What Are Your Favorite Five Best Of All Time War Movies?

I don’t have a top five off the top of my head right now, but two VERY underrated movies are

Darkest Hour
The Pianist

Darkest Hour takes on the first few months of Churchill’s leadership and does a tremendous job of showing that his policies and plans were not obviously the right choice at the time. It was a tough call, he made it, and fortunately for the world, he was right. It’s easy for history to seem inevitable when it wasn’t at the time.

The Pianist looks at the Warsaw Ghetto. I put it up there with Schindler’s List. Amazing.

6 Likes

Zulu Dawn

Charge of the Light Brigade

March or Die

4 Likes

I forgot one

The Eagle Has Landed

3 Likes

Hard to choose just five

  1. All Quiet on the Western Front
  2. Battle of Britain
  3. Gods&Generals
  4. Saving Private Ryan
  5. Hamburger Hill

And many more. I remember the soviet movies about WW2, shown on GDR- Television ( DDR1 ).
And a movie about Rudolf Höß, played by Goetz George. His life from WW1 to his execution, a great movie

3 Likes

A few more to add:
Force 10 From Navarone
Thirty Seconds over Tokyo
The Great Raid
All Quiet on the Western Front (1980)
Lawrence of Arabia
Paths of Glory
Empire of The Sun

3 Likes

My Pick and Choose List

Some really great movies, some not so great movies.
Sorry, I can’t stop this list from growing! :film_strip: :star_struck:

The Book Thief
Schindler’s List
Casablanca
Gunga Din
The Pianist
Dunkirk
Greyhound
Midway (1976)
Midway (2019)
Tora Tora Tora
Halls of Montezuma
Das Boot
Hunter Killer
Crimson Tide
The Hunt for Red October
They Were Expendable
Pearl Harbor
Sink the Bismarck!
In Harm’s Way
Hacksaw Ridge
Apocalypse Now
We Were Soldiers
The Deer Hunter
Full Metal Jacket
Good Morning Vietnam
M•A•S•H
The Siege of Fire Base Gloria
84 Charlie Mopic
The Bridges at Toko Ri
Heartbreak Ridge
Hamburger Hill
Platoon
Danger Close
The Boys in Company C
Rescue Dawn
Air America
Born on the Fourth of July
Tigerland
Casualties of War
The Hanoi Hilton
Thud Pilots
Flight of the Intruder
The Great Santini
Devotion
Top Gun
Top Gun Maverick
The Tuskegee Airmen
Men of Honor
Enemy at the Gates
Saving Private Ryan
The Longest Day
Patton
McArther
Battle of the Bulge
Stalingrad
Blackhawk Down
American Sniper
Act of Valor
The Cane Mutiny
The African Queen
Sahara (Humphrey Bogart, 1943)
Sahara (Jim Beluchi, 1995)
A Bridge Too Far
Bridge on the River Kwai
The Railway Man
Battle of Britain
12 O’Clock High
Sands of Iwo Jima
Letters from Iwo Jima
The Fighting Seabees
Gardens of Stone
Lone Survivor
Hurt Locker
13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi
Courage Under Fire
The Beast
T-34
1941
Biloxi Blues
The Dirty Dozen
Inchon
The Sand Pebbles
Darkest Hour
1917
War Horse
Gone with the Wind
Glory
All Quite on the Western Front
Master and Commander
Doctor Strange Love
Fail Safe
Thirty Dark Zero
Kingdom of Heaven
Lawrence of Arabia
Gettysburg
Empire of The Sun
Gallipoli
Inglorious Bastards
Fury
Red Tails
Valkyrie
The Siege of Jadotville
Mine
Miracle at St. Anna`
Three Kings
Da 5 Bloods
The Captain

Rogue Heroes (six-part TV series worth mention) :tv:

—mike :cup_with_straw::star_struck::popcorn:

9 Likes

Have to mention some more

The Colditz Story.

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The Wooden Horse.

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The Cruel Sea.

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And of course, Ice Cold in Alex. In all that running around and winning the war that John Mills did, he deserved a pint in this one.

5 Likes

In no particular order

The Enemy Below
The Dirty Dozen
Where Eagles Dare
Battleground
Pork Chop Hill

7 Likes

Hard to nail down just 5, so these are the 5 I most recently watched again.

Kelly’s Heroes
The Dambusters
Enemy at the Gates
Zulu
The Battle of Britain

Prior to that:
A Bridge Too Far
Sink the Bismark
The Seige of Jadotville
Danger Close.

Some of you not have heard of the latter two. Well worth watching.

8 Likes

I’m surprised nobody has mentioned The Big Red One yet. written and directed by a man who lived it.
“We don’t murder, we kill.”

6 Likes

I think it would be easier to come up with the “5 Worst” war films.

7 Likes

Yeah, there are at least a couple I’ve seen on here that would qualify on my 5 worst list…

2 Likes

Ah, Anton Diffring - the best German German ever (re Colditz); he also starred (if that’s the right word) as Heydrich in Operation Daybreak, a film I forgot to add to my list; a rather understated film, and at the time made in what was still seriously Cold War territory, but a decent enough effort at the time. Diffring played Heydrich very well in my opinion; as I say, you don’t get a better Aryan Nazi than Anton Diffring(!)

1 Like

Pearl Harbor-hands down

3 Likes

Windtalkers…:nauseated_face::face_vomiting:

2 Likes

I liked the battle scenes

2 Likes

With Nicolas Cage’s bottomless ammo magazines? :laughing:

5 Likes

In this film, the love story is too much present.
Finally, the theme is this love story with a lot of clichés and not the war.
It is not a real surprise especially given the choice of the main actors !

3 Likes

Yes, he turns up in a lot of movies. Although I haven’t seen that one. He seems to have been the go-to man definitely.

3 Likes

There is another actor who has a very strong resemblance to Anton Diffring, George Mikell. Looking on IMDB, I saw that it was Mikell not Diffring in The Guns of Navarone or The Great Escape. I always had thought they were the same actor.

1 Like