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. 💣 The 101 best action movies of all-timeĬast: 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. 🎖️ 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 On the slate are wide-scale epics, personal dramas, devastating documentaries, historical revisions and even a comedy or two. And who better to ask than the man behind Inglourious Basterds and walking war-kipedia of combat flicks, Quentin Tarantino? He’s helped us parse hundreds of films down to a mere 50 all-timers.
In fact, there are so many World War II movies that we needed help narrowing them down to a mere 50.
What some of the very best have in common is the first-hand experiences of their filmmakers: men like Sam Fuller, Jean-Pierre Melville and John Huston saw it all for themselves and brought that authenticity to their films. There are gripping stories of resistance movies like Army of Shadows and Kanal, a whole canon of Holocaust masterpieces and a number of seminal documentaries that employ real-life footage to bring it all home. A whole genre in their own right, World War II movies come in all shapes and sizes: from gung-ho men-on-a-mission movies like Dirty Dozen and Where Eagles Dare to the bleaker, more complex visions of war that usually emerged from the vanquished nations ( Fires on the Plain, Kelly’s Heroes, Stalingrad, et al).
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