War Movies, Ranked

Coppola's 1979 Vietnam odyssey through Conrad's Heart of Darkness won the Palme d'Or and remains the genre's most hallucinatory achievement despite a legendarily chaotic production.

Spielberg's 1998 D-Day film opens with a harrowing Normandy assault that redefined combat realism and won him a second Best Director Oscar.

Elem Klimov's 1985 Soviet film follows a Belarusian boy through Nazi atrocities and is widely cited as the most harrowing anti-war film ever made.

Kubrick's 1957 court-martial-and-trenches drama savages military hierarchy through French soldiers scapegoated after a failed attack, anchored by Kirk Douglas.

Kubrick's 1987 diptych splits boot-camp psychological breakdown from the Tet Offensive in Hue, with R. Lee Ermey's drill sergeant now iconic.

Stone drew on his own combat tour for this 1986 film, which won Best Picture and Best Director for its unromanticized ground-level Vietnam.

Wolfgang Petersen's 1981 submarine epic traps the viewer in a German U-boat and earned six Oscar nominations, rare for a foreign-language film.

Spielberg's 1993 Holocaust drama about Oskar Schindler won seven Oscars including Best Picture and is a defining film of moral witness.

David Lean's 1957 POW epic about British prisoners building a Japanese railway bridge won seven Oscars including Best Picture.

Sam Mendes's 2019 WWI film uses seamless one-take editing to follow two soldiers across no man's land and won three technical Oscars.

Nolan's 2017 film intercuts land, sea, and air across the 1940 evacuation with minimal dialogue and won three Oscars.

Eastwood's 2006 companion piece tells Iwo Jima from the Japanese perspective and earned a Best Picture nomination.

Ridley Scott's 2001 film dramatizes the Battle of Mogadishu with relentless urban-combat intensity and won two editing and sound Oscars.

Kathryn Bigelow's 2009 Iraq bomb-disposal thriller made her the first woman to win Best Director and took Best Picture.

Mel Gibson's 2016 film follows medic Desmond Doss, who saved 75 men at Okinawa without a weapon, and won two Oscars.

Jean-Jacques Annaud's 2001 film stages a Stalingrad sniper standoff but takes heavy liberties with history and Russian accents.

This 2000 submarine thriller drew real criticism for crediting Americans with a British Enigma-capture mission that predated U.S. entry.

John Woo's 2002 film buried the Navajo code-talker story under Nicolas Cage heroics and flopped with critics and at the box office.

Michael Bay's bloated 2001 blockbuster drowned the attack in melodrama and won a raft of Razzie nominations for its trouble.