15. “Das Boot” (1981)
The sweat. The claustrophobia. The literal pressure bearing in from all sides. There has simply never been a more visceral filmic description of the horrors of submarine warfare than Wolfgang Petersen‘s “Das Boot.” Set in a Berman U-boat during WWII, with Jurgen Prochnow’s hard-jawed Captain as the head of a young crew more or less (and mostly less) personally loyal to their cause and their Fuhrer, it’s also a taut sociological experiment as days go by without relief from the monotony and cabin fever sets in, only for frayed nerves and mettle to be tested in brief bursts of devastating combat. Originally a six-hour miniseries, whether you see the original theatrical cut or the extended one, the airless miracle is that such a closed-quarters movie can feel dynamic: Jost Vacano‘s cinematography is so clever at moving nervily through this cramped space with its hatches and tight turnarounds, that by the time it ends, every muscle aches.
14. “Lawrence of Arabia” (1962)
The only reason David Lean’s enthralling all-time classic isn’t higher on this list is that it’s so many other things aside from a war movie; it really amounts to a one-film treatise of the “Great Man” theory of history. Starring an astounding, piercingly blue-eyed Peter O’Toole as TE Lawrence, and the glitteringly dark-eyed Omar Sharif as his friend and counsel Sherif Ali, the film’s most famous moment might be Ali’s long ride up to the well, but the setting on the Arabian Peninsula during WWI provides plenty of superlative battle scenes too. From the train attack, to the morally indefensible slaughter of retreating troops, to the incredible descent on Aqaba, in which hordes of horsemen (and camelmen) overrun the bayside town in a matter of minutes, there is no doubt that “Lawrence of Arabia” unequivocally glorifies warfare as the crucible in which manhood is forged, even as it shows its cost, in human life and moral abnegation.
13. “Paisan” (1946)
The 6 vignettes in Roberto Rosselini‘s neo-realist classic “Paisan” were shot on location at the very tail end of the war, so they feel immediate, without any sense of retrospectivity intruding. They differ in tone — part 1 is a tragedy as a fledging love affair between a village girl and an American soldier is curtailed; part 2 a seriocomic caper as a young boy steals a black GI’s shoes; part 3 a cynical anti-romance in which a drunken soldier fails to recognize the young girl he’s been pining for in the prostitute she’s become; part 4 an American nurse’s desperate race through occupied territory to find her painter-turned-partisan-leader lover; part 5 a religious interlude as three American chaplain spend the night in a Catholic monastery; and part 6 a stirring tale of life and death in a partisan brigade. But chorally they are a brilliantly heartfelt experience of the messiness and communication failures of the waning days of war.
12. “The Deer Hunter” (1978)
There are few films that set out with ambitions as grandiose as those of Michael Cimino’s elegy to the Vietnam War, but “The Deer Hunter,” which sets itself the task of indicting an entire generational ethos, as well as an incredibly controversial and unpopular war and its debilitating aftermath, comes very close to achieving them all. Modulated away from pomposity by a restrained Robert De Niro, whose quiet watchfulness contrasts with his Oscar-winning co-star Christopher Walken‘s tragic, increasingly unhinged performance, and those of John Savage, John Cazale and Meryl Streep, in her small but indelible debut, it won 9 Academy Awards and set up Cimino for the spectacular blaze-out that was “Heaven’s Gate.” But its most lasting legacy is in influencing how the Vietnam War is thought of to this day: certain tropes, like Russian Roulette, or the maimed vet finding it impossible to adjust, have become almost cliched since, because they were achieved here with such unforgettable clarity.
11.” Fires On The Plain” (1959)
It may seem incongruous that the director of one of the most powerfully bleak films about war’s corruption of basic humanity was also a director of comedies and at one time earned the nickname “the Japanese Capra.” But Kon Ichikawa‘s stunning “Fires on the Plain,” aside from being as desolate a picture of the horror of war as you will find, is also rife with witty observational asides, such as the sequence involving a series of soldiers trading up to the pair of boots abandoned by the last guy. And it unfolds with the kind of timing usually reserved for a perfect longform joke, only here the punchline is grimmer than you can imagine. Starring Eiji Funakoshi as Tamura, a tubercular private in a Japanese army on the brink of abject defeat, it’s a kind of Russian-nesting-doll narrative of death, as the sickly soldier criss-crosses these plains encountering humiliation, cannibalism and moral exhaustion in paradoxically beautiful images of destruction and disillusion.