Certain apps, games and experiences may be suitable for a more mature audience. A disorienting, downbeat and unforgettable classic. Klimov’s film argues convincingly that there are no heroes in war, only victims and perpetrators, and that no amount of guns and ammo will be able to reconcile the memory of the Holocaust. Forced to survive alone in the wilderness, he suffers unspeakable indignities at every turn. After much deliberation, we thought it fitting to place this singular film at the top of our list, not just for its strikingly candid take on the human toll of warfare but as a work of sublime visual and aural intensity that uses every tool in the filmmaker’s arsenal to unforgettable and often nauseating effect.Ĭome and See is told from the perspective of Byelorussian lad Flyora (Aleksei Kravchenko), an army recruit whose plucky optimism is torn away as the platoon he’s inducted into are massacred. Making the infamous opening of Saving Private Ryan look like a Sunday stroll in the park, Elem Klimov’s hallucinatory masterpiece feels like the nearest cinema has ever come to recreating the ruthlessly discombobulating sensory experience of war. It’s an extraordinary vision of war, and indeed of humanity – godlike but ultimately sympathetic, exploring not just hearts and minds, but the souls of men in combat. The soldiers are viewed as individuals, questing souls on their own ultimately destructive spiritual journeys, but also as mere facets of the natural world, no more important than the plants, birds and insects that surround them. ![]() Malick paints the disputed island as a lost Eden, the two opposing armies as insignificant in the face of eternal nature. The overriding theme in Malick’s work has always been the transition from youth to adulthood, from innocence to experience, from paradise to reality, and this is no exception. Malick’s adaptation of James Jones’s memoir of the battle for Guadalcanal features Sean Penn, John Cusack, Nick Nolte, George Clooney, John Travolta and Woody Harrelson, with Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Sheen, Gary Oldman and Mickey Rourke left, amazingly, on the cutting room floor. So it was no surprise that on his return to filmmaking the Hollywood elite would line up to volunteer. Lean casts the conflicts in deep shades of grey, interrogating the notion of heroes and villains in the context of combat, building to a finale that’s both cathartic and crushing.Ĭast: Sean Penn, Adrien Brody, Jim Caviezel, Ben Chaplinīy the time of The Thin Red Line, Terrence Malick had been languishing in self-imposed exile for two decades while his first two films, Badlands and Days of Heaven, grew in stature. Meanwhile, William Holden’s begrudgingly Shears, a US Navy commander and former prisoner, is sent on a mission to destroy the bridge, putting him on a collision course not just with ruthless Japanese commandant Saito (Sessue Hayakawa) but Nicholson as well. Driven by national pride, he gradually becomes obsessed with the project, despite the fact that it’s directly assisting the enemy. Alec Guinness is the movie’s deeply compromised centre as Colonel Nicholson, a British office interned at a remote Japanese POW camp in Thailand and forced to oversee the construction of a bridge meant to ferry munitions between Bangkok and Rangoon. □ The 101 best action movies of all-timeĬast: William Holden, Alec Guinness, Jack Hawkins, Sessue HayakawaĪt once one of cinema’s truest epics and among the most meditative of all large-scale war movies, David Lean’s Oscar-winning classic features little in the way of sweeping battle sequences, yet few films manage to convey the madness of war better – and with greater suspense. □️ The best World War I movies, ranked by historical accuracy Written by Tom Huddleston, Adam Lee Davies, Paul Fairclough, Anna Smith, David Jenkins, Dan Jolin, Phil de Semlyen, Alim Kheraj & Matthew Singer War is hell, and World War II was particularly hellish – but at least we have these films to help make some sense of it. Among the selections, you’ll find towering epics, intimate character studies, intense documentaries, historical revisions and even a few comedies. ![]() ![]() That’s why, along with polling our well-studied Time Out writers, we also called in an outside expert: Quentin Tarantino, a man who knows a thing or two about making a great WWII film. So many movies have been made about the war, it’s almost a genre unto itself.įor that reason, choosing the best World War II movies is a challenge. No wonder: the sheer scale of the destruction, the atrocities associated with it and its place in human history make it a natural framework for stories of resistance, survival and unimaginable loss. War has long fascinated filmmakers, no conflict more so than World War II.
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