I just remembered some other film, it’s “To End All Wars” … I really liked it. It is a WWII film too, it is about Scottish soldiers who were captured by the Japanese and who had to built the railway for them under brutal conditions. The games which the Japanese play with their captives are very psycholigical and cruel. I was very impressed by the film and can only recommend it
Three pages and no-one has mentioned Lawrence of Arabia? You should be ashamed of yourselves.
Continuing on the Desert theme, Legionnaire (starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, about a French Foreign Legionnaire in North Africa in the 1920s) is well worth seeing IMHO, and Der Untergang (Downfall) is, IMHO, the definitive movie on the Last Days Of Hitler & The Third Reich.
Three pages and no one has mentioned Battle Ground! Really?
The rest of my list:
Zulu!
Patton
The Enemy Below
Midway
The Longest Day
Platoon
Dr. Strangelove
Jarhead
The Beast
30 Seconds Over Tokyo
Blackhawk Down
Gallipoli
They Were Expendable
The SeeBees
The Sand Pebbles is one of the finest Navy movies out there. While not a war movie per se, there is combat and death. Steve McQueen is the lead with Richard Attenborough, Richard Crenna, and Candice Bergen.
Although it is a science fiction apocolytic story, Children of Men contains excellent urban battle scenes that are scary with the volume turned up on a good surround system.
Glad to see Breaker Morant and Zulu are mentioned.
MASH is a fun one set in Korea. We’re the pro’s from dover.
Beau Geste in it’s many versions is another Legionnaire film. I’ve only seen the 1966 version with Leslie Neilson and Telly Savalas.
I didn’t see some of these mentioned earlier, so I’ll just throw them out there:
A Bridge Too Far- Ensemble WWII epic about the ill-fated Operation Market Garden starring..well…everyone.
The Longest Day - about D-day.
Green Zone - Matt Damon searches for WMDs in Iraq
U-571 - Decent WW II sub flick without all the preachy melodrama of Saving Private Ryanor Thin Red Line.
Some good Jew Power war films:
Defiance - Russian resistance fighting the Nazis
Inglorious Basterds - Tarantinos take on WWII
Raid on Entebbe - Israeli rescue of hostages in Uganda, also the real life source of inspiration for The Delta Force.
And if you just want a good ole WW II POW soccer film staring Sylvester Stalone, Michaele Caine and Pele, there’s Victory.
To that, I would add Uprising about the Warsaw ghetto uprising.
I saw two relatively recent war films just this week that I liked.
Army of Crime (2009), about immigrants in France fighting the Nazi occupation.
Lebanon (2009), which takes entirely inside a tank during the war in Lebanon in 1982.
[QUOTE=toofs**[The Sand Pebbles]
(The Sand Pebbles (film) - Wikipedia)** is one of the finest Navy movies out there. While not a war movie per se, there is combat and death. Steve McQueen is the lead with Richard Attenborough, Richard Crenna, and Candice Bergen.
[/QUOTE]
Ho-man come down!
Yes one of my favorites as well and in my opinion you of those few movies that is better than the book.
Stalingrad, or Stalingrado was a rather bleak look at the breakdown of command of the German army in Stalingrad.
Not a lot of fighting, and the ending was depressing as hell, as it should be given the subject.
I really liked it though.
When I saw Stalingrad in a cinematheque screening, a squad of Wehrmacht reenactors attended. Don’t know if any then sought an early discharge from their enlistments!