The Best War Movies of All Time

Daniel Day-Lewis won an Academy Award for his portrayal of the 16th president of the United States in this Steven Spielberg-directed 2012 biopic. Sally Field was also nominated as Best Actress in a Supporting Role for her portrayal of Mary Todd Lincoln. The film focuses on Abraham Lincoln’s final months in office as he struggles to unite the fractured nation and end slavery.

Directed and co-written by John Woo, “Red Cliff” is a sprawling epic about a battle fought toward the end of the Han dynasty in the third century. The movie was released in two parts originally in Asia. Outside of Asia, the running time was reduced to 148 minutes and the parts were combined into a single film.

“Good Morning, Vietnam” is a comedy vehicle for Robin Williams, who plays Adrian Cronauer, an irreverent disc jockey sent to Vietnam to raise morale with his broadcasts on the U.S. Armed Services radio station. Soon enough, he crosses swords with the military, which doesn’t appreciate his brand of humor. Williams received the first of his four Oscar nominations for his role.

“Zero Dark Thirty” chronicles the hunt for al-Qaeda terrorist group leader Osama bin Laden after the 9/11 attacks through to his death at the hands of the Navy SEAL Team 6 in May 2011. Kathryn Bigelow, who became the only woman to have won an Oscar for best directing (“The Hurt Locker”), was not nominated this time. The movie was nominated for five Oscars and won one — for Best Achievement in Sound Editing.

Starring Spencer Tracy and Van Johnson, “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo” is based on the exploits of the Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle and his aviators, who bombed the Japanese capital about five months after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Also making an early-career appearance in the film is Robert Mitchum.

A war movie distinctive for its exploration of sadism rather than the valor of battle, “The Dirty Dozen” was criticized for its brutal violence. It follows an army unit made up of former death-row inmates who are sent on a suicide mission to sneak behind enemy lines and assassinate dozens of German officers. An all-star cast included Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Charles Bronson, and Telly Savalas, and “The Dirty Dozen” helped launch the movie career of Cleveland Browns star running back Jim Brown.

Co-written by Richard Boyle, a U.S. photojournalist who covered the Salvadoran Civil War, this historical drama depicts Boyle as he attempts to help his former girlfriend and her children escape El Salvador while rebels battle a military dictatorship and innocent people pay the price.

Mel Gibson not only directed but also wrote and produced this epic about William Wallace, the Scottish freedom fighter who led the clans against the English in the First War of Scottish Independence in the late 13th and early 14th centuries. “Braveheart” features actual events such as the battles of Stirling Bridge and Falkirk, depicting combat in the Middle Ages in gruesome detail. The movie won five Oscars, including those for Best Picture and Best Director.

Hollywood icon John Wayne plays John Stryker, a very strict and very mean Marine sergeant who is hated by his men. But they begin to understand his methods and learn to respect him during the Battle of Iwo Jima.

“From Here to Eternity” is set at an airbase in Hawaii just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The topflight cast included Montgomery Clift, Burt Lancaster, Deborah Kerr, Frank Sinatra, Ernest Borgnine, and Donna Reed. The movie corralled eight Academy Awards, including statues for Sinatra and Reed, and resuscitated Sinatra’s career..

“Sergeant York” is the story of Alvin York, a Tennessee backwoodsman and pacifist who became America’s greatest hero during World War I. Gary Cooper played York and won the first of his two Academy Awards for the part. Director Hawks served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army Signal Corps and later joined the Army Air Corps during World War I, and brought his own experiences to bear.

This animated film looks at the life of Jiro Horikoshi, who designed Japanese fighter planes during World War II. The film is noteworthy in that few recent Japanese movies depict significant figures from the imperial era. David Ehrlich of Film.com called “The Wind Rises” “perhaps the greatest animated film the cinema has ever seen.” The film was directed by the Academy Award-winning Hayao Miyazaki.

This film’s star turns out to be Christopher Nolan, of Batman fame, who wrote, directed, and produced it. The movie contains so little dialogue and so few marquee actors, that some of the louder parts of battle sound nearly silent. That near silence and lack of dialogue, Nolan must have believed, would make the violence of war all the more vivid. Nolan turns the movie, built around the Battle of Dunkirk in 1940, into a contemplation of battle without honor or victory. At no point does the viewer see the face of the enemy, who is never identified.

During the Irish War of Independence, two brothers (Cillian Murphy and Pádraic Delaney) who fight together for freedom from British rule end up in different factions, as one supports the Anglo-Irish Treaty and one demands nothing less than a free republic.

“Where Eagles Dare” is a stirring World War II thriller based on a novel by the prolific writer Alistair MacLean. Allied agents (including Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood) are dropped behind enemy lines to launch a raid on a well-fortified castle in the mountains to try and free an American brigadier general prisoner. But the story goes in a completely different direction.

Gregory Peck, David Niven, and Anthony Quinn star as Allied saboteurs sent to destroy a massive German gun emplacement on a Greek island that is preventing the Royal Navy from rescuing Allied troops trapped on another island. The movie is based on an Alistair MacLean 1957 novel ofthe same name and the screenplay was written by Carl Foreman, who had been blacklisted by Hollywood in the 1950s.

Director David Lean followed up his immensely successful “Lawrence of Arabia” with the epic romance film “Doctor Zhivago” about the life of a Russian poet and doctor during and after the Russian Revolution. The movie, which stars Omar Sharif and Julie Christie, was nominated for 10 Oscars and won five.

“The Longest Day,” which tells the story of the D-Day invasion of Normandy from the Allied and German perspectives, was helmed by three directors, and featured one of the greatest casts in motion-picture history, including John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Robert Ryan, Richard Burton, and Sean Connery. British actor Richard Todd, who was part of the British airborne invasion of France during the D-Day operation, appears in the film.

Kathryn Bigelow made history at the Oscars in 2010 when she became the first woman to win for Best Director. Her low-budget, apolitical Iraq war film “The Hurt Locker” won a total of six Oscars, including Best Picture. The movie follows three American soldiers, members of a bomb-disposal unit in Baghdad, who are at the end of their tours. A.O. Scott of The New York Times called the movie “ferociously suspenseful.”

Director Clint Eastwood told the story of the Battle of Iwo Jima twice in films, from the perspective of each side. The Japanese view is expressed here through a Japanese soldier’s letters to home that were unearthed in Iwo Jima’s caves decades after the battle.

“Hacksaw Ridge” is the true story of U.S. Army medic Desmond T. Doss, a pacifist, who saved American soldiers wounded at the Battle of Okinawa and became the only American serviceman to win the Medal of Honor for not firing a shot. The movie is remembered for its depiction of the extraordinary bravery of Doss, played by Oscar-nominated actor Andrew Garfield, and its gripping battle scenes.

Michael Mann’s “The Last of the Mohicans” is one of the more romantic popular war movies. Starring Daniel Day-Lewis as Hawkeye, a white man adopted by the Mohican tribe, the film features well-mounted battle scenes during the French and Indian War against the background of the passionate relationship between Hawkeye and Cora Munro, the daughter of a British soldier.

Samuel Fuller wrote as well as directed this movie about a motley group of U.S. soldiers holed up in a Buddhist temple, fighting an overwhelming force of communist troops during the Korean War. Fuller drew on personal war experiences to tell stories about those in armed conflict. He fought with the U.S. Army’s 1st Infantry Division in North Africa and Italy and landed with the third wave on Omaha Beach during the D-Day invasion of Normandy, and won the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, and the Purple Heart for his service.

The star-studded cast of this epic depiction of a slave revolt in ancient Rome included Kirk Douglas, Laurence Olivier, Tony Curtis, Jean Simmons, and Charles Laughton. The film took home four Oscars. The screenplay was credited to Dalton Trumbo, marking the first time a blacklisted writer had been openly identified on-screen after the blacklist.

“Twelve O’Clock High” is a war film about Allied airmen and the toll the war takes on them. Gregory Peck stars as the no-nonsense commander tasked with boosting the morale of the flyers that he leads. Critic Emanuel Levy said “Henry King’s WWII drama is one of Hollywood’s first and most honestly probing chronicles of the psychological anxieties and emotional pressures caused by high-command positions.”

Burt Lancaster was reunited with director John Frankenheimer (they had earlier collaborated on “Birdman of Alcatraz”) in “The Train.” Lancaster plays a French Resistance fighter who tries to stop the Nazis from transporting works of art out of Paris ahead of the Allied advance. A strong cast of international actors included Paul Scofield, Jeanne Moreau, and Wolfgang Preiss.

Benedict Cumberbatch plays computing pioneer Alan Turing who was tasked with cracking seemingly unbreakable Nazi codes during World War II. “The Imitation Game” also tells how Turing is forced to conceal his homosexuality, which was illegal at the time in the U.K. The film was nominated for eight Oscars, winning one for best adapted screenplay.

“Beasts of No Nation” stars Idris Elba as a warlord who recruits an orphan boy to fight for him in a civil war in an African nation. “(Cary Joji ) Fukunaga’s hurtling camera and taut cutting keep ‘Beasts of No Nation’ only just this side of hallucinatory, and Elba is the kind of titanic actor to kick it to a near-mythic level,” said David Edelstein of New York Magazine.

What says revenge more than a Quentin Tarantino-helmed film that exacts retribution on Nazis. Brad Pitt plays an American lieutenant who puts together a team of Jewish soldiers who parachute behind German lines to attack, scalp, and kill Nazis.

Director Oliver Stone, who served in Vietnam, also wrote this film about a new recruit (Charlie Sheen) caught between a battle of wills involving two sergeants. “Platoon” was a raw examination of the impact of combat on soldiers who have doubts about what they are fighting for. The cast includes Tom Berenger, Willem Dafoe, Forest Whitaker, and Johnny Depp. The movie won four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director.

Two journalists witness the atrocities of genocide firsthand in this historical drama, which takes place in Cambodia during the brutal Khmer Rouge takeover. The movie was nominated for seven Academy Awards, winning three.

This Civil War drama tells the story of the first all-African-American volunteer regiment that served in the Union Army. It’s partly based on the letters of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (played by Matthew Broderick), the actual commander of the regiment. The film won three Academy Awards, including Best Supporting Actor for Denzel Washington.

“The Deer Hunter” is among the most haunting films to deal with the effects of the Vietnam War on U.S. soldiers. With relentless realism, the movie follows a group of friends from a working-class town in Pennsylvania before, during, and after their tours of duty. The film won five Academy Awards in 1979, including Best Picture.

George C. Scott’s performance as the narcissistic and controversial WWII general George Patton represented the apex of his career. The movie would win seven Oscars, including Best Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor (Scott). Scott said before the Academy Awards ceremony that he would not accept the Oscar if he won and he did not, calling the honor “meaningless.”

In “Waltz With Bashir,” director Ari Folman explores his memories, and those of old friends, of the 1982 Lebanon War. The animated film is uniquely powerful and original.

“All Quiet on the Western Front” is ranked at or near the top of every list of great films about war. Told through the perspective of a young German student, Paul Bäumer, the movie focuses on the patriotic zeal of German youth who are implored by their teacher to fight for Germany. As death begins to take the students, the means and results of their demises tell several movies’ worth of stories about the horrors of battle and blind fealty to one’s country.

British prisoners of war held by the Japanese in Burma faced forced labor to build a bridge over the River Kwai in 1942. The movie has as its source the 1952 novel written in French by Pierre Boulle. Initially, the British soldiers led by Alec Guinness, a lieutenant colonel, resisted. Guinness, however, comes to believe he can shame his captors with a bridge far superior to what they might build on their own. William Holden and a group of commandos travel through the jungle to destroy the bridge. The film won seven Oscars for Best Movie, Best Director, and Best Actor.

Based on the 1979 novel “The Short-Timers,” Stanley Kubrick’s depiction of the Vietnam War lays bare the dehumanizing nature of combat. From the indignities of boot camp to the violence inflicted upon the Vietnamese during the Tet offensive, Kubrick doesn’t pull any punches.

The World War II drama, set during Christmas in 1944, was directed by Billy Wilder, one of cinema’s greatest directors. William Holden received an Academy Award for his performance as a cynical prisoner of war wrongfully accused of being a spy for the Germans.

Ernst Lubitsch directed, produced, and co-wrote this satire about the Nazi takeover of Poland and a theatrical troupe’s attempt to help the Polish resistance. The movie was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 1996. It was the last film that Carole Lombard appeared in before she died in a plane crash.

Who can forget Steve McQueen attempting to outrun the Germans on a motorcycle by trying to leap over barbed wire fences that separated Germany from neutral Switzerland? The story of a mass escape by Allied prisoners is based on a true story about a breakout from Stalag Luft III. The prisoners spread far and wide as they, in small groups, try to evade their German captors.

“The Best Years of Our Lives” is a film that dramatized the difficulties World War II veterans who were faced with adjusting to civilian life. The movie won William Wyler his second Oscar. The movie starred Fredric March and Dana Andrews and won seven Academy Awards, including Best Supporting Actor for disabled veteran Harold Russell.

Stanley Kubrick’s film about the immorality of vainglorious French senior officers stars Kirk Douglas in what many critics say was his best role. (He and Kubrick later teamed to make “Spartacus” in 1960.) Set in 1916, in WWI-ravaged France, the story concerns Douglas’s character, Colonel Dax, receiving orders from the general staff to take an impregnable German position. The effort fails, with the deaths of scores of French infantry. French soldiers refuse to renew the attack and are tried by a military court. Dax defends them.

Steven Spielberg’s WWII homage to the “greatest generation” has a loose connection to events from the Civil War that involve President Lincoln’s letter to a woman who had lost several sons in battles. Beyond that, “Saving Private Ryan” is pure fiction. It has been noted for the uncanny realism of costumes, weapons, terrain, and fidelity to actual troop movements after D-Day. Tom Hanks’ performance ranks with his very best.

This black comedy about nuclear armageddon features Peter Sellers playing multiple roles, including a German-accented adviser to the president, also played by Sellers. The film came out prior to a thriller with the same theme, “Fail Safe,” which was released later the same year.

Somewhere along the path from his start as one of Hollywood’s most admired leading men in films that include “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1951) and “On the Waterfront” (1954) and his most successful films in middle age, led by “The Godfather” (1972), Marlon Brando moved into the later part of his career as Colonel Kurtz, a psychotic and deeply feared American officer headquartered deep in the jungle during the Vietnam War. Martin Sheen’s character has been sent to kill him. The movie is loosely based on the 1899 novel “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad.

Based on the life of Polish-Jewish pianist and Holocaust survivor Władysław Szpilman, this saga follows the man’s experiences during the Nazi occupation of his native country. After his family is shipped off to a death camp, he helps smuggle arms to resistance fighters, witnesses the unsuccessful Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, is taken in by a sympathetic Nazi officer, and survives the war.

In what is considered one of the greatest films of all time, Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, past lovers, find themselves together in Nazi-controlled French Morocco. Bergman tells Bogart that when they were together in Paris, she had been married to a resistance leader whom she thought had been killed by the Nazis. Now her husband appears in Morocco with her. Bogart faces one of the great moral dilemmas in American film history. Viewers have been left, for decades, to decide if he made the correct decision.

Animated films are infrequently among the saddest, especially when they involve children. “Grave of the Fireflies” is the major exception. The harrowing anime follows the lives of a young brother and sister in Japan during the final days of World War II. Film critic Ernest Rister has called it “the most profoundly human animated film [he’s] ever seen.”

“Schindler’s List,” the story of how an Austrian businessman saved the lives of Jews during World War II, dominated the Academy Awards in 1994, winning seven Oscars, including Best Director — the first of three for Spielberg — and Best Picture. Susan Stark of the Detroit Free Press called the film “heartfelt” and “monumental.”