaganda films to the role that fictionalised narratives play in helping us come to terms with the traumas of war.

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Every war is terrible, but a war that utilises children, brainwashes them and trains them to kill? That is, most certainly, worse. With a breakout role for Ghanaian first-time actor Abraham Attah and an incredible performance by Idris Elba as the austere Commandant, Cary Joji Fukanaga’s Beasts of No Nation is a harrowing tale of darkness that takes the viewer into the heart of the story of a child soldier in an unnamed African country.

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Perhaps one of the most recognisable war movies of all time, ironically, Apocalypse Now wasn’t Francis Ford Coppola’s most critically renowned war movie. Patton (1971), the biographical drama of General George S. Patton, won Coppola his first Oscar ever (for screenwriting, shared with Edmund H. North). But Apocalypse Now did win best cinematography and best sound. With an all-star cast including Marlon Brando, Martin Sheen, Robert Duvall, Laurence Fishburne, Harrison Ford and Dennis Hopper, the film is an adaptation of an 1899 novella, Heart of Darkness, but set during the Vietnam War where a U.S. Army officer (Sheen) is tasked with the assassination of a renegade Colonel (Brando) whose ego has outgrown his rank.

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Shot in Black Hills, South Dakota — historically Native American land — and using mostly First Nations cast members, Crazy Horse is one of a very few films that aims to create authenticity and fairness when telling American Indians’ stories. Starring Michael Greyeyes and Irene Bedard (best known as the voice for Disney’s Pocahontas), the film is based on the true story of Crazy Horse (Greyeyes), a Lakota warrior who fought back against the encroachment of American Colonials in the late 19th century.

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Though there are few scenes of actual “war” in Jarhead, this is one of those films about conflict that really digs deep into the psychology of soldiers. The story, adapted from the memoir of U.S. Marine sniper, Anthony Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal), takes place during Operation Desert Storm (one of the codenames for The Gulf War in the early 1990s) as the battle between American/Kuwait forces and Iraq wages on and Swofford’s girlfriend is back at home, possibly cheating on him.

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Another Sam Mendes film, 1917 was praised up and down for its innovative filmmaking techniques (it was made to look like it was shot in only one take), its visceral scenes splattered with real-time special effects and its on-point acting. George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman lead the story as two low-ranking British officers in World War I trenches who are tasked with getting a message across and through and around enemy territory in order to stop thousands of other soldiers from walking into a death trap.

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The Hurt Locker is one of the few war films directed by a woman. Kathryn Bigelow won the best directing and best picture Oscars for it, and then went on to make Zero Dark Thirty, another war film. The Hurt Locker was also when everyone started taking Jeremy Renner seriously. Renner plays a Staff Sargent whose maverick manoeuvres don’t land well during the Iraq War as he works with a small bomb squad to disarm life-threatening traps for his fellow soldiers and civilians.

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Less than a decade after his father starred in a movie about the atrocities of Vietnam, Charlie Sheen was starring — alongside Willem Dafoe, Tom Berenger, Johnny Depp, Forest Whitaker and others — in one, too. Platoon is written and directed by Oliver Stone and follows a group of young men as they navigate the immoralities of the war they’re a part of. Where Apocalypse Now focuses on the bigger picture of war through a targeted story, Platoon hones in on soldiers’ singular loss of innocence that came with the Vietnam War.

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At the time, Daniel Day Lewis – though an Academy Award-winning actor already — hadn’t played anything close to the hardened trapper, Hawkeye, raised by Native Americans in The Last of the Mohicans. Clearly, the man had potential. The story, directed by Michael Mann and adapted from both the 1826 novel and the 1936 film of the same names, is set against the backdrop of the French and Indian War (which is actually the British and the French fighting over what was in fact Native American territories). Hawkeye is charged with protecting a British Colonel’s daughter as they navigate the war-torn land to safety. Note: the score will have you humming for days.

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