They range from comical to harrowing, action-packed to quietly introspective, proudly gung-ho to deeply anti-war. These films were released as recently as last year and as far back as 1930. Regarding the films that do feature here: our 100 hail from all over the world. We’ve also decided not to include movies which focus on the Holocaust here those are set to appear in another feature entirely. On the other hand, while both western The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and biopic The Imitation Game feature war prominently, they, like Casablanca (a romance with noir and thriller elements) plus A Man Escaped and The Hill (both prison movies), belong more obviously to other genres. It was decided ultimately that the war was too much a peripheral element in these films.
Likewise Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped and Sidney Lumet’s The Hill. Some tough choices were made on what actually constituted a “war movie.” Resistance dramas feature in this list, but Casablanca doesn’t appear. Post-war dramas, like Ashes and Diamonds and Germany, Year Zero, as well as films that go to war for only a fraction of the running time, such as From Here to Eternity and Born on the Fourth of July, were also excluded. We’ve picked films that deal with soldiers, soldiering and warfare directly, meaning wartime movies set primarily away from conflict, often told largely or exclusively from the civilian perspective-a category which includes such classics as The Cranes Are Flying and Hope & Glory, Grave of the Fireflies and Forbidden Games-didn’t make the cut. With this top 100, we’ve made the decision to include only movies whose wars are based on historical conflicts, so none of the likes of Edge of Tomorrow or Starship Troopers. It’s also a malleable genre, and one that could broadly include all manner of films that we ultimately ruled out of the running in this list.
It’s a genre that emphasizes action and existential angst. It’s the most masculine of genres, the fact that armies have throughout history often been almost exclusively male seeing to it that men almost always dominate these things.
And make no mistake, the war movie is almost always about men. What is it good for? Well, if nothing else, then a tidy template for cinema: conflict, clear protagonists and antagonists, heightened emotions, and a generally unpredictable, lawless atmosphere which-as per the western-has since the dawn of cinema offered an elastic dramatic environment in which filmmakers can explore men at both their best and worst.
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