The 30 Greatest War Films
Peter Debruge William Earl Owen Gleiberman Jordan Moreau J. Kim Murphy Pat Saperstein Ellise Shafer Ethan Shanfeld Rachel Seo
These are the best movies about World War I, WW2, Vietnam and more, from "Inglourious Basterds" to "Saving Private Ryan."
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Variety
Twenty-five years ago, on July 24, 1998, “Saving Private Ryan” was released. It’s a movie that figures high on our list of the 30 Greatest War Films. Yet it’s worth noting just why Steven Spielberg’s wrenching combat masterpiece has earned such a singular place in the cinema of war. Many, if not most, of the greatest war films — like, for instance, “Paths of Glory” — are often characterized as “anti-war.” The reason is obvious: They’re message movies that depict the horrifying devastation of war, all as a way of saying, “The human race must figure out a way to stop this unfathomable cruelty.” You could say that’s the message embedded in every movie about the Vietnam War — the era when combat in film attained a new, searing, at times hallucinatory realism. The Vietnam movies were all about how cataclysmic and terrible and “insane” war could be.

Yet “Saving Private Ryan,” which built on the dizzying, you-are-there battle-field authenticity that had been brought to the screen by Kubrick, Coppola, and Stone, made a statement that couldn’t be categorized as “anti-war.” That’s because it was about a war that needed to be fought. And this lent Spielberg’s film a singular and spectacular ambivalence. It showed war to be hell. But it also showed war to be a hell that was (sometimes) necessary.

Most of the films on our list contain indelible sequences of combat. “Saving Private Ryan,” for example, is just one film that show a great war movie is about the moral complexity at its heart: not just the depiction of war but the understanding of war in all its fear, horror, blood and compulsion, its violent pointlessness and also its need, at times, to exist.