The 50 best World War II movies

They think it’s all over… and for you, Tommy, it is. 

Director: John Huston

Cast: Pelé, Michael Caine, Sylvester Stallone

The sport washers have been the bad guys for decades now, as this wartime sports movie demonstrates in stirring style. This time it’s the actual Nazis doing the sportwashing, challenging a group of malnourished POWs to a prestige kickabout, hoping to get in behind the Allies’ low block and prove definitively that they are the master race… or something. But they underestimate the resilience and tactical nous of West Ham and England’s Captain John Colby (Michael Caine) and his international squad of real-life football stars (Pelé, Ossie Ardiles, Bobby Moore). Sylvester Stallone lends Hollywood star power but it’s more fun to enjoy as a high-budget game of ‘spot the Ipswich Town player’ and a Roy of the Rovers-style underdog story.

Winter is coming

Director:Joseph Vilsmaier

Cast: Dominique Horwitz, Thomas Kretschmann, Jochen Nickel

Forget Enemy at the Gates and the 2015 Fyodor Bondarchuk CG-fest, this rare Germans’ eye view of the conflict is a much more authentic glimpse of the hell that was Stalingrad – the turning point in World War II and one of the most brutal battles in human history. Thomas Kretschmann plays a Nazi office leading a platoon into the crucible and, in the spirit of Das Boot (with which this film shares producers), struggling to lead them out again. It’s harrowing, bleak viewing. It’s also an incredibly honest example of a film addressing a country’s horror-filled past: honest and uncomfortable to the last. This story had no happy ending. 

Out of Africa

Director: Rachid Bouchareb

Cast: Samy Naceri, Roschdy Zem, Sami Bouajila 

There are hundreds of untold WWII stories still to be filmed. Rachid Bouchareb’s drama shines a light on those North African soldiers drafted in to fight for the Free French after D-Day. The film itself is a mite predictable, but what’s impressive are the ripples it created: after release, the French government agreed, for the first time, to begin paying compensation to the remaining widows of North African fighters. Proof that a work of art can still have direct political impact. 

Tinkling the ivories

Director: Roman Polanski

Cast: Adrian Brody, Thomas Kretschmann, Frank Finlay

A Holocaust movie that stands alongside Schindler’s List, Roman Polanski’s Oscar-winning World War II survival drama has Jewish concert pianist Władysław Szpilman turning Robinson Crusoe in the rubble of Warsaw in the final months of the war. For as much as he’s become persona non grata, Polanski’s own experiences as a Polish Jew are movingly channelled into a historical epic that’s full of heartbreaking grace notes – the abandoned train platform, the unopenable can of fruit – and underpinned by a career-best performance from a 29-year-old Brody as a man fighting for his life and humanity amid unexpressible horror. That Oscar was richly deserved.

Buuuh buh buh buh buh-buh buuuh buh…

Director: Michael Anderson

Cast: Richard Todd, Michael Redgrave, Ursula Jeans 

The famous real-life partnership of boffin scientists and plucky pilots is brought to life in a stiff-upper-lipped war film that has endured sufficiently to spark talk of a Peter Jackson remake (still, alas, unmade). Thanks to The Dam Busters, the 1943 raid on the Ruhr dams using bouncing bombs has seeped into the public consciousness. It’s still a gem of the genre, with Michael Redgrave sincere yet conflicted as conscience-stricken inventor Barnes Wallis and Richard Todd all derring-do as RAF wing commander Guy Gibson. The special effects may look a little hokey now but they inspired the final Death Star assault in Star Wars.

Cary on cross-dressing

Director: Howard Hawks

Cast: Cary Grant, Ann Sheridan

Hollywood has a bad reputation for fixing tricky book titles, like going from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to Blade Runner. In the case of French Army Officer Henri Rochard’s autobiography I Was an Alien Spouse of Female Military Personnel Enroute to the United States Under Public Law 271 of the Congress, we reckon they had a point. In this jolly gender-swap comedy from screwball master Howard Hawks, Cary Grant plays Rochard (mercifully eschewing a French accent), whose romance with chauffeur Ann Sheridan somehow leads to him dressing as a woman and smuggling himself into the US.

The spy who shagged them

Director: Paul Verhoeven

Cast: Carice van Houten, Sebastian Koch, Thom Hoffman

Paul Verhoeven’s first Dutch production in two decades tells the loosely factual story of a Jewish resistance fighter seducing a Nazi commander in the occupied Netherlands. If that sounds a bit old-school for the guy who made RoboCop and Basic Instinct, Verhoeven still manages to prod the audience with sex, violence and moral ambiguity while delivering a classic espionage thriller full of double-crosses and narrow escapes. Game of Thrones’ Carice van Houten radiates Golden Age glamour as a singer-turned-spy – although Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich never did a scene where they bleach their pubic hair.

Stars over the battlefield

Director: Guy Hamilton

Cast: Michael Caine, Trevor Howard, Harry Andrews

Even if you haven’t seen the whole film, you’d probably seen bits of Battle of Britain’s stunning aerial photography popping up in other movies. To this day, we’re not sure how they recreated 1940’s struggle between the RAF and the Lufwaffe on quite the scale that one-time 007 director Guy Hamilton and his crew manage. Its combat footage makes even Dunkirk’s dogfights look positively puny by comparison. The cast is meaty too, with Michael Redgrave, Trevor Howard, Laurence Olivier, Michael Caine and Ian McShane taking the fight to Adolf in rousing style. And if you haven’t seen it? Well, goggles on and chocks away.

Hang on, that title’s familiar…

Director: Enzo G. Castellari

Cast: Bo Svenson, Peter Hooten, Fred Williamson

Not Tarantino’s WWII picture, but the 1978 B-movie that partially inspired it. Director Enzo G Castellari is a hero to cult film fans everywhere: his 40-year career has gifted us half a dozen decent Euro-Westerns, a few rip-offs of hits such as Jaws (The Last Shark) and Mad Max (1990: The Bronx Warriors) and the 1990s detective series Extralarge on Italian TV. But thanks to Tarantino’s tribute, he’ll be best remembered for this WWII actioner. Explosive, colourful and slicker than you might expect, it follows a rag-tag bunch of Allied soldiers who… well, we don’t want to spoil it. 

QT takes the reins again for the tale of Heydrich’s assassination

Director: Fritz Lang

Cast: Brian Donlevy, Walter Brennan, Anna Lee, Gene Lockhart

Quentin Tarantino says... ‘When I was writing Inglourious Basterds, I ended up looking at a different type of war film than I’d ever watched before. These were propaganda movies made in the ’40s, mostly directed by foreign directors living in Hollywood because the Nazis had occupied their home countries, like Fritz Lang who made the excellent Hangmen Also Die! WWII was still going on, the Nazis were an actual threat, not just movie bad guys. Those directors had personal experience with the Nazis, and obviously they had to be worried about their loved ones back home. And yet those films are entertaining, they’re thrilling adventure stories, and there’s a lot of humour in them. And this goes against all the ponderous, violin-music diatribes we’ve seen in war movies since the ’80s.’

Strolling thunder

Director: Lewis Milestone

Cast: Dana Andrews, Richard Conte, George Tyne

Director Lewis Milestone was the master of the grunt’s-eye view, and with this account of a few hours in the life of an American platoon in Italy he set the template for dozens of thoughtful war films that followed. For long stretches, nothing much happens – but when it does it’s violent and irrevocable. There’s little in the way of heroics and barely a few moments of gunfire. The impression of warfare is neither of gung-ho glory nor of pant-wetting terror: the overriding feeling is confusion, and a nagging sadness that in such a beautiful landscape one should have to be concerned with dying rather than living. 

War is the ultimate bummer

Director: Brain G. Hutton

Cast: Clint Eastwood, Telly Savalas, Don Rickles, Donald Sutherland

‘Why don’t you knock it off with them negative waves?’ Yes, the hippies finally do their part for global security as Donald Sutherland’s superfreaky tank commander Oddball joins up with Clint Eastwood’s surly one-man warzone, Kelly, on a mission to raid a French bank and hightail it with buckets of Nazi loot. Director Brian G Hutton dispenses pretty much entirely with historical reality, leading some to accuse the film of trivialising the war effort. Which it does, but with such warmth, wit and insouciance that it’s impossible to resist. Pure pleasure.

Not feeling Fiennes

Director: Anthony Minghella

Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, Willem Dafoe, Kristin Scott Thomas

Wartime has rarely been as atmospherically and artfully shot as it is in Anthony Minghella’s Academy Award-winning romance. Adapted (some would say quite loosely) from Michael Ondaatje’s novel, this amorous epic stars Ralph Fiennes as the unknown ‘English patient’ who, covered in burns, is being cared for by a young Canadian nurse (Juliet Binoche). Under her unerringly tender care, fleeting memories of life prior to injury return to the ailing patient, including, most significantly, the juicy affair he had with a friend’s wife (Kristin Scott Thomas, looking enigmatic in linen). Ridiculously attractive people swooning in the desert: oh go on, you’ll enjoy watching it really. 

For the Mutterland

Director: Helma Sanders-Brahms

Cast: Eva Mattes, ‎Ernst Jacobi

One of the lynchpins of New German Cinema and, alas, the only female-directed film on this list (which says something about war movies). Helma Sanders-Brahms’s film presents a dewy-eyed romance between Lene (Eva Mattes) and Hans (Ernst Jacobi) that blossoms into marriage. But their bliss is short-lived when Hans is called away to fight and Lene’s life spirals into disaster. It may sound brutal, but Sanders-Brahms never judges her characters (who are based on her own parents), bluntly demonstrating how relentlessly grim life in wartime can be for women as well as men. 

Both sides now

Director: Clint Eastwood

Stars: Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya

Given his hard-bitten reputation, it’s surprising Clint Eastwood hadn’t got around to directing a World War II movie before 2006. But he made up for it with a groundbreaking one-two punch: a pair of films exploring the battle of Iwo Jima from both the American and Japanese perspectives. Flags of our Fathers was weak, exploring the American culture of war. But Letters from Iwo Jima is stunning, depicting a group of soldiers even more bound by tradition and honour than their American counterparts, trapped in an unwinnable war and dreaming only of home. 

Keep the home fires burning

Directors: Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder

Cast: Eric Portman, Gordon Jackson, Patricia Roc, Basil Radford

No film evokes the everyday British experience of WWII better than Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder’s stiff-upper-lipped drama. It’s a masterpiece of social observation, reflecting the national shift towards social inclusion in its depiction of the lives, loves and heartrending losses endured by the lower-middle-class Crowson family. The closing sequence – in which munitions worker Celia (Patricia Roc) forcibly represses her grief over her dead lover and joins in a rousing factory singalong – is almost unbearably moving. 

Shouting lager lager lager

Director: J. Lee Thompson

Cast: John Mills, Sylvia Syms, Anthony Quayle

Britain’s obsession with the demon drink has made for some terrific cinema, and second only to Whisky Galore in the pantheon of pissed-up pictures is this rousing, surprisingly hard-nosed tale of dipsomania in the desert. When his unit is attacked by the Germans, army captain Anson (John Mills) hijacks an ambulance and heads across the Sahara with two nurses and a dubious South African officer in tow. They’re bound for Alexandria, and the refrigerated lager Anson imagines he’ll find there – provided the Boche don’t do for them first. Terse and stiff-lipped but never to a fault, this is one of the archetypal British combat films. 

Bale begins

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Christian Bale, John Malkovich, Miranda Richardson, Nigel Havers

Empire of the Sun came smack in the centre of Steven Spielberg’s mid-’80s slump: Temple of Doom had been criticised for excessive violence, and there was still Always and Hook to come. But there’s incredible work in Empire of the Sun. The decision to hire Tom Stoppard to adapt JG Ballard’s fictionalised memoir of his days in a Japanese internment camp pays off with a focused script and some wonderfully memorable characters. Best of all is John Malkovich’s Machiavellian hipster Basie. Christian Bale is a star in the making as young Jim, while Allen Daviau’s cinematography adds grandeur, drenching the screen with dazzling searchlights, blazing buildings and, at the climax, Hiroshima itself. 

The Normandy conquest

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Tom Hanks, Tom Sizemore, Matt Damon, Jeremy Davies

Spielberg, Hanks, all those Academy Awards. It’s easy to be a tad sceptical about Private Ryan. A repeat viewing, however, blows away the cobwebs with a furious men-in-combat film that balances comradely bromance with gale-force action. ALD

Quentin Tarantino says: ‘I really liked Saving Private Ryan, in particular the Omaha beach scene. You’re watching that sequence and you think, could anything be worth this? Ultimately, I guess the answer is yes. But when you’re watching it, it seems unfathomable that anything could be worth that.’

Director: Jonathan Glazer

Cast: Christian Friedel, Sandra Hüller

The other side of the wall

Nothing much happens in front of the camera in Jonathan Glazer’s Holocaust drama. An Auschwitz camp commandant and his wife oversee an idyllic domestic life. He goes to work, she gardens. The kids frolic in the yard. His mother-in-law visits. The major conflict involves a promotion that may force them to leave their dream home, which happens to share a wall with his place of employment. It’s effectively plotless. And yet, it is more horrifying, pointed and potent than so many other films on the subject, less for what’s shown than what is implied – in the small visual details and, especially, the sound design, an incessant white noise of gunshots, yelling guards and not-so-distant screams. Like Claude Lanzmann and Shoah, Glazer approaches history’s greatest atrocity without sentiment, stripping it to its barest parts, and the result is gutting. Rarely has the banality of evil been presented with such banality, and thus looked so evil.

Vive le resistance!

Director: Jean-Pierre Melville

Cast: Lino Ventura, Simone Signoret, Paul Meurisse

Jean-Pierre Melville’s film opens on a shot of the Arc de Triomphe as, slowly, a long line of Nazi soldiers goose-step across the screen. This insidious, softly-softly approach to the traumas suffered by the people of Paris during the occupation sets the tone for a riveting, steely-eyed chronicle of resistance. Prizing restraint, Melville adopts a curt, undemonstrative shooting style to present his ‘heroes’ as a self-hating cadre who think nothing of risking life and limb in the name of their nation. Prison escapes are brief and unglamorous, espionage is gruelling and perilous and emotions, speeches and friendships remain suppressed at all times. A cold, meticulous drama about the pressures of propping an entire country on your shoulders. 

Funny how?

Director: Ernst Lubitsch

Cast: Carole Lombard, Jack Benny, Robert Stack

‘So, they call me concentration camp Ehrhardt, do they?’ It’s hard to imagine the shock that must’ve greeted Ernst Lubitsch’s frothy comedy on release in 1942. Here we were, in the grip of the most bloody conflict in Earth’s history, and along comes German Jewish émigré Ernst Lubitsch with a broad Hollywood satire lampooning Nazism, spies, the camps, the whole damn shooting match. A story of mistaken identities, backstage hi-jinks and theatrical misunderstandings set in occupied Poland, the film is genuinely funny. But if you actually stop to think about it, you may start screaming. 

True grit

Director: Robert Aldrich 

Cast: Jack Palance, Eddie Albert, Lee Marvin, William Smithers

As cutting as piano wire and cynical to the core, Robert Aldrich’s whipsmart drama follows through on the queasy promise of its tagline: ‘Rips open the hot hell behind the glory!’ Joining up with the daintily named Fragile Fox company for a botched support mission during the Battle of the Bulge, we find ourselves caught between company captain and ‘gutless wonder’ Eddie Albert, Lee Marvin’s manipulative institutional horse-trader and platoon leader Jack Palance, cracking with frustration at the sharp end. A minor landmark which dared to suggest that, in war, ‘Not everyone is a hero and not every gun is pointed at the enemy’.

Makes you proud to be British. Or American

Director: John Sturges

Director: Steve McQueen, James Garner, Richard Attenborough, James Donald

Maybe the most flat-out enjoyable WWII film of them all, this bank holiday classic continues to win fans, inform ad campaigns and drown out England football matches every time an impromptu rendition of its impossibly chipper theme tune sounds. Steve McQueen heads a top-notch cast of international talent, all of whom are given plenty to do by the lively script and nimbly wrangled by John Sturges’s muscular direction. ALD

Quentin Tarantino says: ‘One of my favourite movies of all time, not just war movies. I love that film. It’s one of those bunch-of-guys-on-a-mission movies that got me to sit down and write Inglourious Basterds.’

Up close and personal

Director: László Nemes

Cast: Géza Röhrig, Levente Molnár, Urs Rechn

The degradation and horror of the Holocaust has never been captured with such ferocity as in László Nemes’s extraordinary debut. Saul is a member of the Sonderkommando, the Jewish concentration camp prisoners tasked with dealing with the bodies of those murdered in the gas chambers. Nemes’s camera stays – literally – right in Saul’s face, using as few cuts as possible to immerse the viewer in an all-too-believable vision of hell. If it sounds tough, it is – but, until virtual reality technology improves, this is the closest you’re going to come to a bone-deep understanding of what really happened. 

Only 23? *Angry Hitler gif!*

Director: Oliver Hirschbiegel

Cast: Bruno Ganz, Alexandra Maria Lara, Corinna Harfouch, Ulrich Matthes

We’ve all been there. You haven’t slept for days. The place is a wreck. There are empties everywhere and you don’t even know who half these people are. Admit it: the Party’s over. This claustrophobic account of the last days of Nazi Germany takes place within the dank corridors of Hitler’s bunker. The sense of impending doom is palpable and, as much of it is based on the recollections of Hitler’s secretary, scenes like a wild champagne party to the backbeat of Russian artillery ring bizarrely true. Sadly for these guests, history was about to gatecrash. 

Scouting for boys

Director: Andrei Tarkovsky

Cast: Nikolai Burlyayev, Valentin Zubkov, Evgeny Zharikov

By the early 1960s, the bloom was off the war – WWII movies no longer needed to focus exclusively on square-jawed men nobly battling fascism. Heck, they might even suggest that the conflict took a toll on both sides. In Andrei Tarkovsky’s shimmering (and surprisingly short) debut, a boy stumbles into the headquarters of a Russian platoon on the Eastern front, claiming to have important information. It transpires that he’s a junior spy used by his own side, who play on his hatred for the German who murdered his family. Dreamlike and devastating, this was a new kind of war movie. 

‘Broadsword calling Danny Boy...’

Director: Brian G. Hutton

Cast: Richard Burton, Clint Eastwood

Famous for the cinema’s best ever punch-up on a moving cable car, this behind-the-lines romp is also reputed to clock up the highest body count of any Clint Eastwood film, with hundreds of Germans throwing themselves headlong into a storm of lead. The plot serves up a string of icepick-sharp set-pieces but more importantly provides an excuse for Richard Burton and Clint to get out of their itchy, ill-fitting British togs and look sharp in German officers’ uniforms. Those Nazis: no moral compass, but what tailoring! 

Troubles in paradise

Director: Fred Zinnemann

Cast: Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Deborah Kerr, Frank Sinatra

There’s more to this Oscar-winning stalwart than Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr’s iconic roll in the sand. Adapted from James Jones’ controversial novel, it follows the intertwined lives of soldiers stationed at a Hawaiian army base in – cue ominous music – 1941. Even with the book’s edges sanded down to appease Hollywood censors, it’s fairly gritty for a ’50s blockbuster, dealing with adultery and military corruption and vague homoeroticism. Sure, it’s melodramatic and slow-moving but not as old-fashioned as you might think, particularly in its depiction of an American war machine that debases its men before the bombs even drop.

The horror

Director: Alain Resnais

Ten years after the liberation of the concentration camps, Alain Resnais made this mournful 32-minute documentary that offers as clear-sighted and painful an insight into the National Socialist mindset as any film before or since. Austerely constructed, the film simply juxtaposes German newsreel and films shot by the Allies as they liberated the camps with newly filmed shots of disused railway sidings, empty fields and husks of buildings where thousands lost their lives. As a yardstick for the gravity of Nazi atrocities, Resnais’s film takes some beating. 

This is Britain, and it’s fine

Directors: Humphrey Jennings and Stewart McAllister

Cast: Chesney Allen, Bud Flanagan/William Sansomm George Gravett

At the beginning of WWII, all UK cinemas were closed. But Churchill’s cabinet quickly realised that not only were the movies a great way for a put-upon populace to relax, they were also a perfect channel for propaganda. But while Humphrey Jennings’s twin masterpieces may be unashamedly patriotic, they’re also two of the most inventive documentaries ever made. The former, co-directed with Stewart McAllister, is more sedate, a sort of Radio 4 with pictures, all twittering songbirds and the smack of leather on willow. Fires Were Started is pitched between documentary and drama in its depiction of a day in the life of a fireman in the Blitz, but through all the banter there’s an inescapable sense of dread, of a city on the brink of collapse.

Twelve angry men

Director: Robert Aldrich

Cast: Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Charles Bronson, Jim Brown 

Foul-tempered, lusty and ludicrously enjoyable, this suicidal symphony to the futility of war fully deserves its status as ‘The Greatest Men-On-A-Mission Movie Ever Made.’

Quentin Tarantino says... ‘The thing that’s just amazing about The Dirty Dozen, and why I don’t think it could ever be duplicated today, is the fact that you could never find eight actors like that now. It was just a different breed of man. Robert Aldrich threw a rock in a tree and Jim Brown fell out, Charles Bronson fell out, John Cassavetes fell out, and Telly Savalas… and that’s without even mentioning Lee Marvin. There aren’t guys like that running around anymore.’

Spaghetti realism

Director: Roberto Rossellini

Cast: Aldo Fabrizi, Anna Magnani, Marcello Pagliero

The wounds of European conflict and Nazi occupation were still tender in Rome in late 1944, which chimed with the documentary instincts of Italian filmmaker Roberto Rossellini. Rome, Open City drew on real issues and situations during the years of conflict. Needless to say, the brutality of the occupying regime is presented with a shocking frankness, not only its indifference to class, age, gender and religion, but its total lack of logical purpose. Rossellini shot the film using leftover celluloid from other movies, which not only lent it a gritty newsreel aesthetic, but a real sense of urgency and anguish. Three years later he would tell a similar story from a different perspective in Germany, Year Zero. 

Withdrawal method

Director: Sam Peckinpah

Cast: James Coburn, Maximilian Schell, James Mason

Sam Peckinpah’s only war film follows a German platoon through the 1943 retreat on the Russian front. Sombre and claustrophobic photography and Peckinpah’s clear understanding of a working platoon of men are all far removed from the monotonous simplicity of most big-budget war films.

Quentin Tarantino says: ‘I’m a big fan of Cross of Iron, it’s really cool. I saw it the day it opened. I was a little boy; I didn’t know anything about the Russian front. I guess it went over my head, but I learned to appreciate it later. But one of the interesting things about Cross of Iron is that it came and went in America, but it was such a huge hit in Europe that it actually inspired rip-offs for years, which I get a huge kick out of. And one of them is the movie that I took the name Inglourious Basterds from.’

Tunnel vision

Director: Andrzej Wajda

Cast: Teresa Iżewska, Tadeusz Janczar, Wieńczysław Gliński

Polish master director Andrzej Wajda’s second film follows the remnants of a ragtag platoon through the last days of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, beating a retreat in the face of German aggression. Left with no other option they take refuge in the sewers, where one by one they succumb to malnutrition, madness and death. Wajda lets us know from the very beginning what we’re up against, as a doom-laden voiceover informs us: ‘These are the tragic heroes. Watch them closely in the remaining hours of their lives.’ But he forces us to relate to these characters, sketching their personalities in subtle, effective strokes: the grim and desperate captain, the lovestruck youth, the out-of-place artist. Each is given a reason to live; that we know they won’t only makes us care more deeply. 

Before the bomb

Director: Isao Takahata

Cast: Tsutomu Tatsumi, Ayano Shiraishi

Studio Ghibli number-two Isao Takahata’s haunting animated drama adopts a template familiar from Ivan’s Childhood and Come and See, offering a child’s-eye-perspective of wartime atrocities. But like his colleague Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbour Totoro from the same year, it also expounds on the methods used by children to block out the horrors of the world (namely daydreaming, fantasy and unrealistic optimism). It cannot be overstated how heartbreaking and painful Grave of the Fireflies is, following a boy and his toddler sister as they are forced to go it alone in the Japanese wilderness as US bombers lay waste to the cities. Roger Ebert rightly named it one of the greatest war movies ever made: once seen, it will never be forgotten. 

European vacation

Director: ​​Samuel Fuller

Cast: Lee Marvin, Mark Hamill, Robert Carradine

The original Band of Brothers, and one of the most detailed and nourishing WWII flicks of them all (at least in its epic director’s cut). Essentially a memoir of director Sam Fuller’s own wartime experiences – and a fitting tribute to the men who served alongside him – the film takes in almost the entire European theatre, from North Africa to Italy and up into France, Germany and Czechoslovakia. But this is far from a straightforward shoot-’em-up, bringing in bizarre and often cruel humour, marvellous characterisation and one of the oddest war-movie scenes of them all, as our heroes assist with childbirth in the belly of a stranded tank. 

Mother Russia

Director: Mikhail Kalatozov

Cast: Tatyana Samojlova, Aleksey Batalov, Vasili Merkuryev

Made in the wake of Stalin’s death, this visually rapturous masterpiece is more akin in tone to ’40s British morale boosters than Soviet propaganda pieces of the post-war period. The story – of young lovers torn apart and dragged where the currents of war pull them – bucked the prevailing trend towards willing sacrifice and noble collective spirit. Director Mikhail Kalatozov and cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky would go on to make Soy Cuba, and their singular, mesmeric photographic style is evident here too: a startling blend of audacious framing and hand-held intimacy that wouldn’t filter into Western cinema for years. 

Oh, we don’t like to be beside the seaside

Director: Christopher Nolan

Cast: Tom Hardy, Mark Rylance, Barry Keoghan, Fionn Whitehead

It’s often said that Christopher Nolan doesn’t do things the ordinary way. But Dunkirk, his visceral, fist-gnawingly tense ticking-clock, actually harks back to an era of war epics like The Longest Day and A Bridge Too Far. Back then, casts were so colossal and the props budgets so enormous, you sometimes wondered if it wouldn’t be easier just declaring war for real. Nolan’s achievement is giving his film scale and intimacy at the same time. There’s not an inch of fat on its bones, just tommies, citizen sailors and the odd officer struggling bitterly for salvation in the face of extraordinary odds. 

Stiff lips and sharp axes

Director: Alberto Cavalcanti

Cast: Leslie Banks, Mervyn Johns, Basil Sydney

Those of us who grew up with national treasure Dame Thora Hird being frightfully lovely on the BBC can only watch in amazement as, at the climax of Alberto Cavalcanti’s masterful wartime chiller, she gamely starts picking off invading Nazis with a rusty old hunting rifle. The plot, in which a German parachutes into a sleepy English village and sets about clearing the way for a major invasion, may be fantasy, but it’s alarmingly powerful. Released before the Normandy landings, Went The Day Well? was precision-tooled to remind all those bicycling bobbies, cheeky pub-dwelling chappies and self-satisfied lairds that they, too, may one day have to take on an entire paratroop division armed only with national pride and a malacca walking stick.

Deeper and down

Director: Wolfgang Petersen

Cast: Jürgen Prochnow, Herbert Grönemeyer, Klaus Wennemann

Originally made as a five-hour miniseries for German TV, cut to feature-length for worldwide consumption and finally expanded again to a 210-minute ‘director’s cut’, Wolfgang Petersen’s breathless, terrifying U-boat drama remains the most claustrophobic of all WWII movies. The film is a masterclass in economical, tight-space storytelling, piling the pressure on both characters and audience until the sprockets squeak. The infamous ‘tiefer…’ sequence, as captain Jürgen Prochnow pushes his sub to life-threatening depths, is still almost unwatchable.

The unvarnished truth

Director: Claude Lanzmann

Early in his nine-and-a-half hour Holocaust documentary, Claude Lanzmann asks a survivor why he is recalling the horror of his experience for the camera. “Because you’re insisting on it,” he answers. Lanzmann spent 11 years imploring witnesses to the atrocity—including the perpetrators—to share their memories. He does not offer closure or catharsis. His goal is only to get them on record while he can. He presses for the details and arranges them in no true narrative order and without any historical footage nor emotional manipulation. And yet, that is enough to make every minute crucial. Lanzmann’s accomplishment is in realizing that what matters most are the voices of those who were there. With the number of such voices dwindling, the importance of his insistence that they speak grows with each passing year.

In the ghetto

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes, Caroline Goodall

At the height of his blockbuster powers, it probably seemed unlikely, if not unwise, that Spielberg would tackle the Holocaust, even though he’d dabbled with its imagery in the past. (The Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark, for just one obvious example.) But his imprimatur made Schindler’s List a true cultural event, and his unparalleled facility with widescreen storytelling made the film among the most powerful of any that have ever grappled with the atrocity. Decades later, it’s Liam Neeson’s lead performance, as the German industrialist Oskar Schindler, that endures most. He manages to bring a deep humanism to the role of a businessman who keeps his empathy shrouded behind a veneer of capitalist opportunism – until, of course, the famously crushing denouement.

About a boy

Director: Elem Klimov

Cast: Aleksei Kravchenko, Olga Mironova

Making the infamous opening of Saving Private Ryan look like a Sunday stroll in the park, Elem Klimov’s hallucinatory masterpiece feels like the nearest cinema has ever come to recreating the ruthlessly discombobulating sensory experience of war. After much deliberation, we thought it fitting to place this singular film at the top of our list, not just for its strikingly candid take on the human toll of warfare but as a work of sublime visual and aural intensity that uses every tool in the filmmaker’s arsenal to unforgettable and often nauseating effect.

Come and See is told from the perspective of Byelorussian lad Flyora (Aleksei Kravchenko), an army recruit whose plucky optimism is torn away as the platoon he’s inducted into are massacred. Forced to survive alone in the wilderness, he suffers unspeakable indignities at every turn. Klimov’s film argues convincingly that there are no heroes in war, only victims and perpetrators, and that no amount of guns and ammo will be able to reconcile the memory of the Holocaust. A disorienting, downbeat and unforgettable classic.