URBAN'S FIFTY (one) FAVOURITE WAR MOVIES

[DaveCinzano]

36: Battle Of The Bulge
36: The Deer Hunter
36: The Eagle Has Landed
36: Escape To Victory
36: Hamburger Hill
36: Indigènes (AKA Days Of Glory (2006))
36: The Last Valley
36: Lepa Sela Lepo Gore
36: No Man's Land
36: Patton
36: Reach For The Sky
36: Red Badge Of Courage
36: Stalingrad (1993)
36: Three Kings
36: Tora! Tora! Tora!
36: The Victors

30: L'Armée Des Ombres (AKA Army Of Shadows)
30: The Big Red One
30: Le Chagrin Et La Pitié (AKA The Sorrow And The Pity)
30: Dr Strangelove
30: Gallipoli
30: La Grande Illusion

26: La Battaglia Di Algeri
26: Catch-22
26: The Dirty Dozen
26: Johnny Got His Gun

22: The Dam Busters
22: Kanał (AKA Sewer)
22: MASH
22: Taegukgi Hwinalrimyeo (AKA Brotherhood)

18: The Great Escape
18: The Hill
18: Roma, Città Aperta (AKA Rome: Open City)
18: Saving Private Ryan

13: The Bridge Over The River Kwai
13: Ice Cold In Alex
13: The Longest Day
13: Platoon
13: Where Eagles Dare

12: Went The Day Well?

10: Kelly's Heroes
10: Paths Of Glory
9: A Bridge Too Far
8: The Thin Red Line
7: Full Metal Jacket
5: All Quiet On The Western Front
5: Zulu
4: Apocalypse Now
3: Das Boot (AKA The Boat)
2: Cross Of Iron
1: Idi I Smotri (AKA Come And See)

Based on:

Log of war films recommended across various threads

So, any more recent films you'd put in here? Any love for Kajaki? Drone war flicks Eye In The Sky or Good Kill? A fresh Danish like Krigen? Maybe you like a slice of gung ho Americana like American Sniper or 13 Hours? Or a traditional father substitute team movie like Fury? Would you like a Turkish perspective on World War One, like Çanakkale Yolun Sonu, or a Brazilian perspective on World War Two, like A Estrada 47? An exploration of child soldiery as in Beasts Of No Nation?

Make your case here, and perhaps we can chip away at the orthodoxy represented by at least half of the results above...

 

[Shippou-Sensei]

Define war


Is Akira a war film?

Is When the wind blows a war film?

 

[ska invita]

Define war


Is Akira a war film?

Is When the wind blows a war film?

Akira, No
Wind Blows, oh go on then

No idea if its any good but just saw theres a $30million budget Russian production of Stalingrad from 2013 here: Stalingrad (2013) - IMDb

 

[Pickman's model]

Col blimp

 

[DaveCinzano]

No idea if its any good

It's not

 

[SpookyFrank]

It's not

The poster is horrible at any rate. Was that geezer really playing that piano at that spot? And how on earth did it stay in tune, never mind intact throughout all the bombing and shit.

 

[seventh bullet]

It is indeed awful. The bit with the soldiers on fire had me laughing.

 

[Reno]

Night of the Shooting Stars by the Taviani brothers is a great war film and very underrated. The film is a semi-autobiographical recollection of their childhood experiences of WWII. Shot through with a magic realist streak which anticipates Pan's Labyrinth, it's structured like a Robert Altman film in the way it follows a large cast of characters as an Italian town anticipates a German revenge attack towards the end of the war. There are many outstanding moments but the stand out sequence is a battle in a wheat field, where neighbours and former friends on both sides of the fascists are pitted against each other. I'm sure that scene influenced a similar sequence in The Thin Red Line. It's one of my favourite Italian films and should be far better known.



The film was long difficult to get hold of, but has recently been restored and released on DVD/Blu-ray in the UK.

 

[Pickman's model]

Dad's army (1971)

 

[Pickman's model]

Battle of algiers

 

[bimble]

The sound of music. Defo a war film.

 

[Sue]

Battle of algiers

No 26 in the list.

Ivan's Childhood. Beautiful and sad.

 

[Sue]

The sound of music. Defo a war film.

Although I was always a bit suspicious of the 'Captain in the Austrian Navy' thing... Can only presume it was in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, given Austria''s lack of sea coasts...

Eta And of course it's absolutely nowhere close to being on the list.

 

[Pickman's model]

Guns of navarone
Heroes of telemark
Force 10 from navarone
Dawn patrol
Wind the shakes the barley

 

[Pickman's model]

Although I was always a bit suspicious of the 'Captain in the Austrian Navy' thing... Can only presume it was in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, given Austria''s lack of sea coasts...

Eta And of course it's absolutely nowhere close to being on the list.

And of course admiral horthy was the hungarian leader at the time of ww2

 

[Reno]

Can only presume it was in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, given Austria''s lack of sea coasts...
.

It was indeed:

Georg von Trapp - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[inva]

Wooden Crosses (1932)
Intense, brutal French WW1 film. There's a scene where the soldiers are sitting in a dugout listening to German soldiers digging a mine towards them to plant explosives which captures the mix of boredom, terror and tension of trench warfare really powerfully.

 

[Ax^]

King Rat 1965...

hmm but its POW movie that counts right

 

[Reno]

The Bridge, German war film about when the Nazis were drafting school boys towards the end of WWII and based on real events.

 

[seventh bullet]

Do they have to be more recent?

I'll offer The Little Girl of Hanoi (Socialist Realism from a DRV still at war), The Commissar (banned Russian civil war film about anti-Semitism, a Vasily Grossman adaptation set in the town of his birth where thousands of Jews were later murdered by occupying Nazis, referenced in the film), and the one people on here take the piss out of me for liking but I don't care because it looks fantastic, that being wartime romance The Cranes are Flying.

 

[Pickman's model]

Outlaw Josey Wales

 

[butchersapron]

Three films with red in the title but no room for The Red and The White. What is this?

 

[Pickman's model]

Surprised on a board full of bowie fans there's no merry christmas mr lawrence

 

[Pickman's model]

Zulu dawn
Lawrence of Arabia

 

[oneflewover]

1: Idi I Smotri (AKA Come And See)

Just watched this, harrowing, thought provoking, and hitting hard your emotions. But the best?

 

[butchersapron]

Just watched this, harrowing, thought provoking, and hitting hard your emotions. But the best?

Just a question mark? No content? Argument/contention/comparison/explication?

 

[inva]

Diamonds of the Night (1964)
Brilliant, haunting WW2 film about two boys on the run from the concentration camp system.

 

[oneflewover]

Just a question mark? No content? Argument/contention/comparison/explication?

Not really clever enough or knowledgeable about films to give more insight or to compare / contrast.

I'll try:- Absolutely true to life and brilliantly shows the horrow of war, but as good as Saving Private Ryan / FullMetal Jacket / Apocolypse Now
Shows the break down of emotions and normal behaviours, Catch 22, Paths Of Glory

See, I told you

I will add though that the most moving / thought provoking is Night and Fog a documentary film

 

[inva]

for a fairly recent one, Sergey Loznitsa's film from 2012, In the Fog is one I remember being very good. Partisans in Belarus (I think it is) accuse a man of colaboration and set off into the forest intending to execute him. What follows is a slow paced, brooding film of moral complexity and tension. Got to be in the right mood for it I think, but really striking.

He also made a harrowing documentary before that of the siege of Leningrad.

 

[butchersapron]

for a fairly recent one, Sergey Loznitsa's film from 2012, In the Fog is one I remember being very good. Partisans in Belarus (I think it is) accuse a man of colaboration and set off into the forest intending to execute him. What follows is a slow paced, brooding film of moral complexity and tension. Got to be in the right mood for it I think, but really striking.

He also made a harrowing documentary before that of the siege of Leningrad.

Loved that - was trying to remember title of this. I remember writing about it when i still bothered with the DVD thread.