War Media

Dir. Steven Spielberg

The D-Day landings redefined war on film.

Dir. Francis Ford Coppola

A hallucinatory descent into the heart of Vietnam.

Dir. Steven Spielberg

The Holocaust rendered in unsparing black and white.

Dir. Stanley Kubrick

A withering indictment of command cowardice in the trenches.

Dir. Stanley Kubrick

From Parris Island to Hue — the duality of the Vietnam Marine.

Dir. David Lean

Duty, madness, and a bridge built of pride.

Dir. Oliver Stone

Ground-level Vietnam from a veteran who was there.

Dir. Billy Wilder

The original POW camp classic.

Dir. John Sturges

Allied ingenuity and a motorcycle leap for the ages.

Dir. Wolfgang Petersen

Claustrophobic terror aboard a U-boat.

Dir. Elem Klimov

The Eastern Front as witnessed by a Belarusian boy.

Dir. Sam Mendes

A single continuous mission across No Man's Land.

Dir. Edward Zwick

The 54th Massachusetts and the fight for Black soldiers' honor.

Dir. Franklin J. Schaffner

The general as prophet, strategist, and problem.

Dir. Terrence Malick

Guadalcanal as philosophical poem.

Dir. David Lean

The desert war and the myth of one man.

Dir. Michael Cimino

Russian roulette and the cost of going to war.

Dir. Clint Eastwood

The Pacific island fight told from the Japanese side.

Dir. Clint Eastwood

The men behind the famous photograph.

Dir. Oliver Hirschbiegel

Hitler's final days in the Berlin bunker.

Dir. Roman Polanski

Survival in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Dir. Mel Gibson

A conscientious objector who saved lives without a weapon.

Dir. Joseph Vilsmaier

A German platoon ground down in the frozen city.

Dir. Samuel Fuller

A rifle squad from North Africa to Czechoslovakia.

Dir. Brian G. Hutton

A heist behind enemy lines.

Dir. Brian G. Hutton

A castle raid in the Austrian Alps.

Dir. Robert Aldrich

Convicts turned commandos for one impossible mission.

Dir. Richard Fleischer

The Pearl Harbor attack from both sides.

Dir. Jack Smight

The carrier battle that turned the Pacific.

Dir. Lewis Gilbert

The Royal Navy's hunt for the German battleship.

Dir. Quentin Tarantino

A revisionist fable of Nazi hunting.

Dir. Christopher Nolan

Land, sea, and air interwoven across the evacuation.

Dir. Ken Annakin

The D-Day invasion in epic scale.

Dir. Richard Attenborough

Operation Market Garden's ambitious failure.

Dir. Guy Hamilton

The RAF's fight for the skies over England.

Dir. Henry King

Command fatigue in the bomber groups.

Dir. Michael Caton-Jones

One final mission for a B-17 crew.

Dir. Isao Takahata

Two children and the firebombing of Kobe.

Dir. Charlie Chaplin

Chaplin's satire against fascism.

Dir. Michael Curtiz

Resistance, romance, and a letter of transit.

Dir. Fred Zinnemann

Pearl Harbor on the eve of infamy.

Dir. Edward Dmytryk

A mutiny over a commander's sanity.

Dir. John Ford

Comedy and longing on a backwater cargo ship.

Dir. Mike Nichols

The absurd logic of war laid bare.

Dir. George Roy Hill

Dresden through a man unstuck in time.

Dir. William Wyler

Three veterans coming home to a changed country.

Dir. Kathryn Bigelow

An EOD tech addicted to the bomb.

Dir. Clint Eastwood

Chris Kyle's four tours in Iraq.

Dir. Peter Berg

Operation Red Wings in the Afghan mountains.

Dir. Ridley Scott

Mogadishu, a day, and a city at war.

Dir. Kathryn Bigelow

The decade-long hunt for bin Laden.

Dir. Rod Lurie

Combat Outpost Keating under siege.

Dir. Tim Hetherington

A documentary year in the Korengal Valley.

Dir. Susanna White

A Marine recon unit rolling into Iraq.

Dir. Stanley Kubrick

See #5 — included once; this slot reserved for the Vietnam canon.

Dir. Barry Levinson

An Armed Forces Radio DJ subverts the airwaves.

Dir. John Irvin

The 101st Airborne takes Hill 937.

Dir. Randall Wallace

The first major battle of Vietnam, Ia Drang.

Dir. Brian De Palma

A squad's crime and one soldier's conscience.

Dir. Oliver Stone

A paralyzed veteran becomes an activist.

Dir. Roland Joffé

Cambodia's genocide through a journalist and his fixer.

Dir. Ted Kotcheff

A Green Beret's war comes home to a small town.

Dir. Phillip Noyce

Early Vietnam and the cost of innocence.

Dir. Werner Herzog

A Navy pilot's escape from a Laotian POW camp.

Dir. Lewis Milestone

The original anti-war masterpiece.

Dir. Edward Berger

A brutal German-language retelling.

Dir. Peter Weir

Australian runners and a doomed campaign.

Dir. Christian Carion

The 1914 Christmas truce in the trenches.

Dir. G.W. Pabst

A German companion piece to All Quiet.

Dir. Sergei Bondarchuk

The battle staged with thousands of Soviet soldiers.

Dir. Peter Weir

A frigate duel around Cape Horn.

Dir. Ridley Scott

A decade-long grudge between two hussars.

Dir. Sergei Bondarchuk

Tolstoy's epic, staged on a Soviet scale.

Dir. Stanley Kubrick

The slave revolt that shook Rome.

Dir. Ridley Scott

A general betrayed, an arena, and Rome.

Dir. Oliver Stone

The Macedonian's march to the edge of the world.

Dir. Zack Snyder

Thermopylae rendered as myth and ink.

Dir. Antoine Fuqua

Artorius and the Sarmatian knights on Hadrian's Wall.

Dir. Kenneth Branagh

Agincourt and St. Crispin's Day.

Dir. Mel Gibson

William Wallace and the Scottish rising.

Dir. Michael Mann

The French and Indian War on the frontier.

Dir. Roland Emmerich

A militia farmer in the American Revolution.

Dir. Peter Weir

See #71 — the canon's single entry.

Dir. Ronald F. Maxwell

The three-day battle across every front.

Dir. Ronald F. Maxwell

Stonewall Jackson and the war's early years.

Dir. Steven Spielberg

The political fight to end slavery.

Dir. Sergio Leone

Three gunslingers in the chaos of the West.

Dir. Anthony Minghella

A deserter's long walk home.

Dir. Simon Wincer

The Australian Light Horse at Beersheba.

Dir. John Huston

A riverboat, a spinster, and a German steamer.

Dir. John Sturges

A fictional plot to kidnap Churchill.

Dir. Sam Peckinpah

A German platoon on the Eastern Front.

Dir. Fedor Bondarchuk

A Russian perspective on the city's defense.

Dir. Aleksey Sidorov

A captured Soviet tank crew turns the tables.

Dir. Morten Tyldum

Alan Turing and the codebreakers of Bletchley Park.

Dir. Angelina Jolie

Olympian Louis Zamperini's survival at sea and in camp.

Dir. Aaron Schneider

A destroyer commander in the Battle of the Atlantic.

Dir. David Ayer

A Sherman tank crew in the final push into Germany.

Dir. Mark Herman

An innocent friendship across the camp fence.

Dir. Taika Waititi

A boy's imaginary Hitler and the war's end.