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Top 10 best movie battle speeches.

By Tom Piccolo · September 26, 2013

Remember the last time you watched a movie and wished you could attack the enemy right then and there!  Even if it were almost certain you’d go down in flames, you were psyched for the contest.  A great movie battle speech touches the audience with its passion, putting the viewer in the center of the conflict.  It can be a rallying cry for victory; the motivational force that propels a warrior to act with bravery, and disregard the paralyzing effects of fear. It can be the recognition of almost certain defeat in the short term, realizing the enemy must be engaged, and victory focused on loftier future goals.

Historically, movies have played an important role in rallying the American spirit in wartime. Battle speeches have been used not only to inspire patriotism, but also to highlight the ideals, issues, and conflicts of the time.

Have a great speech you want to include in a script? Write your first draft in 5 weeks with this guide .

Alas, I know I have left out many great speeches and movies in my list, so I invite you to add your personal favorites to the list in the comments section.

10. Dawn Patrol (1938)

As payback for his insubordination and daredevil antics, crackerjack pilot Captain Courtney is handed the command of the 39 th Squadron in this film about the World War I Royal Flying Corps. Given the unsavory task of sending inexperienced pilots in worn-out planes against a well-equipped German air force, Errol Flynn as Captain Courtney gives the following pre-battle speech:

CAPTAIN COURTNEY

GOOD Evening Gentlemen, There’s no secrecy about these orders. GHQ has discovered that Fritz is making a big push the day after tomorrow. They’ve started minor advances already. You’re to patrol the Belleau Wood sector, that’s opposite the German Sixth Army. You’ll fly four patrols a day, which means that every man will be in the air at dawn tomorrow. As usual you got the dirty work to do, low flying, machine-gunning infantry, strafing supply trucks, and any shock troops that they try to bring up. You’re flying directly below Von Richter’s Patrols. So you better watch out. That’s all.

9. The Dirty Dozen (1967)

After Major Reisman’s team of 12 convicted murders prove themselves trained and ready by winning a combat game using unconventional tactics, Reisman, played by Lee Marvin, preps them for their real mission, the mass assassination of Nazi officers in a fortified chalet.

MAJOR REISMAN

We still have one operation to go. If you guys foul up on this one none of us will ever play the violin again. Cause up until now it’s all been a game. But as of tomorrow night it’s going to be the real thing. And if you want to know how real, I’ll tell you. It’s my guess that a lot of you guys won’t be coming back. But there’s no sense in squawking about that, right? Cause the army never did love you anyway. And besides you all volunteered, right? That’s more than I did.

Reisman drills his troops, having them recite a 16-point rhyming plan to attack the Nazi stronghold.

8. Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)

As Aragorn rides back from the Black Gate, he delivers this impassioned speech:

Sons of Gondor, of Rohan. My brothers. I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me! A day may come, when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of Fellowship, but it is not this day! An hour of wolves and shattered shields when the age of men comes crashing down! But it is not this day! This day we fight! By all that you hold dear on this good earth, I bid you, stand, men of the West!

7. Zero Dark Thirty  (2012)

With the war on terrorism, we fight a new type of battle, the covert action. And so comes a new kind of battle speech.  In this intense action drama about the pursuit of Osama Bin Laden, CIA agent Maya, played by Jessica Chastain, lays out the mission to a skeptical team of Navy SEALS:

Quite frankly I didn’t want to use you guys. With your dip and your Velcro and all your gear bullshit. I wanted to drop a bomb. But people didn’t believe in this lead enough to drop a bomb.  So they’re using you guys as canaries in the theory that if Bin Laden isn’t there, you can sneak away and nobody will be the wiser. But Bin Laden is there. And you’re gonna kill him for me.

6. Braveheart  (1995)

Delivered by the legendary Scottish rebel, William Wallace, played by Mel Gibson, this battle speech beckons the Scottish countrymen to lay down their lives as the cost of freedom from English tyranny:

Sons of Scotland, I am William Wallace.

YOUNG SOLDIER

William Wallace is 7 feet tall.

Yes, I’ve heard. Kills men by the hundreds, and if he were here he’d consume the English with fireballs from his eyes and bolts of lightning from his arse. I AM William Wallace. And I see a whole army of my countrymen here in defiance of tyranny. You have come to fight as free men, and free men you are. What would you do without freedom? Will you fight?

VETERAN SOLDIER

Fight? Against that? No, we will run; and we will live.

Aye, fight and you may die. Run and you’ll live — at least a while. And dying in your beds many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that for one chance, just one chance to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom!!!

5. Gandhi (1982)

This film depicts a different type of battle for independence; not of brutal combat, but of non-violent resistance. Playing Mohandas Gandhi, who led the revolt against British colonialism in India, Ben Kingsley delivers this inspiring speech:

We must defy the British… Not with violence that will inflame their will, but with a firmness that will open their eyes. English factories make the cloth that makes our poverty. All those who wish to make the English see bring me the cloth from Manchester and Leeds that you wear today and we will light a fire that will be seen in Delhi, and in London! And if, like me you are left with only one piece of homespun, wear it with dignity.”

Moved to passion by these words, the massive crowd throws their English clothes onto a burning fire. At the end of the film, as Gandhi’s ashes are poured into the sea, we hear him speak:

GANDHI (V.O.)

When I despair, I remember that the way of truth and love has always won. There may be tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it: always.

4. Apocalypse Now (1979)

In this film co-written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, Lt. Colonel Bill Kilgore, portrayed by Robert Duvall, assists Captain Benjamin L. Willard and crewman Lance B. Johnson by launching a strike on Viet Cong outpost on the Nung River:

You smell that?  Do you smell that?

Napalm, son.  Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning.  You know, one time we had a hill bombed for twelve hours…and when it was all over, I walked up.  We didn’t find one of them, not one stinking dink body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell? The whole hill – smelled like – victory.

He looks off nostalgically.  A shell comes in and HITS in the background.  Willard and the soldiers react; Kilgore ignores it.

Someday this war’s gonna end.

3. Spartacus (1960)

This movie has two great battle speeches intercut as the preface to the battle between the Roman Legions and a rebellion of slaves led by the gladiator slave, Spartacus. In the film directed by Stanley Kubrick, Kirk Douglas plays Spartacus:

Tonight a Roman army lands in the harbour of Brundusium.  Another army is approaching us from the west.  Between them, they hope to trap us here… against the sea…Rome will not allow us to escape from ltaly.  We have no choice but to march against Rome herself… and end this war the only way it could have ended: by freeing every slave in ltaly. “

I promise you…a new Rome…a new ltaly and a new empire. I promise the destruction of the slave army…and the restoration of order…throughout all our territories.

I’d rather be here, a free man among brothers…than to be the richest citizen of Rome…

I promise the living body of Spartacus…

We’ve fought many battles and won great victories…Maybe there’s no peace in this world…as long as we live…we must stay true to ourselves. I do know that we’re brothers, and I know that we’re free.  We march tonight!

…this campaign is not alone to kill Spartacus.  It is to kill the legend of Spartacus.

2. Armageddon (1998)

In this movie, the enemy is an asteroid the size of Texas that threatens the destruction of the entire earth. It is a fictional President that defines the battle:

I address you tonight, not as the President of the United States, not as the leader of a country, but as a citizen of humanity. We are faced with the very gravest of challenges; The Bible calls this day Armageddon. The end of all things. And yet for the first time… in the history of the planet, a species has the technology… to prevent its own extinction.

Rallying the entire population of the world to put their faith in the hands of a team of oddball deep core drillers, he goes on to say:

Through all the chaos that is our history, through all of our times, there is one thing that has…elevated our species above its origins. And that is our courage. Dreams of an entire planet are focused tonight… on those 14 brave souls… traveling into the heavens. And may we all, citizens the world over, see these events through. God speed and good luck to you.

1. Patton (1970)

Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor, dumb bastard die for his country.

With that compelling line, George C. Scott as General George S. Patton delivers the film’s opening speech directly to the movie audience.

Dressed in his decorated general’s uniform and dwarfed by an enormous American flag, he goes on to say,

Americans, traditionally, love to fight. All real Americans love the sting of battle…the very thought of losing is hateful to Americans.

One can imagine the impact of those lines as a 1970’s American audience embroiled in debate over the unpopular Vietnamese War listened to Patton’s incitement to winning as the only option in war.

In an introduction interview for the Cinema Classics collection DVD, Francis Ford Coppola, who co-wrote the screenplay, explains how he was fired from the project, largely because the opening speech was seen to be strange. He goes on to instruct young people that the things you are fired for, are often the things later on that you are celebrated for.

The speech ends with a line that is almost an afterthought for Patton:

Oh… I will be proud to lead you wonderful guys into battle anytime, anywhere. That’s all.

For the full text of this opening speech, go to: Patton’s Speech .

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16 times movie speeches got us seriously pumped

Ranked in order of epic stirringness.

Sometimes in life, whether you've just failed a test, flunked an interview or you were simply out for the count after 10 minutes at the gym, it would be really useful if someone were on hand to give you some hugely inspiring words to help you get back out there.

Well, look no further than the movies. Over the years, there have been some incredible speeches before the characters entered battle, literally or metaphorically.

We've ranked some of the very best (and worst) of these eve-of-battle speeches to get you seriously pumped for the day ahead.

16. Major League

Speechifier: Jake Taylor (Tom Berenger)

Pumped-up quote: "Well then I guess there's only one thing left to do. Win the whole f**king thing."

Sometimes, you don't need to say much at all. Just state the damned obvious. With an F-bomb.

15. Street Fighter

Speechifier: Colonel Guile (Jean-Claude Van Damme)

Pumped-up quote: "I'm not going home. I'm gonna get on my boat, and I'm going up river, and I'm going to kick that son of a bitch Bison's ass so hard that the next Bison wannabe is gonna feel it!"

OK, it's not exactly "once more unto the breach dear friends", but it's up there. Right? We barely remember who Bison is (the late Raul Julia), but we certainly want to kick his ass too after that speech.

14. Harry Potter: The Deathly Hallows Part II

Speechifier: Neville Longbottom (Matthew Lewis)

Pumped-up quote: "People die everyday. Friends... family. Yeah, we lost Harry tonight. But he's still with us… in here. So is Fred, Remus, Tonks… all of them. They didn't die in vain! But you will! Cause you're wrong! Harry's heart did beat for us! For all of us! It's not over!"

Neville Longbottom might not be Russell Crowe, but he does it for the weird nerd in all of us. And it was so good it brought Harry back to life, bitches.

13. Animal House

Speechifier: Bluto (John Belushi)

Pumped-up quote: "Over? Did you say 'over'? Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no! And it ain't over now. 'Cause when the goin' gets tough... The tough get goin'! Who's with me? Let's go!"

He might not know his history, but someone like John Belushi's Bluto can sometimes be exactly the right person to give you that swift kick up the arse.

12. Gladiator

Speechifier: General Maximus Decimus Meridius, commander of the armies of the north, etc etc

Pumped-up quote: "Three weeks from now, I will be harvesting my crops. Imagine where you will be, and it will be so. Hold the line! Stay with me! If you find yourself alone, riding in the green fields with the sun on your face, do not be troubled. For you are in Elysium, and you're already dead!"

In a weird way, Maximus prepares you for the harshness of battle while also giving you some perspective. Worst-case scenario? You'll die. Fair enough.

11. D2: The Mighty Ducks

Speechifier: Coach Bombay (Emilio Estevez)

Pumped-up quote: "We're not goons. We're not bullies. No matter what people say or do... we have to be ourselves. And we're gonna stick together. You know why? Because we are Ducks. And ducks fly together."

Coach Bombay will always remind us to never become a douche, to always be ourselves, and to be there for those around us. Sorry, hard not to be soppy after watching that.

10. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part I

Speechifier: Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence)

Pumped-up quote: "You can torture us and bomb us and burn our districts to the ground. But do you see that? Fire is catching... And if we burn... you burn with us!"

If something or someone is pissing you off no end, try and channel Katniss Everdeen's pure anger and take them on. But don't actually burn them or anything, you maniac.

9. Elizabeth: The Golden Age

Speechifier: Queen Elizabeth (Cate Blanchett)

Pumped-up quote: "My loving people. We see the sails of the enemy approaching. We hear the Spanish guns over the water. Soon now, we will meet them face-to-face. I am resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to live or die amongst you all. While we stand together no invader shall pass. Let them come with the armies of Hell; they will not pass! And when this day of battle is ended, we meet again in Heaven or on the field of victory."

It's not just gruff blokey blokes who can give rousing speeches. And this one was real and everything. The Queen gathers her troops in Tilbury in preparation for the next round of war against the Spanish Armada. We'd love to see Elizabeth II in full battle armour on a horse.

8. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King

Speechifier: Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen)

Pumped-up quote: "I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me. A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down! But it is not this day! This day we fight! By all that you hold dear on this good Earth, I bid you stand, Men of the West!"

We like Aragorn's added notion of realism in this speech. Yeah, we'll probably fail for good one day, but not today, dammit. TODAY WE WIN.

7. Independence Day

Speechifier: President Whitmore (Bill Pullman)

Pumped-up quote: "'Mankind'. That word should have new meaning for all of us today. We can't be consumed by our petty differences anymore. We will be united in our common interests. Perhaps it's fate that today is the Fourth of July, and you will once again be fighting for our freedom. Not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution... but from annihilation. We are fighting for our right to live. To exist. And should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day the world declared in one voice: 'We will not go quietly into the night! We will not vanish without a fight! We're going to live on! We're going to survive! Today we celebrate… our Independence Day!'"

We're still not quite sure whether this speech is utterly dreadful or so bonkers it's genius. Any President that can riff on Dylan Thomas while shouting a battle cry against aliens is pretty special, either way.

6. Remember the Titans

Speechifier: Herman Boone (Denzel Washington)

Pumped-up quote: "This is where they fought the battle of Gettysburg. 50,000 men died right here on this field, fighting the same fight that we are still fighting among ourselves today. This green field right here, painted red, bubblin' with the blood of young boys. Smoke and hot lead pouring right through their bodies. Listen to their souls, men. I killed my brother with malice in my heart. Hatred destroyed my family. You listen, and you take a lesson from the dead. If we don't come together right now on this hallowed ground, we too will be destroyed, just like they were. I don't care if you like each other or not, but you will respect each other. And maybe... I don't know, maybe we'll learn to play this game like men."

You don't always need bombastic screaming to get you in the right mood. Sometimes, you just need some pathos and a short history lesson and your place within it. And if it's Denzel Washington saying it, that helps.

Speechifier: King Hal (Laurence Olivier)

Pumped-up quote: "And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by from this day until the ending of the world but we in it shall be remember'd. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers, For he today who sheds his blood with me shall be my brother, Be he ne'er so vile, this day shall gentle his condition, and gentlemen in England now abed shall think themselves accursed they were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap whilst any speaks, that fought with us upon SAINT CRISPIN'S DAY!"

Combine Shakespeare's words with Olivier's acting and you've got yourself quite the epic speech.

Speechifier: Dilios (David Wenham)

Pumped-up quote: "Just there the barbarians huddle, sheer terror gripping tight their hearts with icy fingers... knowing full well what merciless horrors they suffered at the swords and spears of 300. Yet they stare now across the plain at 10,000 Spartans commanding 30,000 free Greeks! The enemy outnumber us a paltry three to one, good odds for any Greek. This day we rescue a world from mysticism and tyranny and usher in a future brighter than anything we can imagine. Give thanks, men, to Leonidas and the brave 300! TO VICTORY!"

Dilios might waffle on a bit compared to his old pal Leonidas, and we're not totally sure those at the back can hear him, but if this doesn't make you want to go out and fight anything that moves, nothing will.

3. Any Given Sunday

Speechifier: Tony D'Amato (Al Pacino)

Pumped-up quote : "I don't know what to say, really. Three minutes to the biggest battle of our professional lives. All comes down to today, and either, we heal as a team, or we're gonna crumble. Inch by inch, play by play. Until we're finished. We're in hell right now, gentlemen. Believe me. And, we can stay here, get the shit kicked out of us, or we can fight our way back into the light. We can climb outta hell... one inch at a time.

"Now I can't make you do it. You've got to look at the guy next to you, look into his eyes. Now I think ya going to see a guy who will go that inch with you. You're gonna see a guy who will sacrifice himself for this team, because he knows when it comes down to it you're gonna do the same for him. That's a team, gentlemen, and either we heal, now, as a team, or we will die as individuals. That's football guys, that's all it is. Now, what are you gonna do?"

Tony D'Amato look as if he's rambling, but it's a damn inspiring ramble. Just when you feel down and out and ready to quit, just think to yourself: What would Al Pacino say to me? (You better hope he's in Tony D'Amato mode rather than Tony Montana mode.)

2. Braveheart

Speechifier: William Wallace (Mel Gibson)

Pumped-up quote: "I am William Wallace! And I see a whole army of my countrymen, here in defiance of tyranny. You've come to fight as free men... and free men you are. What will you do with that freedom? Will you fight? Aye, fight and you may die. Run, and you'll live... at least a while. And dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willing to trade ALL the days, from this day to that, for one chance, just one chance, to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they'll never take... OUR FREEEDOMMM!"

Thinking of backing down from a challenge when it looks like the easier option? Not on yer nelly.

1. The Great Dictator

Speechifier: The Barber (Charlie Chaplin)

Pumped-up quote: "To those who can hear me I say: do not despair! The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass. And dictators die. And the power they took from the people, will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.

"Soldiers! Don't give yourselves to brutes! Men who despise you and enslave you! Who regiment your lines and tell you what to do, what to think, what to feel! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder! Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men! Machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don't hate. Only the unloved hate. The unloved and the unnatural.

"Soldiers! Don't fight for slavery, fight for liberty! In the 17th chapter of St Luke it is written, the kingdom of God is within man. Not one man, nor a group of men but in all men. In you! You the people have the power! The power to create machines, the power to create happiness. You the people have the power to make this life free and beautiful! To make this life a wonderful adventure! Then in the name of democracy let us use that power! Let us all unite!"

It's remarkable how poignant and urgent everything that Charlie Chaplin says in this 1940 film remains today. When you need something to help you rise up against those in your way, this will help.

While we're here, we just wanted to leave you with Melodysheep's amazing autotuned edit. Because when else are we going to have the excuse to use it?

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10 Greatest Ever of Battle Movie Speeches

by Kolarele Sonaike

What is the point of a movie if it doesn’t move us to tears or laughter? If it doesn’t take us down to a valley of despair only to raise us back up to the highest heights?

The Eve of Battle Motivational Speech is one of those defining moments in movies. The soldiers are about to head into a momentous battle. There is no guarantee of victory (except that we know our heroes will always win) and the forces of evil seem overwhelmingly strong.

It’s a moment that calls for leadership and powers of motivation and oratory, to instil them with courage and fortitude and to inspire them to give more of themselves than they believe possible.

Here are our pick of the Top Ten Eve of Battle Speeches in movies:

OK, the movie may be sentimental twaddle, but this address to his people in the face of the alien invasion is the stand out moment. Bill Pullman having been a pretty ineffectual President through the movie suddenly raises his game to deliver some inspirational words that help to turn the battle against the invaders. That and some typically brazen bravado from Will Smith.

9. 300 (David Wenham)

Though the action in this movie is superbly cinematic, one of the most played non-action clips was the speech at the end of the movie following the death of King Leonidas and his 300 brave warriors. His right hand man, Dilios, uses the great example of his King’s death to rally the entire army to face the Greek tyrant King Xerxes.

An epic war movie featuring the first African American soldiers in the US Union army. Here Morgan Freeman (surely a man with one of the greatest actor voices in modern movie history) reminds his fellow soldiers of their place in history. He draws on the tradition of the Baptist preacher and implores his men to fight for pride, for their families and for their people.

7. Tilbury Speech (Ann Marie Duff)

“I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king and a king of England too” – possibly the most powerful words ever spoken by a Queen. Though there is some dispute over the exact wording of Queen Elizabeth 1’s speech at Tilbury to her troops, this transcript is generally accepted as the most likely and one can only imagine the incredible impact it must have had on the soldiers to be addressed in so forthright and stirring a manner by a female sovereign.

Though this is not a speech from a movie, Kenneth Branagh delivers an understated but authentic performance of the speech to his troops by Colonel Tim Collins at the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The text of this speech hung on the walls of the Oval Office in the White House. It was a call to his troops to fight hard but with honour and respect.

At the final battle of a remarkable trilogy, King Aragorn addresses his soldiers, who are small in number and facing an overwhelming and evil force. It is short (slightly Shakespearean) but powerful. And of course, they go on to win with a little help from a little Hobbit at Mount Doom.

4. Glengarry Glen Ross (Alec Baldwin)

Though not a time of actual war, this tour de force was given by Alec Baldwin to his lowly staff members faced with a struggling market in which they were fighting to save their jobs by closing the most sales. He is odious, rude and obnoxious, but incredibly compelling. He doesn’t go for the ‘inspire your people’ option so much as the ‘instil the fear of God in them’ route. In the circumstances, it is highly effective.

3. Henry V (Kenneth Branagh)

Kenneth Branagh and Shakespeare go together like Ham and Cheese and in his eve of battle speech to his heavily outnumbered soldiers at the battle of Agincourt, Henry V delivers the most famous battle speech of all of Shakespeare’s plays. It is from this speech that we get the phrase ‘We happy few, we band of brothers’. And in Branagh, we are given the quintessential Shakespearean performance.

2. Braveheart (Mel Gibson)

Dodgy Scottish accent aside, Mel Gibson’s turn as William Wallace is absorbing and this speech to his young Scottish warriors faced with their age-old enemy, the English, is dramatic as it is hair-raising. The blue face paint no doubt helped.

1. Any Given Sunday (Al Pacino)

This is just motivation at its finest. Though the movie itself is forgettable, Al Pacino never is. And in this moment, his delivery has never been stronger. Even if most of us will never experience the thrill of the locker room before an American Football game, for the moment when Pacino talks about “inches” being the difference between winning and losing, between living and dying, we are all right there in the thick of the action with him and the guys. Brilliant!

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The 30 Best Movie Inspirational Speeches

Cinema's most stirring oratories and spirit-raising team talks.

In times of trouble, you need a little help getting up and going, and film can often provide just that. Cinema has a long and storied history of providing great words of motivation and encouragement, sometimes for the characters' own benefit and occasionally to the audience. Here, we've chosen 30 of the best that should fit almost any occasion - but if you're really pressed for time, here are 40 condensed into a two-minute span { =nofollow}. If you have a little longer, read on!

Also: The 25 Best Movie Bollockings

The Great Dictator

Made at a time when the shadow of World War II was looming over Europe, Charlie Chaplin’s speech here – he’s playing a poor Jewish barber in disguise as a preening dictator and forced to address a Nuremberg-style rally – is a heartfelt plea for sanity and compassion in a time of madness. It’s the perfect antidote to extremism, and uses fiery rhetoric for good. If only we’d be able to pull this switcheroo in real life.

Buy The Great Dictator

Independence Day

Sure, there are cheesemongers with less cheese on offer than you see here and OK, the American jingoism doesn’t work at all for those of us not of a Yank disposition. But Bill Pullman’s slightly sheepish style blends here with steely determination, and he delivers the American St Crispin’s Day speech with conviction. Then, like any US President, he leaps into his fighter jet and flies off to battle aliens.

Buy Independence Day

For those who prefer a little humour in their motivational speeches, try the pitch-black streak in this opener, establishing Russell Crowe’s Maximus Decimus Meridius as a leader of men and a helluva guy. Galloping around the Legions in his cool armour and fur-lined cloak, you might question whether he really needs an entire army to back him up, but you’ll never doubt for a moment that they’d choose to follow him as he unleashes hell.

Buy Gladiator

Any Given Sunday

There’s a lot to be said for a little personal touch to leaven your high-flung rhetoric, and it’s a trick that Al Pacino uses well here, in the first of three American football speeches we’re going to include (hey, we can’t help it if the heavily-padded sport produces some great pep talks). Pacino’s troubled Tony D’Amato unveils his own problems with brutal honesty before using his own failures as a spur to rev on his team to greatness, speaking of team spirit and commitment as someone who has been known to suck at both.

Buy Any Given Sunday

Friday Night Lights

The film has been somewhat overshadowed nowadays by the equally good TV show that followed it, but watch Billy Bob Thornton here and be reminded that Kyle Chandler isn’t the only fundamentally decent man who can inspire a team of small-town boys to great efforts in pursuit of perfection. It’s also worth noting that he puts his emphasis here on excelling and not winning, making it clear that victory isn’t only measured by the scoreboard. Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.

Buy Friday Night Lights

It is, and will probably always be, the greatest inspirational speech ever made. It’s endlessly flexible, and works even when not declaimed by the classically trained (see this Renaissance Man version for proof). And it’s by Shakespeare, still the best writer in Hollywood. We have, controversially perhaps, chosen Branagh’s version over Olivier’s because the latter sounds a little shrill to the modern ear, while Branagh convinces us that he could convince his men. This speech, given by the titular monarch to a vastly outnumbered force about to fight the French, obviously works especially well for English people, but by God, Harry and St George, it’s universal in its rousing effect.

Buy Henry V

This is a little-known film in the UK but it’s revered in certain communities in the US. Sean Astin’s Rudy has overcome dyslexia, poor grades and his relatively small stature to win a place on Notre Dame’s famous Fighting Irish American football team. Only problem is that he’s never been off the bench, and with his final game approaching he threatens to quit the team if he isn’t allowed to play – prompting this inspirational speech / telling off from a friend who points out that he’s being whiny and entitled and needs to grow a pair. Soon he’s back on the bench and given a starting position when his entire team threatens not to play unless he’s given a shot.

An honourable mention for Hector’s pep talk but Achilles wins the battle of the inspirational speeches just as he wins their duel (c’mon, that’s not a spoiler; it’s in the 2000 year-old Iliad). This is a short snippet, but then godlike Achilles, the man-killer, is a man of action rather than words. And what he does say – focusing on lions, glory and the manifold abilities of his small, hand-picked group of Myrmidons – would convince a rock to fight any Trojan who dared oppose it.

Animal House

Not every inspirational speech is about trying to inspire his cohorts to kill people or batter them up and down the length of a football field. Some aspire to a higher goal. Some aspire to debauchery, drinking and probably nudity. Some aspire to party like 1999 might have done had it tried harder. Some aspire to a particular kind of grubby, deranged greatness. One such is John Belushi’s Bluto, and this is the greatest night of his life.

Buy Animal House

The Goonies

Come the hour, cometh the man – and in this case the man is a small, asthmatic Sean Astin, inspiring his fellow Goonies to never say die and to keep going in their quest to find treasure and save their community. In his yellow rain slicker and with his voice on the edge of breaking he may not look like a modern Napoleon, but he has the same effect on his exhausted and discouraged troopers. He’s so good you’ll almost forget to laugh at his mentions of One-Eyed Willy. snigger

Buy The Goonies

The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King

Death comes to us all, and Aragorn ain’t going to lie about it. But he still gees up his troops with the assurance that their civilisation will survive the onslaught of the forces of Mordor. Sure, they’re vastly outnumbered and sure, it seems likely that Frodo has failed in his quest to destroy the Ring in Mount Doom (especially if you’re watching the Extended Edition) but Viggo Mortensen’s Aragorn ensures that no one will be quitting any time soon. Not this day!

Buy The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King

Bill Murray isn’t usually the guy you turn to for sincere, inspiring words of comfort. He’s more the type to puncture any attempt at same, and probably to fast-talk his opponents into giving up and going for a karaoke session while he’s about it. But after his heart grows two sizes during the course of Scrooged, he makes a plea for kindness and niceness from all mankind. He still does it in a recognisably Murray, manic and scattershot way, but that just makes him all the more compelling. Someone hire this man to play Santa Claus.

Buy Scrooged

Stirring sports speeches are limited to American Football. Miracle On Ice chronicles the based-on-truth tale of how the US Olympic hockey team triumphed over their Russian rivals. Kurt Russell's the speech-giver here, playing coach Herb Brooks. "Tonight, we are the greatest hockey team in the world," he tells them. You'll feel a swell of pride and inspiration too.

Rent Miracle

Deep Blue Sea

“You think water’s fast? You should see ice.” Samuel L. Jackson’s been around the block more than once, and he’s seen the worst of mankind. It’s with the weight of that history behind him that he takes charge and orders his fellow survivors of a marine disaster to start pulling together and quit arguing. His speech also has what is, unquestionably, the greatest punchline on this list. Still, it achieves the desired effect once everyone has quit screaming.

Buy Deep Blue Sea

If in doubt, steal from classical history, something that David Wenham’s Dilios demonstrates with aplomb here. In actual history, the one survivor of the 300 was so shamed by his survival that he executed a suicidal one-man attack on the Persians at this Battle of Plataea, but Wenham seems more in control and also like he has quite a bit of back-up. “The enemy outnumber us a paltry three-to-one,” notes Dilios triumphantly. Why, it was hardly worth the Persians turning up.

Good Will Hunting

Here’s an inspirational speech well-suited to highly-paid sports teams and the enormously talented. Ben Affleck’s argument is, basically, that if you’re lucky enough to get extraordinary chances in your life, it’s your duty to the rest of us schmoes to actually take those chances and run with them as far as you can. If you can get past the shellsuit and the hair, he’s basically Yoda-like in his wisdom.

Buy Good Will Hunting

Most people only remember the last word – “Freedom!” – but the rest of the speech is pretty killer too. Mel Gibson’s William Wallace starts off by puncturing his own legend, and acknowledges the urge to cut and run in the face of a far superior English force. But then he reminds his men what they’d be missing if they do, and soon they’re all back on side and facing down the hated English. By the end of this speech, you’ll all hate the English with them – even if you are one.

Buy Braveheart

Coach Carter

You’d expect the inspiration in this basketball film to come from the titular no-nonsense coach, played by a fiery Samuel L. Jackson. But in fact it’s one of his players who nabs the best lines, as he and the team sit studying to keep their grades as high as their scores. There is a little cheating here: Rick Gonzalez’ Timo actually steals his inspirational speech from Marianne Williamson (it’s sometimes wrongly attributed to Nelson Mandela) but he delivers it well so we’re going to allow it.

Buy Coach Carter

While it’s his skills in the ring that he is most lauded for, Rocky Balboa is something of a poet to boot. An incoherent one, certainly; a poet who says “I guess” a lot more often than Wordsworth might like, but a poet nevertheless. His moving words here, as he single-handedly ends the Cold War and ushers in a new era of East-West relations, are just one example. Another is…

Buy Rocky IV

Rocky Balboa

If his last speech was incoherent – in fairness, his rhythm may have been thrown off by the translator – this one verges on incomprehensible when he really gets going. Still, there’s real passion in Rocky’s plea for one last shot and an argument that’s applicable to all sorts of situations of institutional injustice or unfeeling bureaucracy.

Buy Rocky Balboa

Stand And Deliver

Those who've watched him on the modern Battlestar Galactica know that Edward James Olmos is a past master at giving speeches. This is him from a little earlier in his career, playing Jaime Escalante, a real-life teacher who inspired his students to stop dropping out and start taking calculus seriously. Here, he's handing out as pop quiz, so anyone having to home school their kids can take note.

Rent Stand And Deliver

Good Night, And Good Luck

This one is couched particularly at media moguls, but there’s a call for excellence and the highest moral standards here that we would all do well to live by. David Strathairn’s Edward R. Murrow, in a speech lifted directly from Murrow’s actual address to the Radio and Television News Directors Association in 1958, pleads for TV to inform as well as entertain. We feel that if more people saw this speech, Made In Chelsea would be cancelled immediately and reality TV would be banned, so spread the word!

Buy Good Night, And Good Luck

Anyone who has ever flirted with a romantic interest knows the risk of being knocked back, and Jon Favreau's Mike is experiencing a crisis of confidence. Luckily for him, he has Vince Vaughn's Trent to talk him back into the game, and Alex Désert's Charles to remind him that he's so money. He's a bear! And she's a bunny! Everything is going to be fine.

Buy Swingers

Charles Dutton’s second appearance on this list, after Rudy, sees him once again reminding lesser men (and women) to get with the programme, pull the finger out and generally stand up and be counted. But this time they’re facing unstoppable acid-blooded xenomorphs rather than American football players, so he has to be extra-emphatic.

Buy Alien 3

Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World’s End

Remarkably few women get to deliver inspirational speeches in movies – apparently they’re relegated to clapping admiringly from the sidelines. Thank goodness for Elizabeth Swan (Keira Knightley) who is elected King of the Pirates and rouses her troops into action for a last-ditch fight against the Lord Beckett’s overwhelming forces, led by the Flying Dutchman. She may not have quite the lungs of others on the list, but there’s no doubting her conviction as she calls for them to “Hoist the colours!” – the Jolly Roger – and sail out one last time.

Buy Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World’s End

The Replacements

One doesn’t expect lengthy speeches from Keanu “Woah” Reeves (although he’s done his share of Shakespeare actually) but he’s rarely more succinct and to the point than in this chat with his fellow Replacements. And in fact there are few speeches more likely to be effective in motivating an exhausted team for one last effort. “Chicks dig scars” could be used by virtually every example here to drive on the listeners.

Buy The Replacements

Bill Murray at it again, and once more an unconventional speech. This time out, he's John Winger, a loser who decides that he and best pal Russell Ziskey (Harold Ramis) will join the Army. Stuck with a group of oddballs, and, after a night of partying, decides to rally his fellow troops. It works... Sort of. But Murray's typically laconic style works well for the speech itself.

Rent or buy Stripes

The Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King

All seems lost for Samwise Gamgee (Sean Astin again) and Frodo Baggins (Elijah Wood) as they lie, exhausted, on the slopes of Mount Doom. Frodo’s beyond endurance and raving as the influence of the Ring grows ever stronger on him, and his desperate straits drive Sam to one last push. It’s barely a speech, really – he uses his words better here – but there are few moments more inspirational.

Buy The Lord Of The Rings: Return of The King

The Shawshank Redemption

A quiet moment between Tim Robbins' Andy Dufresne and Morgan Freeman's Red became one of the more memorable moments in Shawshank , a movie with no shortage of them. And for those who are spending more time inside than perhaps they might be used to, Andy's musing on what he would do if he got out of prison are inspirational in themselves, even before he gets to that iconic line.

Rent The Shawshank Redemption

Avengers: Endgame

Steve Rogers, AKA Captain America, is not shy of breaking out speech mode when the moment calls for it. And inspiring the Avengers as they're about to embark on a trip through space and time to retrieve the Infinity Stones certainly seems like that moment. "Whatever it takes," indeed.

Rent Avengers: Endgame

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Greatest Classic War Movie Speeches: 5 Memorable Monologues

By Josh Katzowitz    |   Monday, 27 April 2015 07:27 PM EDT

• 13 Memorable War Movie Roles
• 12 Film Critics Who Praise – or Pan – 'American Sniper'

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The 30 Best War Movies of All Time, Ranked

War films are a difficult genre to tackle, but these are the 30 greatest ever made, from The Longest Day to Saving Private Ryan.

War films are a tricky genre to tackle, because they are inherently political , and always have a perspective. At the fundamental level, there are only two types of war films (outside the documentary sphere) — anti-war movies and propaganda. Granted, just because something is propaganda doesn't mean it can't be awash in artistic brilliance or deep pathos (whether it's liberal like The Battle of Algiers or Che , or conservative like They Were Expendable or Flags of Our Fathers ). Propagandistic war films are essentially pro-war. So that leaves anti-war films.

However, as French director and film critic François Truffaut famously said, “there’s no such thing as an anti-war film.” What he meant is that cinema, by its very nature, can't help but glorify what it depicts. That's why drug users enjoy films such as Trainspotting or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas , despite those movies depicting the horror of drug use. Try as they might, but anti-war films like Saving Private Ryan or Dunkirk are simply exciting; they use the violence and tragedy of war to create exhilarating, money-making spectacles far from the front.

As such, the cinematic landscape of war stories is an ideological minefield, pun intended. So what makes a great war film? Ethics are certainly a part of it, but aesthetic genius still exists outside an ethical orbit (look at Triumph of the Will or Birth of a Nation , for instance). A three-hour runtime or more, epic scope, and meticulously choreographed set pieces certainly help, as does historical accuracy.

Ultimately, though, the parameters of a great war film are the same as every other narrative film, except with war as its subject — filmic artistry, memorable visuals, rich characters, bombastic emotion, intellectual stimulation, and an almost spiritual understanding of human nature.

Updated July 23, 2023: This article has been updated with additional films to recognize our readers and explore even more of the greatest war films ever made.

A final note. While some past masterpieces could be classified as war films, if they're predominantly a romance or an action movie, they will be excluded (apologies to the perfect Casablanca , the epic Gone with the Wind , and the dramatic adventures and beauty of the biographical Lawrence of Arabia ). That being said, these are the best war films of all time.

30 The Hurt Locker

Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker is easily one of the best dramatizations of the Iraq war ever put to film. Starring Jeremy Renner , Anthony Mackie, Ralph Fiennes, and Guy Pearce, this movie follows a bomb disposal team in an intimate and often unnerving way. A frequent target of insurgents in the line of duty, this film wonderfully portrays their reactions, both physical and psychological, to the stresses of combat.

With precise direction, a class-act script, a brilliant shot-list, and memorable performances, it's no wonder this film racked up a whopping 125 wins and 130 nominations come awards season. It was neck in neck for nominations at the Oscars alongside Avatar (the original), but when push came to shove, this film came out on top with more wins and the award for Best Picture to boot.

29 Breaker Morant

A unique Australian war film which explores some of the forgotten moments of war history, Breaker Morant is set at the turn of the 20th century during the Second Boer War in South Africa. The blistering drama follows three Australians in the British Army who are prosecuted for war crimes, and brings in elements of courtroom drama and ethical philosophy (which work a lot better than the often historically inaccurate plot details). Like The Grand Illusion , the film is interested in the death of civility and 'wars of gentlemen' with the advent of the 20th century, and has a melancholic, morally ambivalent air to it.

28 The Longest Day

The Longest Day was a successful book from 1959, and the movie rights were sold for one of the highest figures for any adaptation — $1.75 million in today's money, adjusted for inflation. The production itself was even more expensive, resulting in the single most expensive black and white movie of all time until 1993's Schindler's List took the spot.

Lavish and massive, The Longest Day was a huge, international production which explored D-Day from different perspectives, recruiting three different directors and five screenwriters to tell an elaborate and meticulously detailed story in a documentary style. The cast was packed (John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Rod Steiger, Henry Fonda, Sean Connery, Richard Burton, Robert Ryan, and dozens more), and the film featured 750 real soldiers from World War II as extras. Multiple military men from the war were consulted and had their stories recreated on film, and the result is one of the most authentic and elaborate war films ever made.

1917 is a cinematic masterpiece and for good reason. It was shot to appear as if the entire movie was one long take , which is no easy feat considering the extensive set list of cast and crew. With a half thousand extras and a $100 million dollar budget, using a single-take approach was nothing short of challenging. However, formatting it as a race against time proved a smart story choice for the approach.

The film followed two soldiers forced into enemy territory on a mission to deliver an important message that could save hundreds of lives. This gritty narrative from director Sam Mendes and cinematographer Roger Deakins busted open the one-shot conversation for a whole new generation.

26 Grave of the Fireflies

Bust out the tissues, this one is a doozy. Grave of the Fireflies is based on the semi-autobiographical short story by the same name. The film follows Seita and Setsuko, two siblings trying to survive by their lonesome in Japan during WWII.

Though anime does predate WWII , there’s no doubt that it was heavily inspired and popularized as a result of the conflict, which also helped to popularize the genre. Released during what is arguably considered the Golden Age of anime, this 1988 classic from Studio Ghibli has a perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes. This haunting film ‘from the other side’ is simply a must-see for fans of both war movies and anime.

25 All Quiet on the Western Front

2022’s All Quiet on the Western Front is another magnificent example of telling a story from the losing side’s perspective. This German-language film, not to be confused with the previous two films by the same name, is also based on the iconic novel by Erich Maria Remarque. This outing, however, far surpassed the others in terms of cinematography, musical score, visual effects, and make-up.

All Quiet on the Western Front 's haunting and gritty portrayal of the disillusionment of war follows a young German soldier whose hopes of becoming a hero are quickly dashed by the day to day reality of survival in the trenches. Among other accolades, this film went on to nab the Oscar for Best International Feature Film in 2023.

24 Hacksaw Ridge

Hacksaw Ridge single-handedly brought the discussion of conscientious objection back into the American lexicon. The movie is based on the true story of WWII American Army Medic Desmond T. Doss, the first conscientious objector in US history to be awarded the Medal of Honor without firing a weapon. Andrew Garfield’s portrayal of Everyman Doss earned him more than one nomination for Best Actor. This unique take on a war film is perfect for those looking to learn some more about a unique bit of history.

23 A Bridge Too Far

Richard Attenborough's A Bridge Too Far has received mixed reviews, but in recent years, war enthusiasts have returned to the three-hour epic with more and more enthusiasm, and deservedly so. The script from William Goldman ( Lord of the Flies, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President's Men ) is excellent, and its meticulously detailed account of Operation Market Garden is historically accurate and enticing.

22 The Steel Helmet

Samuel Fuller was always a Hollywood renegade, and so it was almost unsurprising that he'd rush to write and direct a film about the Korean War almost immediately after it began. In 1950 (the year the war began), Fuller wrote the script for The Steel Helmet in a week, and then filmed the whole thing in 10 days in a park with UCLA students as extras. The result is anything but amateurish, and remains perhaps the most sophisticated anti-war films of its time, and one of the best American war movies of the 1950s.

The Steel Helmet follows the sole survivor of an executed unit or Army troops in North Korea as he wanders enemy territory and seeks help. He comes across another survivor, and then a whole platoon, but it's here that deep racial tensions emerge between the American military men. Brimming with Buddhist imagery, sociopolitical messages, and dark drama, The Steel Helmet is an underrated war film classic .

21 The Great Escape

A classic Steve McQueen movie based on the great book by Paul Brickhill, The Great Escape may actually be more famous for its iconic action sequences involving motorcycles than it is as a well-detailed war movie. While there are some inaccuracies (with the film understandably omitting the fact that German forces helped with the escape, and exaggerating the American involvement in it), The Great Escape is still brimming with tiny details that are movingly true-to-life and authentic to the POW experience. McQueen stars as 'The Cooler King,' Captain Virgil Hilts, a noted escapist who helps organize a mass escape from a POW camp. The wonderful color cinematography from the underrated Daniel Fapp and the rousing score from Elmer Bernstein help seal the deal on this American classic.

20 The Deer Hunter

Michael Cimino's expert epic The Deer Hunter chronicles the trauma experienced by Pennsylvanian friends during the Vietnam War, and how that affects them coming home. With arguably Christopher Walken's best performance and outstanding displays from Robert De Niro, John Cazale, John Savage, and Meryl Streep, the film is an emotionally gut-wrenching exercise in empathy. Following three friends who become POWs in Vietnam, the middle part of the film features perfect scene after perfect scene, with some of the most tense, unpredictable, and explosive moments in war movie history. Watching the devastating consequences of these scenes makes The Deer Hunter feel an updated, Vietnam-oriented version of The Best Years of Our Lives .

Director Andrzej Wajda, himself a resistance fighter against the Nazis, made three masterful war films in the 1950s, including A Generation and the incredible Ashes and Diamonds , but Kanal is arguably the most war-centric and the best. Like the other films, Kanal follows the Polish resistance to Nazism and both the liberating and oppressive qualities of communism.

The film follows the intense efforts by the Home Army of freedom fighters to take back Poland from the Nazis in what was known as the Warsaw Uprising. Wajda takes his camera into the sewers of Poland and creates a claustrophobic masterpiece.

The Oscar-winning epic Patton was a controversial epic about a controversial man, General George S. Patton. Containing one of the most famous opening scenes of all time (Patton giving a speech to the audience in front of a gigantic flag) and a powerful ending, Patton chronicles the General's career as he grows in stature and acclaim. George C. Scott is absolutely perfect in the role.

17 The Best Years of Our Lives

The Best Years of Our Lives was one of the boldest American films to explore the actual traumas of war, made especially bolder by the fact of its 1946 release date. The movie follows three men returning from home after World War II, and proceeds to chronicle the PTSD , alcoholism, insecurity, and general instability that would go on to define a generation of men who witnessed things no one ever should.

Related: Best World War II Movies Ever Made, Ranked

It's fitting that one of the most emotionally poignant anti-war films had to be about what happens next, after the war, in order to truly show the horrors of combat.

16 Waltz with Bashir

A hybrid fiction and documentary film , Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir is a breathtaking masterpiece of cinema that uses interviews, poetic animation, and grueling documentary images to depict the Lebanon War of 1982. Focusing on a specific character while elucidating universal truths,

Folman's masterpiece follows his conversations with Boaz, who was a soldier in the war, and whose memories instigate Folman's own search for further understanding about the war and the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Waltz with Bashir is frequently beautiful and aesthetically perfect, and the final scenes are some of the most haunting in cinematic history.

15 Full Metal Jacket

Stanley Kubrick's bifurcated film Full Metal Jacket follows the lead-up to war and the war itself, focusing on boot camp and then the Vietnam War. It's a clever bit of mirroring which details how people can be trained to kill other people, and the utter brutality and inhumanity that is often required to do so.

The first half features one of the most disturbing performances of all time courtesy of a young Vincent D'Onofrio, not to mention the darkly hilarious and profane performance from R. Lee Ermey (a former Marine Corps staff sergeant himself).

While most people think of the hit television series when they hear the title, M*A*S*H was actually an incredible Robert Altman film before heading to the small screen with a different cast. The story of wisecracking medical officers stationed in Korea struck a real chord with American audiences as the war in Vietnam resulted in a wave of cynicism and anti-war sentiments.

While the series had a great cast, the film has arguably better actors, with pitch-perfect sarcasm and confidence from Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, Tom Skerritt, Robert Duvall, and Sally Kellerman.

13 The Bridge on the River Kwai

The film with the most popular whistling of all time, The Bridge on the River Kwai followed a group of gung-ho prisoners of war taken by Japanese soldiers to Thailand in order to help construct a strategic railway bridge. The wily gang plans the destruction of the bridge while trying to stay alive as the war nears its end. With masterful performances from Alec Guinness, William Holden, and Sessue Hayakawa , the film is a rousing, exciting classic from the great David Lean.

12 The Ascent

A rarely seen but deeply powerful Soviet war film, The Ascent follows Soviet soldiers fighting against Nazi forces as they wander the snowy Belorussian landscape looking for food. With stark black and white cinematography and a minimalist narrative, Larisa Shepitko's 1977 masterpiece has no heroes and instead looks at the moral, emotional, and physical peril wrought by war on all sides and everyone involved. The atmospheric and unsentimental film becomes more abstract as it nears a truly unforgettable ending.

11 Paths of Glory

Early remnants of Stanley Kubrick's formalist, unemotional, and rigid filmmaking genius are on full display in his 1957 classic, Paths of Glory. Setting itself far apart from other American war films, Paths of Glory is a patient and solemn look at military structures, hierarchy, and morality in wartime.

The film follows a commanding officer (Kirk Douglas at his very best) whose unit is charged for cowardice for refusing a veritable suicide mission during World War I . His attempts to prevent the soldiers from being punished reveal the complicated politics and depressing bureaucratic indifference of war, just as much as the film depicts the fragility of the human condition.

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100 Best War Movies of All Time

From peacetime to frontlines, from coming home to left behind: Rotten Tomatoes presents the 100 best-reviewed war movies of all time, ranked by Certified Fresh films first. — Alex Vo

Page 1: Movies #1-#100 | Page 2: Movies #101-#137

Grave of the Fireflies (1988) 100%

A Man Escaped (1956) 100%

Casablanca (1942) 99%

The Battle of Algiers (1966) 99%

Henry V (1989) 98%

Schindler's List (1993) 98%

Apocalypse Now (1979) 97%

Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) 98%

All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) 98%

Das Boot (1981) 98%

The Hurt Locker (2008) 97%

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) 97%

Army of Shadows (1969) 97%

Grand Illusion (1937) 97%

Son of Saul (2015) 96%

Waltz With Bashir (2008) 97%

'71 (2014) 96%

The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) 96%

Ran (1985) 96%

Paths of Glory (1957) 96%

To Be or Not to Be (1942) 96%

Eye in the Sky (2015) 95%

The Pianist (2002) 95%

Saving Private Ryan (1998) 94%

Lawrence of Arabia (1962) 94%

Three Kings (1999) 94%

Spartacus (1960) 94%

The Great Escape (1963) 94%

Glory (1989) 95%

No Man's Land (2001) 93%

Wonder Woman (2017) 93%

Wings (1927) 94%

The Last of the Mohicans (1992) 88%

The Killing Fields (1984) 93%

Dunkirk (2017) 92%

Land of Mine (2015) 92%

Zero Dark Thirty (2012) 91%

Letters From Iwo Jima (2006) 91%

Stalag 17 (1953) 91%

Full Metal Jacket (1987) 90%

Gallipoli (1981) 91%

All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) 90%

The Imitation Game (2014) 90%

Rescue Dawn (2006) 90%

Downfall (2004) 90%

The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006) 90%

Lebanon (2009) 90%

Gone With the Wind (1939) 90%

Patton (1970) 91%

The Big Red One (1980) 90%

Inglourious Basterds (2009) 89%

Lincoln (2012) 90%

Platoon (1986) 89%

Good Morning, Vietnam (1987) 90%

The Wind Rises (2013) 88%

From Here to Eternity (1953) 88%

Tangerines (2013) 88%

Zero Motivation (2014) 88%

A Midnight Clear (1992) 88%

The Deer Hunter (1978) 86%

The English Patient (1996) 86%

Courage Under Fire (1996) 86%

Born on the Fourth of July (1989) 84%

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003) 85%

Hacksaw Ridge (2016) 84%

M*A*S*H (1970) 84%

Doctor Zhivago (1965) 82%

Operation Mincemeat (2021) 83%

Atonement (2007) 83%

Casualties of War (1989) 84%

The Dirty Dozen (1967) 81%

Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) 80%

The Thin Red Line (1998) 80%

Life Is Beautiful (1997) 81%

Devotion (2022) 80%

Che: Part Two (2008) 79%

Greyhound (2020) 78%

A Very Long Engagement (2004) 79%

Michael Collins (1996) 78%

Black Hawk Down (2001) 77%

Fury (2014) 76%

Black Book (2006) 77%

Good Kill (2014) 75%

Empire of the Sun (1987) 78%

War Horse (2011) 75%

Lone Survivor (2013) 75%

Braveheart (1995) 76%

Merry Christmas (2005) 74%

Flags of Our Fathers (2006) 76%

American Sniper (2014) 72%

Henry V (1945) 100%

Ivan's Childhood (1963) 100%

The Forgotten Battle (2020) 100%

Narvik (2022) 100%

Come and See (1985) 90%

Major Dundee (1965) 97%

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) 97%

Zulu (1964) 96%

Twelve O'Clock High (1949) 96%

Gunga Din (1939) 93%

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Screen Rant

12 greatest opening scenes in war movie history.

While war movie introductions are known for revealing the horrors and chaos of warfare, these opening sequences come in all shapes and genres.

• War movies often begin with scenes that capture the chaos and brutality of battle, but they can also incorporate drama, suspense, and dark comedy.
• The greatest opening scenes in war movie history can employ any genre to introduce the film's premise and foreshadow events.
• These opening scenes set the tone for the films and explore themes of survival, heroism, the dehumanizing effects of war, and the complexities of the battlefield.

The greatest opening scenes in war movie history examine warfare from different angles. Typically, the most memorable introductory scenes from war films are the ones that focus on the sheer chaos of a real-world battlefield. However, while many great war films begin with actual fights, this isn't always the case.

From the most famous and best war movies of all time , to war films that have gone under the radar in recent years, the introductions of these movies come in all shapes and genres. Although their stories primarily tackle the subject of warfare, war movies sometimes begin with doses of drama, suspense, and even dark comedy or surrealism. In fact, though these movies commonly revolve around action and war, the greatest opening scenes in war movie history can employ any genre to introduce its premise, set up the plot, foreshadow events, or subvert viewer expectations.

12 Enemy At The Gates (2001)

Soviet sniper Vassili Zaitsev displays his skill by hunting a wolf amid the cold and unforgiving Russian winter. After this prelude to the title card, Enemy at the Gates cuts to the chaos of the Battle of Stalingrad during WWII. The desolation and brutality of war are vividly portrayed as Vassili and his fellow soldiers board trains headed for Stalingrad, where they must defend the Soviet Union from the encroaching Nazi forces. However, the soldiers must first survive the Nazis ambushing the Red Army's deployment. Its stark depiction of war and survival has made Enemy at the Gates' introduction one of the most influential war movie openings of all time.

All The Times Call Of Duty Has Referenced Enemy At The Gates

11 glory (1989).

As the sun rises, Glory begins with slice-of-life sequences featuring a Union Army camp during the American Civil War. Following scenes of the soldiers cooking their meals and playing baseball to pass the time, Captain Robert Gould Shaw narrates his letter to his mother as he and his fellow Union soldiers march towards the Battle of Antietam. At the actual battle, the camera artfully navigates through the battlefield, immersing viewers in the intensity of the conflict. This scene foreshadows the challenges faced by the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, one of the first African-American units in the Union Army, as they strive for dignity and equality on the battlefield.

10 1917 (2019)

The true story-inspired plot of 1917 opens during the calm before the storm. Awoken by their sergeant, British lance corporals Tom Blake and William Schofield walk across the trenches to a meeting with General Erinmore, who gives them a special mission. As explained in 1917 's opening scenes, the opposing German forces are making a tactical retreat in order to overwhelm the British Devonshire Regiment with artillery. Blake and Schofield are tasked with delivering a message to the said regiment, containing orders to call off the attack in anticipation of the German ambush. This scene sets the stage for Schofield and Blake's impossible journey to save 1,600 of their fellow combatants.

9 Full Metal Jacket (1987)

To the tune of Johnny Wright's "Hello Vietnam," Full Metal Jacket starts by showing recruits getting their heads shaved before training. At the United States Marine Corps training facility, Gunnery Sergeant Hartman delivers a barrage of insults and remarks to the new recruits. This sets the tone for the harsh and unrelenting training that soldiers undergo before being sent to the Vietnam War. Stanley Kubrick's masterful direction captures the dehumanizing aspects of military training, highlighting the psychological toll on young recruits. The opening scene foreshadows the film's exploration of the dehumanizing effects of war, both on the battlefield and within the hearts and minds of those sent to fight.

Was Full Metal Jacket Based On A True Story?

8 saving private ryan (1998).

At the Normandy Cemetery, an American war veteran leads his family to the graves of his fallen comrades - after which Saving Private Ryan abruptly cuts to the battle that took place there in 1944. The succeeding sequences immerse viewers in the sheer brutality and disarray of battle, heightened by the handheld camera work and realistic portrayal of the horrors faced by Allied soldiers as they storm the beaches. The deafening sounds and stark depiction of carnage create an unforgettable cinematic experience. Apart from paying homage to those who fought in one of history's most pivotal conflicts, this intro has come to shape the style of subsequent war movies.

7 Dunkirk (2017)

The opening scenes of Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk are focused on the British private Tommy, who navigates the streets of Dunkirk under enemy fire. As Tommy follows orders to retreat to the beach while his comrades fall around him, the mostly quiet scene is underscored with urgency and impending doom. The haunting image of German propaganda leaflets falling ominously sets the tone for the perilous situation facing Allied forces. This not only introduces the chaotic reality of the evacuation, but also establishes the film's unique structure, weaving together land, sea, and air perspectives. It's a gripping prelude to the larger narrative of survival and solidarity during the Dunkirk evacuation.

6 All Quiet On The Western Front (2022)

An adaptation of the war novel of the same name, All Quiet on the Western Front throws audiences headfirst into the pandemonium of trench warfare. A deep dive into the lives of German recruits during World War I, the movie begins with a young soldier climbing out of the trenches, running his way across the chaotic battlefield, and finally striking an enemy up close with a trench shovel. This is followed by scenes of teenage Germans listening to a patriotic speech at school, getting recruited to serve the Kaiser and the Fatherland. These sequences exemplify the movie's core themes of wartime indoctrination and the disillusionment of soldiers on the frontline.

Full Breakdown Of All Quiet On The Western Front's True Story & Events

5 hacksaw ridge (2016).

Hacksaw Ridge begins with a serene image of a cliff, setting the stage for the gripping true story of combat medic Desmond Doss, who is both a Medal of Honor awardee and a conscientious objector in the second World War. It then transitions to the brutal Battle of Okinawa, where slow-motion scenes of chaos and carnage unfold as a voice narrates a passage from the Bible. The visceral intensity of combat is juxtaposed with Doss's unwavering commitment to saving lives without wielding a weapon, capturing the brutality and humanity of the battlefield. This serves as a compelling introduction to the film's examination of heroism and the power of pacifism.

4 Inglorious Basterds (2009)

The opening scene of Inglorious Basterds is director Quentin Tarantino's favorite scene from his entire filmography. A masterclass in tension and suspense, it features Colonel Hans Landa interrogating a French dairy farmer suspected of harboring Jews. Landa's charming yet menacing demeanor shines as he explains why he's come to love being unofficially known as the "Jew Hunter." The dialogue becomes a psychological chess match, building suspense to a crescendo, and setting the tone for Inglorious Basterds subversive alternate history. Landa's cunning and the farmer's desperation create a gripping prologue, establishing the film's unique narrative and its exploration of wartime resistance.

3 Lord Of War (2005)

The introduction of Lord of War is a visually striking montage tracing the life cycle of a bullet. The narrative is framed by the captivating voiceover of protagonist and firearms dealer Yuri Orlov, who presents a chillingly calculated perspective on the global arms trade. The scene stylistically captures the journey of a bullet from its creation to its destructive impact, symbolizing the grim business of war. The film's dark humor is evident as the charismatic arms dealer reflects on the ubiquity of his product across the world. This juxtaposition of beauty and brutality sets the tone for a thought-provoking exploration of the complex world of international arms trafficking.

2 Apocalypse Now (1979)

Apocalypse Now opens with a surreal and mesmerizing scene as Captain Willard grapples with the disorienting effects of war, captured through fragmented imagery and a sense of psychological unraveling. The sound of helicopters and the Doors' haunting "The End" play in the background as Captain Willard lies in a Saigon hotel room. The room is dimly lit, and the ceiling fan whirs overhead, creating an eerie atmosphere and setting the stage for the film's exploration of the madness and moral ambiguity of the Vietnam War. Apocalypse Now 's hypnotic opening scene is just one of the many reasons why it's one of the most critically acclaimed war films ever made.

1 Black Hawk Down (2001)

Black Hawk Down starts with a somber look into the desolation of war. In 1992, civil war has caused a famine in Somalia, which the movie explains through subtitles and darkly realistic imagery. The movie then thrusts viewers into the heart of the action with U.S. Army soldiers preparing for a mission. The atmosphere is tense and the anticipation is palpable as helicopters soar over the war-torn city, capturing the camaraderie and focused determination of the soldiers. The scene serves as a prelude to the harrowing events of the Battle of Mogadishu, as well as Black Hawk Down 's core themes of courage and patriotism.

The 30 Best War Movies

From ancient wars to wars of the future...

Narrative works of fiction and nonfiction alike have always been a strong device when it comes to examining the many facets of warfare. A subject that can be both personal, but also wide reaching, there’s so many lenses one can use to tell a story about the various armed combats the people of the world have experienced. It’s because of this that today, we’re here to honor the best war movies that make up the canon, from movies about Pearl Harbor and Vietnam to great films about World War I and   World War II films set around the world , and that's just breaching the surface. 

Whether on the battlefield, or at the homefront, tales such as these can help us better understand one of the most complicated impulses of humanity. Some of the movies highlighted are even based on fictional characters/conflicts, but those entries aren’t any less effective for it. Some of the best action movies even qualify for this feature as a result. With that in mind, please enjoy CinemaBlend’s rundown of the best war movies of all time. 

30. Dunkirk (2017)

Leave it to Christopher Nolan ( Inception , Tenet ) to take the fairly straightforward concept of a war picture and filter it through three intersecting time frames, which all converge on the key battle that’s mentioned in the title. 

You don’t quite pick it up at first. But as Nolan – and, by extension, the audience – follows the events of the Allied forces trapped on the beaches of Dunkirk during WWII, we see the timeline of a soldier (Fionn Whitehead), a pilot ( Tom Hardy ), and a civilian boat captain (Mark Rylance) all intersecting while the narrative unfurls. Dunkirk delivers a thinking-man’s approach to the brutality of combat, an intelligent dissection of combat as seen from the land, the sea, and the air. 

29. Ben-Hur (1959)

Few movies are more befitting of the word “epic” than William Wyler’s masterpiece, Ben-Hur . Oh, and fun fact, but Wyler also won two more Oscars for two other war films, those being Mrs. Miniver , and The Best Years of Our Lives . But back to Ben-Hur , which stars Charlton Heston as Judah Ben-Hur , a Jewish prince who becomes a slave, but then ultimately rises up and becomes a respected charioteer during the Roman Empire. This sprawling movie has some of the most impressive scenes in cinema, like when the Roman fleet is attacked by pirates, or of course the groundbreaking chariot race. But the real war is more of a personal battle between Ben-Hur and his former friend, Messala. All of this is set to a story of the Christ, which ultimately makes Ben-Hur’s quest for vengeance really a quest for redemption. It’s a film for the ages!

28. Valkyrie (2008)

While most World War II movies focus on the action in the major battlefields, director Bryan Singer ’s Valkyrie pays tribute to a piece of history that’s more localized. One of the great Tom Cruise movies you may have never seen, the action star plays Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, a key figure in an attempt to overthrow Adolf Hitler from within his own military.

Heading up an all star cast, including Terrence Stamp, Eddie Izzard, and Kenneth Branagh - among others, Cruise commands the picture as its dramatic anchor. A portrait of people who rejected their own government’s cruelty by using its very machinery against it, Valkyrie ’s plot skews away from traditional war stories. Opting to show a more clandestine battle, the action is mixed with a climate of tension and personal stakes that makes this more confined tale as thrilling as one told with a more open battlefield.

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27. Lincoln (2012)

Though Lincoln probably isn’t the first title that comes to mind when thinking about the best war movies, it’s more than deserving of a spot on this list. With the American Civil War in the background, Steven Spielberg ’s historical drama follows U.S. President Abraham Lincoln ( Daniel Day-Lewis ) as he attempts to accomplish two major goals: bring an end to the bloody military conflict, and ban slavery once and for all.

Again, there’s not much in terms of battles (the only major sequence is in the opening minutes of the film), but Lincoln does a masterful job of capturing the attitudes and fears of a nation torn in two as well as the impact it has on the country 150 years later.

26. Inglourious Basterds (2009)

When Brad Pitt’s Lt. Aldo Raine looks down upon the carved forehead of Christoph Waltz’s Hans Landa at the end of Inglourious Basterds and remarks, “I think this might just be my masterpiece,” it’s A) hard not to read it as a meta sentiment from Quentin Tarantino, and B) hard not to agree with said sentiment. The writer/director has made some phenomenal films , and there is an argument to be made that his 2009 contribution to the war movie genre is his greatest.

It’s gnarly and awesome to see the titular collection of commandos execute their mission to start up a collection of Nazi scalps, but the genius comes in with the integration of the fiery revenge plot unfurled by Mélanie Laurent’s Shosanna Dreyfus. With the sinister, slimy Landa slithering through both stories, it’s a movie that shocks, thrills, and delights with a killer vision of alternative history.

25. Gladiator (2000)

Ridley Scott’s Gladiator is more about the aftermath of a war, and a power struggle that ensues when the Emperor’s son murders him in order to prevent losing his right to the throne to a successful war general. Scott is a master when it comes to directing historical films, and he really knocked it out of the park pitting established star Russell Crowe against a young but phenomenal Joaquin Phoenix. 

The film won five Academy Awards after its release, and was nominated for a whole lot more. Russell Crowe received his Best Actor Oscar, though Joaquin Phoenix would have to wait longer before finally getting one of his own. When it comes to modern gladiator films, there’s really no better option to choose from. 

24. Hacksaw Ridge (2016)

“Please Lord, help me get one more.” Repeated variations on that plea are heard throughout director Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge , as combat medic Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield) tries to save as many of his fellow soldiers. The story of the first Medal of Honor recipient to be a conscientious objector, it’s a cross between a more traditional, combat heavy picture, and a moving biographical drama.

Through his dedication to protecting and saving as many lives as he could, especially during the Battle of Okinawa, Desmond’s career as a World War II combat medic is brought to life through an intense performance from Andrew Garfield. Producer Bill Mechanic once remarked on the reason Hacksaw Ridge resonates with audiences is due to how the story affects people. Basing its message on the universal belief that true heroes can rise to the darkest of occasions, it’s not hard to agree.

23. The Deer Hunter (1978)

While the famous “Russian roulette” scene is the most iconic image of The Deer Hunter , what makes the movie great, what makes it important, is the metaphorical Russian roulette of three friends who go to war, and come out of it in very different ways. Many war movies deal with the terrible cost of war, but few do it in quite the same way as The Deer Hunter . 

The movie ultimately spends little of its three-hour runtime on the Vietnam War itself. This is a story about the men who fought in it, both before and after their time there. By spending so much time with Mike (Robert De Niro), Nick (Christopher Walken) and Steven (John Savage) before they ever go to war, we understand who they truly were, and therefore we understand the loss of those men that much more.

22. The Dirty Dozen (1967)

What do you get when a group of colorful criminals-turned-commandos are sent out on a top secret, high risk mission to disrupt German command ahead of the D-Day invasion during World War II? If your answer is one hell of a movie, you’re 100% right. With legend Robert Aldrich at the helm, The Dirty Dozen sports one of the best ensemble casts of any movie from the 1960s – including Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson, Ernest Borgnine, Donald Sutherland, George Kennedy, Robert Ryan, Telly Savalas, and more – and their mission as expendables soldiers risking their lives for a pardon is a blast.

Not just a great movie unto itself, The Dirty Dozen also happens to be hugely influential. Number 26 on this list wouldn’t exist without it, not to mention the Suicide Squad blockbusters and the comics on which they are based.

21. Black Hawk Down (2001)

There are two major aspects of warfare that Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down commits to displaying in its adaptation of author Mark Bowden’s account of the Battle of Mogadishu. On one hand, the picture shows the importance of tactical awareness, as what seemed like a “routine mission” for UN peacekeepers during the Somali Civil War turned into what was known as the “longest sustained firefight” since the Vietnam War. 

Adding to the masterfully claustrophobic feel of that very war zone is the atmosphere of personal valor. Black Hawk Down ’s cast boasts actors like Josh Hartnett, Ewan McGregor, Eric Bana, and Sam Shepherd; all playing the peacekeepers who unexpectedly find themselves in harm's way. Rather than merely showing the battle as a lesson of preparedness, Ridley Scott and writer Ken Nolan also dig into why we fight, especially when the battle becomes greater than we could have ever anticipated. 

20. The Hurt Locker (2008)

Where has director Kathryn Bigelow gone? After bursting onto the scene with Near Dark , Blue Steel and Point Break , the searing action director settled into a groove of gripping combat features with the back-to-back releases of The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty , winning Best Picture and Director for Locker . Bigelow has only made one movie since then – Detroit in 2017 – and when you watch The Hurt Locker , you realize how much we, as an audience, are missing. 

The Hurt Locker goes deep behind enemy lines during the Iraq War, following bomb technicians (Anthony Mackie, Jeremy Renner) as they tackle fresh waves of devastating new threats. The film put human faces on a war that played out in our nation’s headlines, while also remembering to be a riveting and suspense-filled action thriller. 

19. Born On The Fourth of July (1989)

The second movie in Oliver Stone’s Vietnam trilogy (the first film being the Academy-Award winning, Platoon , and the third being Heaven & Earth ), Born on the Fourth of July may just be the most potent and personal of the three. In one of Tom Cruise’s best movie performances , the talented actor portrays real-life figure, Ron Kovic, a proud American who was itching to get into Vietnam, but returned home broken and disillusioned. 

The film chronicles his change, from gung-ho soldier, to wounded veteran, to activist, and it never shies away from the message that war is never kind to anyone, especially those who go into it thinking it’s noble or glorious.

18. Beasts Of No Nation (2015)

Beasts Of No Nation is not an easy movie to watch. Director Cary Joji Fukunaga’s unflinching look at the story of a young boy in an unnamed West African country who finds himself forced into a warlord’s army of children is brutal, horrific, and completely brilliant. 

The boy, Agu (Abraham Attah) is enlisted into the Commandant's army after most of his family flees his village in the midst of a civil war and his father is killed after telling Agu to run into the jungle as the village is attacked. The Commandant, played exceptionally by Idris Elba, is remorseless and cruel with his child soldiers and the movie pushes the emotions of its viewers as far as anyone would want. It’s well worth the sacrifice, but maybe not repeat viewings.

17. M*A*S*H (1970)

While M*A*S*H is mostly famous for the television series that lasted years longer than the Korean War itself, that show owes its existence to Robert Altman’s excellently subversive film. It’s not a shock the movie translated well to television considering the film is fairly episodic, following Hawkeye (Donald Sutherland) and Trapper (Elliot Gould) from one wild situation to the next, with each story having little to do with those around it. 

Still, M*A*S*H does a fantastic job of looking at the Korean War (as well as the Vietnam War), which was raging alongside the film’s release, with a hilariously dark sense of humor, something the men in the actual conflict likely had to do to make it through.

16. Enemy At The Gates (2001)

Few war movies are as riddled with the tension that Enemy At The Gates provides, as two opposing snipers look to kill the other during the Battle of Stalingrad during World War II. Jean-Jacques Annaud does a phenomenal job of building the tension between Jude Law’s Vassili Zaitsev as he takes on Ed Harris’ Major Erwin König. 

This movie delivers both the massive battles that other great war films feature, and does a great job at showcasing some of the key minor battles that were fought, and how just a couple of key players could play a massive role in the morale of an entire army.  

15. Patton (1970)

Directed by Franklin J. Schaffner and co-written by Francis Ford Coppola (another filmmaker known for a brilliant war movie), Patton features one of the best depictions of a military leader in the medium’s history with George C. Scott’s portrayal of U.S. General George S. Patton. This epic war movie, which starts with one of the most iconic speeches of all time, spends 172 minutes dissecting the man, the myth, and the legend of the decorated military mind.

A Best Picture winner, Patton took home an impressive seven Academy Awards, including Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Actor, though Scott refused to accept the award.

14. Starship Troopers (1997)

For sci-fi fans, it might be hard to pick which is the best Paul Verhoeven movie: Total Recall , RoboCop , or Starship Troopers , but for the sake of this article, we’re going to focus on Starship Troopers , which is definitely worthy of being in consideration as one of the best war movies of all time. On the surface, this might not seem right. Here we have a movie about soldiers fighting giant bugs, which wasn’t in any textbooks that we remember growing up. 

Underneath the pulse-pounding action, however, is a satire that is definitively anti-fascism. In fact, many of our “heroes” are dressed like Nazis, and when our protagonists capture the enemy species, they rejoice in the fact that “it’s afraid.” So, yeah. It might not be the first movie you think of when it comes to great anti-war movies, but it definitely is once you think about it.

13. The Thin Red Line (1998)

Released the same year as Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan and set during the same conflict (World War II), Terrence Malick’s 1998 epic war film, The Thin Red Line , couldn’t be any more different than the Tom Hanks-led spectacle. Set during the Battle of Mount Austen in the Pacific Theater of WWII, the movie largely consists of a series of internal monologues by characters played by Jim Caviezel, Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, and others, as they contemplate their respective roles in the war and what fate has in store for them.

Malick’s first movie in 20 years, The Thin Red Line is less of a straightforward portrayal of war and more an artistic exploration of the internal struggles soldiers face while staring death in the eye.

12. Spartacus (1960)

Spartacus , which is the story of a slave-cum-gladiator who becomes a leader of men and leads a revolt, is one of Stanley Kubrick’s most underappreciated gems. Starring Kirk Douglas (who also starred in Kubick’s anti-war masterpiece, Paths of Glory ), the film is as epic in scope as you’d want it to be. 

Set during the Third Servile War (also known as the Gladiator War), the film follows the rise, and ultimate fall of its titular character. But along the way, we get stirring speeches, and excellent scenes of combat – most notably a gladiatorial fight involving a man using a net and a trident! Yes, at over three hours, it’s a bit long, but the voyage along the way is rewarding as all hell. I am Spartacus!

11. Platoon (1986)

Oliver Stone’s Platoon is considered to be one of the top war movies to win Best Picture as well as one of the most realistic military films of all time. Centering on Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen), an idealistic young soldier thrown into the meat-grinder that was Vietnam, this harrowing drama is as disturbing as it is decorated with its depictions of heroism, human depravity, and a battle between right and wrong on the battlefield.

Remembered for its unflinching examination of one of the bloodiest conflicts in American military history, Platoon also gave the world one of the most emotional and cinematic scenes in movie history with Sergeant Elias (Willem Dafoe) being chased through the jungle set to Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings.”

10. Glory (1989)

One way to guarantee success in a war movie is to assemble an all-star cast and tell an inspirational, if little told, story of a war. That is exactly what director Edward Zwick did with 1989’s Glory . Telling the story of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment in the Civil War, one of the few all-Black outfits to fight for the Union, Zwick put together a cast of serious heavyweights to show all the emotion, the glorious highs and the heartbreaking lows of the regiment. 

The movie stars Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington (who won an Oscar for his performance), Andre Braugher (in his first film role), as members of the unit, and Matthew Broderick and Cary Elwes as their commanding officers. It’s a powerful film that is as true to history as a movie can be, but also as inspiring as a film can be. It was nominated for five Academy Awards and won two –  Best Cinematography as well as Washington’s win.

9. 1917 (2019)

In 2019, Sam Mendes gave audiences one of the best World War I movies with 1917 , a blistering and grueling thriller about two young British soldiers – Will Schofield (George MacKay) and Tom Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) – as they try to reach the frontline and deliver an important message that could save scores of lives. But this proves to be no simple task, as the pair has to cross enemy lines where they encounter attacks on land and from the air before they can reach their destination and call off a doomed offensive.

The winner of three Academy Awards, including Best Cinematography for the legendary Roger Deakins, 1917 is presented as two extended takes, a decision that creates a sensation of being right there in the trenches and on the battlefields with its stars. This chaotic, fast-paced, and intense delivery of a story of survival and hope created a war movie like no other, and one we’ll probably remember for years if not decades to come. 

8. Full Metal Jacket (1987)

Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket is almost three movies in one, with each act being very distinct from the others. The first, and most famous, is the Marine boot camp for new recruits. R. Lee Ermey steals the show with his amazing performance as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman. Still, it’s the intensity of Vincent D’Onofrio as Leonard “Gomer Pyle” Lawrence that leaves the most haunting impression. 

The second act details the futility of war, particularly the Vietnam War that it depicts. Joker (Matthew Modine) travels the combat zone and sees just how pointless the whole war is and how no one seems to care, they are just doing what they are told. The third act takes on a horror-movie vibe as the platoon attempts to take out an unseen enemy sniper in the spooky, bombed-out town of Huế. Fear, death, and hopelessness consume the latter third of the movie. The film is a masterpiece by one of film’s greatest directors.

7. All Quiet On The Western Front (2022)

It seemed pretty impossible that the modern version of All Quiet on the Western Front could actually be superior to the groundbreaking 1930 movie that won Best Picture back at the third Academy Awards (making it one of sixteen war films to take home the prestigious statue ), but 2022’s version manages to do it. It’s the grand scope of it all, but also the fact that it feels extremely personal. By focusing mainly on one soldier — an enthusiastic 17-year-old who can’t wait to get into the trenches of World War I, but also featuring a subplot involving officials working toward armistice, the dual plots really add layers to the people on the ground, but also the people who worked toward ending the war. 

The movie is grueling, and our once plucky hero sees firsthand that war is hell. Director Edward Berger got the best performances out of his actors, while the cinematography by James Friend is top notch, really putting us in the heat of combat. It’s a powerful film that spotlights the horrors of combat, making it a modern masterpiece, and one of the greatest anti-war movies ever made.

6. The Bridge On The River Kwai (1957)

“What have I done?” Alec Guinness’ horrified line delivery as he realizes the extreme consequences of his abetting the construction of the titular structure is perhaps the most iconic part of The Bridge On The River Kwai , but it’s really just a part of the immense power and drama of David Lean’s 1957 epic. It’s both one of the all-time great war movies and one of the all-time great prison movies – something it shares in common with other entries on this list.

An adaptation of Pierre Boulle’s novel, the branched narrative follows American and British prisoners of war building a bridge to connect Bangkok and Rangoon (aided by Guinness’ tortured/Stockholm Syndrome-afflicted Colonel Nicholson) and the efforts by escapee Navy Commander Shears (William Holden) to return to the camp and sabotage the work. It’s magnificent and gripping throughout, and yes, the film’s ending packs an incredible punch.

5. Master and Commander: Far Side Of The World (2003)

Perhaps the reason that co-writer/director Peter Weir and co-writer John Collee’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is a brilliant war movie is because, frankly, it’s not totally a war movie. Adapted from selected texts out of author Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey-Maturin series, the Russell Crowe/Paul Bettany-led ensemble drama cares just as much about its mythic characters as it does its Napoleonic Wars setting. Nowhere is that better shown than through the camaraderie of the HMS Surprise’s crew, most notably through the friendship of the vessel’s captain Jack Aubrey (Crowe) and his ship surgeon Stephen Maturin (Bettany). While Aubrey’s orders border on obsession, we don’t totally see Russell Crowe’s protagonist lose himself in the fog of war, carefully walking between protecting his crew, while also recognizing when and how to strike. 

Master and Commander also uses a handful of intense, expertly crafted set-pieces to depict the era of warfare the story occupies. Naval battles of close proximity and great destruction are shown, which are only heightened by getting to know the HMS Surprise and its proud sailors. With great warmth, humor, and action, it’s a true shame that this attempted franchise never sailed far from port.

4. Saving Private Ryan (1998)

I’m not sure if there’s any movie that can truly give viewers the full scope of what invading allied forces felt when storming the Omaha beach in Normandy during World War II, but Saving Private Ryan does a damn good job. In fact, veterans who actually were present at D-Day told Time that Steven Spielberg’s opening battle featured very little Hollywood embellishment, to the point that it may be painful for those who were there to experience. That’s truly horrifying to hear as a viewer, and a great scene to showcase the brutality of war. 

Many would call Saving Private Ryan Steven Spielberg’s best movie, and that’s hard to argue with the amount of care that went into crafting it. Even if the story is only loosely based on the rescue of paratrooper Fritz Niland after the death of his two brothers, it is a wonderful story that works to give the audience a fairly solid depiction of the most brutal war in human history. 

3. The Great Escape (1963)

We often see World War II depicted on-screen on a massive scale, it was a world war, after all. And yet, part of what makes The Great Escape such a wonderful movie is how it tightens that focus onto a relatively small group of soldiers located in one place at one point in time. It humanizes the scale of it all in a real way and tells a story of true bravery and heroism. The only way for a group of men to fight the Nazis is to try and escape from them.

The events of The Great Escape are broadly embellished for the sake of drama, to be sure, but the story of a massive jailbreak from a POW camp is exactly the sort of exciting story that works well as a blockbuster movie. While it made Steve McQueen a star, The Great Escape has one of the best ensemble casts in movie history, and one of the most iconic movie themes ever written.

2. Paths of Glory (1957)

The first war movie that springs to many people’s minds when somebody mentions Stanley Kubrick’s name is Full Metal Jacket , which makes sense, as Jacket is definitely the more popular war movie. However, Paths of Glory is probably the better one, mostly since its anti-war message is much clearer and more pronounced. Based on the novel of the same name by Humphrey Cobb, the story centers around a commanding officer, played by Kirk Douglas, who defends three French soldiers against being court-martialed and shot. 

In this war movie set during World War I , Douglas delivers a powerful performance, and the film gives a more nuanced look at the closed-door machinations that occur in offices while soldiers go off to die. The film also gives a fascinating look at the effects of shell shock, and does an admirable job of showcasing the hell that was no man’s land. It’s definitely one of Stanley Kubrick’s very best movies .

1. Apocalypse Now (1979)

War is hell. As Apocalypse Now proves, making a movie about war can be hell, as well. Francis Ford Coppola’s masterful interpretation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness addresses the physical and mental toll that combat has on soldiers, as a platoon of Special Forces troops are ordered to head upriver in Vietnam and deal with rogue commander Kurtz (Marlon Brando). Turn up “The End” by The Doors, and lose yourself in Coppola’s disturbing haze.  

The story of the making of Apocalypse Now is almost as famous as the finished movie, which boasts a commanding cast (Martin Sheen, Brando, Robert Duvall, Laurence Fishburne, Dennis Hopper, Scott Glenn, Harrison Ford) in service of a filmmaker renowned for his two Godfather features. But it’s Coppola’s unflinching approach to the horrors of overseas conflict, and the psychological damage it does to our soldiers, that keeps Apocalypse Now atop virtually every list made about iconic war movies… this one, included.  

While there are certainly other great, impactful and intriguing movies that depict battles and the inner workings of military conflicts in a variety of ways, these are our picks for the thirty best war films. 

CinemaBlend’s resident theme park junkie and amateur Disney historian, Dirk began writing for CinemaBlend as a freelancer in 2015 before joining the site full-time in 2018. He has previously held positions as a Staff Writer and Games Editor, but has more recently transformed his true passion into his job as the head of the site's Theme Park section. He has previously done freelance work for various gaming and technology sites. Prior to starting his second career as a writer he worked for 12 years in sales for various companies within the consumer electronics industry. He has a degree in political science from the University of California, Davis.  Is an armchair Imagineer, Epcot Stan, Future Club 33 Member.

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Top 25 Greatest War Movies of All Time (The Ultimate List)

The war movies on this list are ranked according to their success (awards & nominations), their popularity, and their cinematic greatness from a directing/writing perspective. To me, accuracy when making a Top 10/Top 100 all time list is extremely important. My lists are not based on my own personal favorites; they are based on the true greatness and/or success of the person, place or thing being ranked. In other words, a film's commercial success (Oscars & BAFTA Awards), and greatness in direction, screenwriting and production, is how I ranked the films on this list. If you guys would like to view my other Top 10/Top 100 lists, feel free to check out my YouTube page and/or my IMDb page at *ChrisWalczyk55*. Thanks guys and don't forget to LIKE & comment! :)

• Movies or TV
• IMDb Rating
• In Theaters
• Release Year

1. Apocalypse Now (1979)

R | 147 min | Drama, Mystery, War

A U.S. Army officer serving in Vietnam is tasked with assassinating a renegade Special Forces Colonel who sees himself as a god.

Director: Francis Ford Coppola | Stars: Martin Sheen , Marlon Brando , Robert Duvall , Frederic Forrest

Votes: 709,212 | Gross: $83.47M

Oscars: 2 Oscar Nominations: 8 BAFTA Awards: 2 BAFTA Nominations: 8 Golden Globes: 3 Golden Globe Nominations: 4

2. Schindler's List (1993)

R | 195 min | Biography, Drama, History

In German-occupied Poland during World War II, industrialist Oskar Schindler gradually becomes concerned for his Jewish workforce after witnessing their persecution by the Nazis.

Director: Steven Spielberg | Stars: Liam Neeson , Ralph Fiennes , Ben Kingsley , Caroline Goodall

Votes: 1,448,589 | Gross: $96.90M

***** Oscars: 7 Oscar Nominations: 12 BAFTA Awards: 6 BAFTA Nominations: 12 Golden Globes: 3 Golden Globe Nominations: 6

3. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

PG | 161 min | Adventure, Drama, War

British POWs are forced to build a railway bridge across the river Kwai for their Japanese captors in occupied Burma, not knowing that the allied forces are planning a daring commando raid through the jungle to destroy it.

Director: David Lean | Stars: William Holden , Alec Guinness , Jack Hawkins , Sessue Hayakawa

Votes: 233,069 | Gross: $44.91M

Oscars: 7 Oscar Nominations: 8 BAFTA Awards: 4 BAFTA Nominations: 4 Golden Globes: 3 Golden Globe Nominations: 4

4. Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

Approved | 218 min | Adventure, Biography, Drama

The story of T.E. Lawrence , the English officer who successfully united and led the diverse, often warring, Arab tribes during World War I in order to fight the Turks.

Director: David Lean | Stars: Peter O'Toole , Alec Guinness , Anthony Quinn , Jack Hawkins

Votes: 313,923 | Gross: $44.82M

***** Oscars: 7 Oscar Nominations: 10 BAFTA Awards: 4 BAFTA Nominations: 5 Golden Globes: 4 Golden Globe Nominations: 7

5. Saving Private Ryan (1998)

R | 169 min | Drama, War

Following the Normandy Landings, a group of U.S. soldiers go behind enemy lines to retrieve a paratrooper whose brothers have been killed in action.

Director: Steven Spielberg | Stars: Tom Hanks , Matt Damon , Tom Sizemore , Edward Burns

Votes: 1,494,582 | Gross: $216.54M

***** Oscars: 5 Oscar Nominations: 11 BAFTA Awards: 2 BAFTA Nominations: 8 Golden Globes: 2 Golden Globe Nominations: 5

6. Full Metal Jacket (1987)

R | 116 min | Drama, War

A pragmatic U.S. Marine observes the dehumanizing effects the Vietnam War has on his fellow recruits from their brutal boot camp training to the bloody street fighting in Hue.

Director: Stanley Kubrick | Stars: Matthew Modine , R. Lee Ermey , Vincent D'Onofrio , Adam Baldwin

Votes: 789,491 | Gross: $46.36M

Oscars: 0 Oscar Nominations: 1 BAFTA Awards: 0 BAFTA Nominations: 2 Golden Globes: 0 Golden Globe Nominations: 1

7. Patton (1970)

GP | 172 min | Biography, Drama, War

The World War II phase of the career of controversial American general George S. Patton .

Director: Franklin J. Schaffner | Stars: George C. Scott , Karl Malden , Stephen Young , Michael Strong

Votes: 107,864 | Gross: $61.70M

***** Oscars: 7 Oscar Nominations: 10 BAFTA Awards: 0 BAFTA Nominations: 2 Golden Globes: 1 Golden Globe Nominations: 3

8. Platoon (1986)

R | 120 min | Drama, War

Chris Taylor, a neophyte recruit in Vietnam, finds himself caught in a battle of wills between two sergeants, one good and the other evil. A shrewd examination of the brutality of war and the duality of man in conflict.

Director: Oliver Stone | Stars: Charlie Sheen , Tom Berenger , Willem Dafoe , Keith David

Votes: 438,989 | Gross: $138.53M

***** Oscars: 4 Oscar Nominations: 8 BAFTA Awards: 2 BAFTA Nominations: 3 Golden Globes: 3 Golden Globe Nominations: 4

9. Das Boot (1981)

R | 149 min | Drama, War

A German U-boat stalks the frigid waters of the North Atlantic as its young crew experience the sheer terror and claustrophobic life of a submariner in World War II.

Director: Wolfgang Petersen | Stars: Jürgen Prochnow , Herbert Grönemeyer , Klaus Wennemann , Hubertus Bengsch

Votes: 264,063 | Gross: $11.49M

***** Oscars: 0 Oscar Nominations: 6 BAFTA Awards: 0 BAFTA Nominations: 1 Golden Globes: 0 Golden Globe Nominations: 1

10. Paths of Glory (1957)

Approved | 88 min | Drama, War

After a failed attack on a German position, a general orders three soldiers, chosen at random, court-martialed for cowardice and their commanding officer must defend them.

Director: Stanley Kubrick | Stars: Kirk Douglas , Ralph Meeker , Adolphe Menjou , George Macready

Votes: 212,006

***** Oscars: 0 Oscar Nominations: 0 BAFTA Awards: 0 BAFTA Nominations: 1 Golden Globes: 0 Golden Globe Nominations: 0

11. Braveheart (1995)

R | 178 min | Biography, Drama, War

Scottish warrior William Wallace leads his countrymen in a rebellion to free his homeland from the tyranny of King Edward I of England.

Director: Mel Gibson | Stars: Mel Gibson , Sophie Marceau , Patrick McGoohan , Angus Macfadyen

Votes: 1,090,332 | Gross: $75.60M

Oscars: 5 Oscar Nominations: 10 BAFTA Awards: 3 BAFTA Nominations: 5 Golden Globes: 1 Golden Globe Nominations: 4

12. The Great Escape (1963)

Approved | 172 min | Adventure, Drama, Thriller

Allied prisoners of war plan for several hundred of their number to escape from a German camp during World War II.

Director: John Sturges | Stars: Steve McQueen , James Garner , Richard Attenborough , Charles Bronson

Votes: 258,584 | Gross: $12.10M

Oscars: 0 Oscar Nominations: 1 BAFTA Awards: 0 BAFTA Nominations: 0 Golden Globes: 0 Golden Globe Nominations: 1

13. The Pianist (2002)

R | 150 min | Biography, Drama, Music

During WWII, acclaimed Polish musician Wladyslaw faces various struggles as he loses contact with his family. As the situation worsens, he hides in the ruins of Warsaw in order to survive.

Director: Roman Polanski | Stars: Adrien Brody , Thomas Kretschmann , Frank Finlay , Emilia Fox

Votes: 910,350 | Gross: $32.57M

***** Oscars: 3 Oscar Nominations: 7 BAFTA Awards: 1 BAFTA Nominations: 5 Golden Globes: 0 Golden Globe Nominations: 2

14. Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)

R | 141 min | Action, Adventure, Drama

The story of the battle of Iwo Jima between the United States and Imperial Japan during World War II, as told from the perspective of the Japanese who fought it.

Director: Clint Eastwood | Stars: Ken Watanabe , Kazunari Ninomiya , Tsuyoshi Ihara , Ryô Kase

Votes: 169,930 | Gross: $13.76M

***** Oscars: 1 Oscar Nominations: 4 BAFTA Awards: 0 BAFTA Nominations: 0 Golden Globes: 1 Golden Globe Nominations: 2

15. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)

Passed | 152 min | Drama, War

A German youth eagerly enters World War I, but his enthusiasm wanes as he gets a firsthand view of the horror.

Director: Lewis Milestone | Stars: Lew Ayres , Louis Wolheim , John Wray , Arnold Lucy

Votes: 67,615 | Gross: $3.27M

***** Oscars: 2 Oscar Nominations: 4 BAFTA Awards: N/A BAFTA Nominations: N/A Golden Globes: N/A Golden Globe Nominations: N/A

16. The Deer Hunter (1978)

R | 183 min | Drama, War

An in-depth examination of the ways in which the Vietnam War impacts and disrupts the lives of several friends in a small steel mill town in Pennsylvania.

Director: Michael Cimino | Stars: Robert De Niro , Christopher Walken , John Cazale , John Savage

Votes: 361,795 | Gross: $48.98M

***** Oscars: 5 Oscar Nominations: 9 BAFTA Awards: 2 BAFTA Nominations: 9 Golden Globes: 1 Golden Globe Nominations: 6

17. Inglourious Basterds (2009)

R | 153 min | Adventure, Drama, War

In Nazi-occupied France during World War II, a plan to assassinate Nazi leaders by a group of Jewish U.S. soldiers coincides with a theatre owner's vengeful plans for the same.

Director: Quentin Tarantino | Stars: Brad Pitt , Diane Kruger , Eli Roth , Mélanie Laurent

Votes: 1,581,465 | Gross: $120.54M

Oscars: 1 Oscar Nominations: 8 BAFTA Awards: 1 BAFTA Nominations: 5 Golden Globes: 1 Golden Globe Nominations: 4

18. The Dirty Dozen (1967)

Approved | 150 min | Action, Adventure, War

During World War II, a rebellious U.S. Army Major is assigned a dozen convicted murderers to train and lead them into a mass assassination mission of German officers.

Director: Robert Aldrich | Stars: Lee Marvin , Ernest Borgnine , Charles Bronson , John Cassavetes

Votes: 79,011 | Gross: $45.30M

***** Oscars: 1 Oscar Nominations: 4 BAFTA Awards: 0 BAFTA Nominations: 0 Golden Globes: 0 Golden Globe Nominations: 1

19. From Here to Eternity (1953)

Passed | 118 min | Drama, Romance, War

At a U.S. Army base in 1941 Hawaii, a private is cruelly punished for not boxing on his unit's team, while his commanding officer's wife and top aide begin a tentative affair.

Director: Fred Zinnemann | Stars: Burt Lancaster , Montgomery Clift , Deborah Kerr , Donna Reed

Votes: 50,769 | Gross: $30.50M

Oscars: 8 Oscar Nominations: 13 BAFTA Awards: 0 BAFTA Nominations: 1 Golden Globes: 2 Golden Globe Nominations: 2

20. Stalag 17 (1953)

Not Rated | 120 min | Comedy, Drama, War

After two Americans are killed while escaping from a German P.O.W. camp in World War II, the barracks black marketeer, J.J. Sefton, is suspected of being an informer.

Director: Billy Wilder | Stars: William Holden , Don Taylor , Otto Preminger , Robert Strauss

Votes: 58,754

Oscars: 1 Oscar Nominations: 3 BAFTA Awards: 0 BAFTA Nominations: 0 Golden Globes: 0 Golden Globe Nominations: 0

21. Sergeant York (1941)

Passed | 134 min | Biography, Drama, History

A Tennessee farmer and marksman is drafted in World War I, and struggles with his pacifist inclinations before becoming one of the most celebrated war heroes.

Director: Howard Hawks | Stars: Gary Cooper , Walter Brennan , Joan Leslie , George Tobias

Votes: 19,762 | Gross: $16.40M

***** Oscars: 2 Oscar Nominations: 11 BAFTA Awards: 0 BAFTA Nominations: 0 Golden Globes: 0 Golden Globe Nominations: 0

22. The Longest Day (1962)

G | 178 min | Action, Drama, History

The events of D-Day, told on a grand scale from both the Allied and German points of view.

Directors: Ken Annakin , Andrew Marton , Gerd Oswald , Bernhard Wicki , Darryl F. Zanuck | Stars: John Wayne , Robert Ryan , Richard Burton , Henry Fonda

Votes: 59,022 | Gross: $39.10M

***** Oscars: 2 Oscar Nominations: 5 BAFTA Awards: 0 BAFTA Nominations: 0 Golden Globes: 1 Golden Globe Nominations: 2

23. The Thin Red Line (1998)

R | 170 min | Drama, History, War

Adaptation of James Jones ' autobiographical 1962 novel, focusing on the conflict at Guadalcanal during the second World War.

Director: Terrence Malick | Stars: Jim Caviezel , Sean Penn , Nick Nolte , Kirk Acevedo

Votes: 199,388 | Gross: $36.40M

Oscars: 0 Oscar Nominations: 7 BAFTA Awards: 0 BAFTA Nominations: 0 Golden Globes: 0 Golden Globe Nominations: 0

24. Hacksaw Ridge (2016)

R | 139 min | Biography, Drama, History

World War II American Army Medic Desmond T. Doss , serving during the Battle of Okinawa, refuses to kill people and becomes the first man in American history to receive the Medal of Honor without firing a shot.

Director: Mel Gibson | Stars: Andrew Garfield , Sam Worthington , Luke Bracey , Teresa Palmer

Votes: 592,874 | Gross: $67.21M

Oscars: 0 Oscar Nominations: 6 BAFTA Awards: 1 BAFTA Nominations: 5 Golden Globes: 0 Golden Globe Nominations: 3

25. The Hurt Locker (2008)

R | 131 min | Drama, Thriller, War

During the Iraq War, a Sergeant recently assigned to an army bomb squad is put at odds with his squad mates due to his maverick way of handling his work.

Director: Kathryn Bigelow | Stars: Jeremy Renner , Anthony Mackie , Brian Geraghty , Guy Pearce

Votes: 473,406 | Gross: $17.02M

Oscars: 6 Oscar Nominations: 9 BAFTA Awards: 5 BAFTA Nominations: 7 Golden Globes: 0 Golden Globe Nominations: 3

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Civil War Is a Thoroughly Modern (and Totally Must-See) War Film

By Taylor Antrim

Great war films—and I’d call Alex Garland’s Civil War a great and totally modern war film—should be discomfiting. That’s the moral calculus: War is hell, and any depiction of it should be tinted with the reality of violence and death. It’s how you get something as operatic and brutal as Platoon or the frightful poetry of Apocalypse Now or the quiet outrage of the recent All Quiet on the Western Front . Civil War is as poised as those movies, as balanced between beauty and horror. Writer-director Garland’s vision of a near-future America at war with itself has ravishing moments, an incredible central performance from Kirsten Dunst, and a heart-stopping pace. But this is a movie built around a moral center, and it is as excruciating as any you’re likely to see this year.

Which is all to its credit. The America Civil War depicts—in which so-called Western Forces (an armed alliance between California, Texas, and other states) fight a fascist US government—has fallen so far off its axis that Dunst’s character—Lee, a pitiless and ambitious photojournalist inured to death—is the closest thing we have to a heroine. I’ve never seen Dunst so good. She holds the movie’s anger and sadness in her face, captures its violence with her Leica, and when she smiles, briefly, in a scene where she considers a dress at a boutique in a militarized town, you see what happiness costs her.

Garland broke out with a page-turning novel, The Beach , and parlayed that success into a career as a screenwriter and filmmaker (writing 28 Days Later and directing Ex Machina , Annihilation , and TV’s Devs ). His prescience and fearlessness (fire up his Men , I dare you) mean whatever he makes is, to my mind, essential viewing—and this is his best movie since Ex Machina . At the screening I went to, Garland said he began writing Civil War four years ago, feeling that divisiveness was at a perilous height, but today, he added, the country seems even more on the brink.

The chaos in his movie is unrelenting. We start after a suicide bombing in New York, where Lee and her Reuters partner Joel (Wagner Moura) are staging a dangerous trip to Washington, DC, to interview the under-siege president (Nick Offerman). Tagging along is Sammy (played by Stephen McKinley Henderson), a veteran reporter, and also a rookie photographer named Jessie (Cailee Spaeny). The foursome does feel like a slightly contrived movie conceit—a gang of contrasting personalities—and I found the mentor-mentee relationship between Lee and Jessie strained. But never mind: In mere moments Civil War gives you its first unpleasant sequence, a stop at a gas station run by scary militia members. From there we arrive at a brutal suburban firefight. And then a roadside ambush. And then an encounter with Jesse Plemons as an armed psychopath that you won’t get out of your head.

I wish I could say you will enjoy this movie. There are stunningly beautiful passages (tracer fire in the night sky, a drive through a forest fire) that will stick with you and needle drops (Suicide and De La Soul) that leave marks. But the final action sequence, an assault on the White House, is so thuddingly stressful and morally unhinged, and the ending of the movie so unsettling, that you will walk out shaken. Civil War is unconvinced of many things: that journalism will save us, that democracy will endure, that the left or the right has any purchase on rectitude. All it knows for sure is that when we turn on each other, no one wins.

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‘Civil War’ Review: We Have Met the Enemy and It Is Us. Again.

In Alex Garland’s tough new movie, a group of journalists led by Kirsten Dunst, as a photographer, travels a United States at war with itself.

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‘Civil War’ | Anatomy of a Scene

The writer and director alex garland narrates a sequence from his film..

“My name is Alex Garland and I’m the writer director of ‘Civil War’. So this particular clip is roughly around the halfway point of the movie and it’s these four journalists and they’re trying to get, in a very circuitous route, from New York to DC, and encountering various obstacles on the way. And this is one of those obstacles. What they find themselves stuck in is a battle between two snipers. And they are close to one of the snipers and the other sniper is somewhere unseen, but presumably in a large house that sits over a field and a hill. It’s a surrealist exchange and it’s surrounded by some very surrealist imagery, which is they’re, in broad daylight in broad sunshine, there’s no indication that we’re anywhere near winter in the filming. In fact, you can kind of tell it’s summer. But they’re surrounded by Christmas decorations. And in some ways, the Christmas decorations speak of a country, which is in disrepair, however silly it sounds. If you haven’t put away your Christmas decorations, clearly something isn’t going right.” “What’s going on?” “Someone in that house, they’re stuck. We’re stuck.” “And there’s a bit of imagery. It felt like it hit the right note. But the interesting thing about that imagery was that it was not production designed. We didn’t create it. We actually literally found it. We were driving along and we saw all of these Christmas decorations, basically exactly as they are in the film. They were about 100 yards away, just piled up by the side of the road. And it turned out, it was a guy who’d put on a winter wonderland festival. People had not dug his winter wonderland festival, and he’d gone bankrupt. And he had decided just to leave everything just strewn around on a farmer’s field, who was then absolutely furious. So in a way, there’s a loose parallel, which is the same implication that exists within the film exists within real life.” “You don’t understand a word I say. Yo. What’s over there in that house?” “Someone shooting.” “It’s to do with the fact that when things get extreme, the reasons why things got extreme no longer become relevant and the knife edge of the problem is all that really remains relevant. So it doesn’t actually matter, as it were, in this context, what side they’re fighting for or what the other person’s fighting for. It’s just reduced to a survival.”

By Manohla Dargis

A blunt, gut-twisting work of speculative fiction, “Civil War” opens with the United States at war with itself — literally, not just rhetorically. In Washington, D.C., the president is holed up in the White House; in a spookily depopulated New York, desperate people wait for water rations. It’s the near-future, and rooftop snipers, suicide bombers and wild-eyed randos are in the fight while an opposition faction with a two-star flag called the Western Forces, comprising Texas and California — as I said, this is speculative fiction — is leading the charge against what remains of the federal government. If you’re feeling triggered, you aren’t alone.

It’s mourning again in America, and it’s mesmerizingly, horribly gripping. Filled with bullets, consuming fires and terrific actors like Kirsten Dunst running for cover, the movie is a what-if nightmare stoked by memories of Jan. 6. As in what if the visions of some rioters had been realized, what if the nation was again broken by Civil War, what if the democratic experiment called America had come undone? If that sounds harrowing, you’re right. It’s one thing when a movie taps into childish fears with monsters under the bed; you’re eager to see what happens because you know how it will end (until the sequel). Adult fears are another matter.

In “Civil War,” the British filmmaker Alex Garland explores the unbearable if not the unthinkable, something he likes to do. A pop cultural savant, he made a splashy zeitgeist-ready debut with his 1996 best seller “The Beach,” a novel about a paradise that proves deadly, an evergreen metaphor for life and the basis for a silly film . That things in the world are not what they seem, and are often far worse, is a theme that Garland has continued pursuing in other dark fantasies, first as a screenwriter (“ 28 Days Later ”), and then as a writer-director (“ Ex Machina ”). His résumé is populated with zombies, clones and aliens, though reliably it is his outwardly ordinary characters you need to keep a closer watch on.

By the time “Civil War” opens, the fight has been raging for an undisclosed period yet long enough to have hollowed out cities and people’s faces alike. It’s unclear as to why the war started or who fired the first shot. Garland does scatter some hints; in one ugly scene, a militia type played by a jolting, scarily effective Jesse Plemons asks captives “what kind of American” they are. Yet whatever divisions preceded the conflict are left to your imagination, at least partly because Garland assumes you’ve been paying attention to recent events. Instead, he presents an outwardly and largely post-ideological landscape in which debates over policies, politics and American exceptionalism have been rendered moot by war.

‘Civil War’ Is Designed to Disturb You

One thing that remains familiar amid these ruins is the movie’s old-fashioned faith in journalism. Dunst, who’s sensational, plays Lee, a war photographer who works for Reuters alongside her friend, a reporter, Joel (the charismatic Wagner Moura). They’re in New York when you meet them, milling through a crowd anxiously waiting for water rations next to a protected tanker. It’s a fraught scene; the restless crowd is edging into mob panic, and Lee, camera in hand, is on high alert. As Garland’s own camera and Joel skitter about, Lee carves a path through the chaos, as if she knows exactly where she needs to be — and then a bomb goes off. By the time it does, an aspiring photojournalist, Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), is also in the mix.

The streamlined, insistently intimate story takes shape once Lee, Joel, Jessie and a veteran reporter, Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), pile into a van and head to Washington. Joel and Lee are hoping to interview the president (Nick Offerman), and Sammy and Jessie are riding along largely so that Garland can make the trip more interesting. Sammy serves as a stabilizing force (Henderson fills the van with humanizing warmth), while Jessie plays the eager upstart Lee takes under her resentful wing. It’s a tidily balanced sampling that the actors, with Garland’s banter and via some cozy downtime, turn into flesh-and-blood personalities, people whose vulnerability feeds the escalating tension with each mile.

As the miles and hours pass, Garland adds diversions and hurdles, including a pair of playful colleagues, Tony and Bohai (Nelson Lee and Evan Lai), and some spooky dudes guarding a gas station. Garland shrewdly exploits the tense emptiness of the land, turning strangers into potential threats and pretty country roads into ominously ambiguous byways. Smartly, he also recurrently focuses on Lee’s face, a heartbreakingly hard mask that Dunst lets slip brilliantly. As the journey continues, Garland further sketches in the bigger picture — the dollar is near-worthless, the F.B.I. is gone — but for the most part, he focuses on his travelers and the engulfing violence, the smoke and the tracer fire that they often don’t notice until they do.

Despite some much-needed lulls (for you, for the narrative rhythm), “Civil War” is unremittingly brutal or at least it feels that way. Many contemporary thrillers are far more overtly gruesome than this one, partly because violence is one way unimaginative directors can put a distinctive spin on otherwise interchangeable material: Cue the artful fountains of arterial spray. Part of what makes the carnage here feel incessant and palpably realistic is that Garland, whose visual approach is generally unfussy, doesn’t embellish the violence, turning it into an ornament of his virtuosity. Instead, the violence is direct, at times shockingly casual and unsettling, so much so that its unpleasantness almost comes as a surprise.

If the violence feels more intense than in a typical genre shoot ’em up, it’s also because, I think, with “Civil War,” Garland has made the movie that’s long been workshopped in American political discourse and in mass culture, and which entered wider circulation on Jan. 6. The raw power of Garland’s vision unquestionably owes much to the vivid scenes that beamed across the world that day when rioters, some wearing T-shirts emblazoned with “ MAGA civil war ,” swarmed the Capitol. Even so, watching this movie, I also flashed on other times in which Americans have relitigated the Civil War directly and not, on the screen and in the streets.

Movies have played a role in that relitigation for more than a century, at times grotesquely. Two of the most famous films in history — D.W. Griffith’s 1915 racist epic “The Birth of a Nation” (which became a Ku Klux Klan recruitment tool) and the romantic 1939 melodrama “Gone With the Wind” — are monuments to white supremacy and the myth of the Southern Lost Cause. Both were critical and popular hits. In the decades since, filmmakers have returned to the Civil War era to tell other stories in films like “Glory,” “Lincoln” and “Django Unchained” that in addressing the American past inevitably engage with its present.

There are no lofty or reassuring speeches in “Civil War,” and the movie doesn’t speak to the better angels of our nature the way so many films try to. Hollywood’s longstanding, deeply American imperative for happy endings maintains an iron grip on movies, even in ostensibly independent productions. There’s no such possibility for that in “Civil War.” The very premise of Garland’s movie means that — no matter what happens when or if Lee and the rest reach Washington — a happy ending is impossible, which makes this very tough going. Rarely have I seen a movie that made me so acutely uncomfortable or watched an actor’s face that, like Dunst’s, expressed a nation’s soul-sickness so vividly that it felt like an X-ray.

Civil War Rated R for war violence and mass death. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. In theaters.

An earlier version of this review misidentified an organization in the Civil War in the movie. It is the Western Forces, not the Western Front.

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Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times. More about Manohla Dargis

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'Civil War': Kirsten Dunst, Cailee Spaeny break down 'heartbreaking' yet disturbing ending

Spoiler alert! We're discussing major details about the ending of “Civil War” (in theaters now).

“ Civil War ” isn’t Kirsten Dunst's first time in the White House.

In 1999, the actress co-starred with Michelle Williams in the offbeat comedy “ Dick ,” playing ditzy teens who help expose Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal. The film ends with a giddy roller disco scene set to ABBA’s “Dancing Queen.”

“I just remember skating around the Oval Office,” Dunst says with a laugh. But there are no bell bottoms to be found in “Civil War,” which culminates in a nerve-shredding finale of rebel forces storming the White House and killing the tyrannical, third-term president (Nick Offerman). Dunst plays world-weary photojournalist Lee, who travels to Washington to capture the raid with rookie photographer Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) and their teammate Joel (Wagner Moura).

The ear-splitting gunfire and explosions took a toll on the cast, who shot the sequence over the course of two weeks on a soundstage in Atlanta. “The loudness (you hear) in the theater was that intense when we were filming,” Dunst says. “It’s exhausting on your body to be in that noise.”

“It’s very rattling but also very effective for those scenes,” Spaeny adds. “There’s not much acting you have to do, it’s so jolting.”

'No dark dialogue!' Kirsten Dunst says 5-year-old son helped her run lines for 'Civil War'

How does 'Civil War' end?

After bombing the Lincoln Memorial, a militia breaks into the White House and searches for the president, who is holed up in the Oval Office as D.C. burns. Lee, Jessie and Joel tag along with the insurgents, snapping pics as they dodge gunfire from the president’s soldiers.

At one point, while Jessie is furiously shooting photos, Lee notices a gunman aiming at her young colleague. Lee jumps to push Jessie out of the way, taking the bullets and falling down dead. Jessie continues photographing, capturing Lee's lifeless body even as she tumbles onto her.

It’s a sobering callback to earlier in the film, when Lee and Jessie watch as two men get executed at a gas station. “Would you photograph that moment if I got shot?” Jessie tearfully asks. “What do you think?” Lee responds coolly. Lee begrudgingly becomes Jessie’s mentor as the movie goes on, and teaches her to compartmentalize her work and emotions.

“To me, it’s a bit heartbreaking, but it also feels inevitable,” Spaeny says of Jessie chronicling Lee’s death. “But it’s mixed. It could be a bit hopeful; someone else does have to take this on. This is an important job, but it’s also bittersweet, right? Mostly what I felt was slightly disturbed.”

Over the course of “Civil War,” we watch as Jessie becomes desensitized to violence. The film was shot in chronological order, meaning Spaeny was able to track Jessie’s arc in real time.

“As we were filming, I would just know, ‘OK, it’s time for her to step up,’” Spaeny recalls. With that last sequence, “I knew there was going to be some sort of passing of the baton. So much was informed by Kirsten’s performance and the decisions she made on how to play Lee. I was just trying to soak that in.”

What happens to Nick Offerman in 'Civil War?'

In the very last scene, Jessie leaves behind Lee’s dead body and follows Joel into the Oval Office, where the unnamed president is lying on the floor with rebels’ guns pointed at him. Since the start of the war, Joel has been doggedly trying to secure an interview with the president, who has shut himself off entirely from journalists for years.

“Wait! Wait! I need a quote!” Joel says, to which the president replies with a muffled, “Don’t let them kill me!”

“Yup, that’ll do,” Joel deadpans, before the agitators gun down the commander in chief and the credits roll.

“Civil War” is Spaney’s third project with Offerman, after FX series “Devs” and 2018 thriller “Bad Times at the El Royale.” Playing a dictator is a 180 from his best-known role as the gruff but lovable Ron Swanson in NBC sitcom “Parks and Recreation.”

“All the ‘Parks’ fans don’t know how to digest this!” Spaeny jokes. Offerman’s casting “is so fun. I love watching comedians take on dramatic roles because I think they bring something to those characters that is more true to life. I think he did it brilliantly, but it’s very bizarre to see him in this role.”

Here are 8 Newly Released War Movies on Netflix You Shouldn't Miss

W ar movies have a unique ability to transport audiences to the heart of conflict, offering glimpses into the bravery, sacrifice, and complexities of warfare. If you’re a fan of intense action sequences, gripping narratives, and powerful performances, Netflix has recently added some compelling titles to its war movie lineup. From epic battles to personal struggles, these films cover a wide range of wartime experiences. Here are eight newly added war movies on Netflix that you definitely shouldn’t miss:

Sisu (2022)

In the final days of World War II, “Sisu” follows a solitary gold prospector who becomes a one-man army, battling a Nazi death squad retreating from Finland. Jorma Tommila delivers a captivating performance as the relentless protagonist, supported by Aksel Hennie and Jack Doolan in a tense and action-packed narrative.

Top Gun: Maverick (2022)

Tom Cruise returns as Maverick in this long-awaited sequel, where he trains a new group of Top Gun graduates for a specialized and perilous mission. Miles Teller and Jennifer Connelly join the cast, delivering adrenaline-fueled aerial sequences and emotional depth that fans of the original film will appreciate.

Fighter (2024)

“Fighter” follows a reckless but brilliant squadron leader and his team of elite fighter pilots as they confront mortal dangers and inner demons on a deadly mission. Hrithik Roshan shines in the lead role, supported by Deepika Padukone and Anil Kapoor in a visually stunning and emotionally charged film that captures the intensity of aerial combat.

Einstein and the Bomb (2024)

This thought-provoking docudrama explores what happened after Albert Einstein fled Nazi Germany, delving into the mind of the tortured genius through archival footage and his own words. Aidan McArdle delivers a captivating portrayal of Einstein, offering insights into his moral and scientific struggles during a tumultuous period in history.

The Ghazi Attack (2017)

Tensions rise during an underwater reconnaissance operation as an Indian navy captain and his officer clash over the approach to a risky mission. Rana Daggubati leads the cast with a commanding presence, supported by Kay Kay Menon and Atul Kulkarni in a suspenseful and gripping drama inspired by true events.

WILL (2024)

Set in Nazi-occupied Antwerp during World War II, “WILL” follows two young police officers torn between collaboration and resistance as they navigate the dangerous landscape. Stef Aerts and Annelore Crollet deliver nuanced performances, portraying the moral complexities and personal sacrifices of individuals caught in the turmoil of war.

The Last Vermeer (2019)

After the war, a former Dutch resistance fighter investigates an artist suspected of collaborating with Nazis, uncovering surprising truths about national heroism. Guy Pearce delivers a captivating performance as the enigmatic artist, Claes Bang shines as the determined investigator, and Vicky Krieps adds depth to the narrative in this thought-provoking drama.

Soil Without Land (2019)

This powerful documentary explores the struggles of a young soldier named Jai and other Shan people in Myanmar, grappling with disenfranchisement and disillusionment in a land where they lack basic rights. Through intimate interviews and stunning cinematography, “Soil Without Land” sheds light on the human cost of conflict and the resilience of those fighting for their dignity and freedom.

Whether you’re a history buff, an action enthusiast, or simply appreciate compelling storytelling, these newly added war movies on Netflix offer something for everyone. Grab your popcorn and prepare to be transported to the frontlines of some of history’s most defining moments.

The post Here are 8 Newly Released War Movies on Netflix You Shouldn't Miss appeared first on New York Tech Media .

Civil War starring Kirsten Dunst imagines an America tearing itself apart

An early contender for 2024's most controversial film, Civil War was labelled "irresponsible" and potentially "dangerous", just from February's provocative trailer.

As you might have guessed from the title, Civil War depicts contemporary America dividing into fighting factions.

Even for social media, reaction was heightened: Commenters deemed it the exact opposite of what the country needed during a tense election year, and a potential psy-op from Hollywood to manifest and incite real-world violence that would spiral into the end of America as we know it ("All Empires Fall" is the film's tagline).

Speaking to the reaction, star Kirsten Dunst hopes audiences will be surprised by the film.

"You don't know what you're in for," she tells ABC Entertainment. "It's really unexpected – there's never been a movie like this.

"What's great about this film is that we don't have a message for you," she adds. "It really lets the audience imprint their own beliefs. For me, it really shakes you, in a very powerful way."

Written and directed by provocateur Alex Garland, Civil War runs with current anxieties and turns them into visceral, fun-house horrors, much like previous films Men , Annihilation and Ex Machina (misogyny, climate change, artificial intelligence, respectively).

It follows a set of journalists driving from New York to Washington DC in hopes of interviewing the authoritarian president (Nick Offerman), who is likely to be killed any day by the Western Front, a secessionist alliance between California and Texas.

Celebrated war photographer Lee (Dunst) and long-term collaborator Joel (Wagner Moura) are joined by their mentor (Stephen McKinley Henderson), a veteran journalist "for what's left of The New York Times", plus Jessie (Cailee Spaeny, Priscilla ), an aspiring war photographer who sweet talks her way into the car, against Lee's better judgement.

Essentially a road movie, Civil War is a horrific journey to Oz. Across its two hours, it jumps between visceral, overwhelming violence and quieter, disturbing pockets of lifelessness, where abandoned cars and bodies ask audiences to imagine what came before.

In order to understand the weight of war journalists, the actors watched Under The Wire, a documentary on war correspondent Marie Colvin.

"It showed all the interpersonal relationships, [the journalists] going through the thoughts they were having every day," says Spaeny.

"That back and forth of 'do we keep pushing? How much danger do we get into to tell – to sacrifice our lives – for the truth?"

But context is not always available to the journalists, either. At one point, they find themselves in the cross hairs of a sniper stand-off, and a soldier, frustrated by Alex's questions about what side they're fighting, simplifies things: "Someone's trying to kill us. We are trying to kill them."

Civil War's 'in medias res' elements ('in the middle of things') frustrated audiences and critics expecting clearer or didactic political messaging, though Garland has repeatedly called it an "anti-war" work. (Glowing reviews credit it as an objective piece of filmmaking, mirroring the most powerful war journalism.)

Both Dunst and Spaeny say they never questioned the lack of context in the script.

"It would have easily made sense for any of us to ask that question," says Spaeny. "But we also understood it wasn't about what started [the war], it was the ending.

 "I think that's the point of the film. Whatever beliefs you have, whatever side you're on, we all can agree that we don't want to end up in this place."

As Moura adds: "No reason explains the cost, the human cost of war."

Is this America?

Allusions to contemporary America throughout Civil War are clearest through the president (Offerman), who unmistakably echoes Trump through his red tie and a love of vague attribution ("some are calling it") and repetition ("a very great loss, a very great defeat") in speeches.

Elsewhere, a previous Antifa massacre mentioned in passing makes it ambiguous whether the group were victims or perpetrators. And the repeated reference to Charlottesville, a stop on their protracted drive, evokes the city's deadly clashes in 2017 , where a white supremacist ploughed a car into anti-racism protesters, killing one person.

But it is the film's perceived lack of engagement in racial or socio-economic divides that have frustrated critics most, with some calling the film "apolitical" or a "failure of nerve" . (Right wing outlets are too, with Breitbart's film critic calling it "the stupidest movie I've ever seen".)

Civil War's most intense and pivotal scene is the closest it gets to interrogating these familiar fault-lines. In it, a white soldier, played by Jesse Plemons (Dunst's husband), interrogates the journalists, screaming "Where are you from? What kind of American are you?"

Their answers – Colorado, Florida, Missouri – land with a weight that we can't understand, suggesting histories and cultures far removed from our own. But the line of questioning recalls the aggression, micro- or macro-, that lurks underneath asking someone with a foreign background "where are you from?"

"[It was] very, very hard for me personally, it was the most difficult scene," says Moura. "I'm Brazilian, right? I did not grow up here, although I'm an American citizen.

"The xenophobia and racism in that scene really affected me because this is another layer of polarisation — it's racism, xenophobia, anti-immigration, all those things."

A mammoth film

With a production budget of $US50 million, Civil War is the biggest film to date for both Garland and production company A24.

Unusually for a film of this scope, it was shot sequentially, allowing the actors to feel the weight of the journey's cumulative bloodshed. Arriving in the film's second half, the scene with Plemons was one of the hardest to shoot, says Spaeny.

"Alex [Garland] handles these topics in a very intelligent way. But also the way that scene was filmed, he shot it without the cameras breaking up that circle we were all in, so all the cameras are hidden," he explains.

"After a while, you do that scene that many times for two days straight, and it's just eventually going to get under your skin."

Spaeny calls journalists the "heroes of the story", but it is not always portrayed as noble work, as the group scavenge for the perfect shot or scoop.

Of the characters, it's the once unflappable Lee who begins to waver in her purpose. "I thought I was sending a warning signal home," she says. Across the journey, Jessie's eyes widen, at first in horror at what she witnesses, then in eagerness at what else she can capture.

It's also unclear who engages with their reporting – soldiers are unsure who they're shooting (as are the photographers, at times), with entire towns staying wilfully uninformed so they can focus on their green lawns and artisan shops.

Civil War probes more questions than answers, and perhaps most difficult to answer is what the purpose is of being a witness, though Moura says he believes in its power.

"We're all very proud of having made a film about war journalism," he says.

"There are some images that you can't really ignore."

Civil Wars is in cinemas now.

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‘Civil War’ beholds the rockets’ red glare but not real-world divisions

Alex garland’s lean, cruel film appeals to its broadest base by dodging specifics.

The jaw-clenching, bullet-clanging thriller “Civil War” opens with a blurry image of the president of the United States of America. As the president moves into view, we can see he’s played by Nick Offerman and can hear the speech he’s practicing, vague platitudes about vanquishing the insurgents of California and Texas. But even as POTUS’s face comes into focus, writer-director Alex Garland keeps him fuzzy. What are his politics? What could have possibly united blue California and red Texas against him? What year is it? I suspect Garland might answer that specifics are a distraction. No bloodbath is rational.

Early on in Garland’s fourth movie, a bomb explodes in New York. In the eerie silence, a hard-bitten war photographer named Lee (Kirsten Dunst) dispassionately snaps photos of the fresh corpses. Behind her, a greenhorn named Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) takes photos of Lee taking photos of the dead, and behind Jessie, of course, are Garland and his cinematographer Rob Hardy filming images of both women. There are three lens-lengths of distance between these horrors and us bystanders curious to see the collapse of the United States.

Everyone in that chain would claim they’re recording the brutality for our benefit. Lee admits she hoped ghastly images from her earlier career — a montage of executions from other wars in other countries that flips by in eerily stunning slow motion — would caution her own homeland to keep the peace. Clearly, that didn’t work. Maybe Garland naively hopes the same, which is why he’s avoided the real-world polarization behind this conflict so his gory warning will be watched by as many Americans as possible. Garland has stripped every background player of any demographic patterns of age, race, class, gender or beliefs. One fatal standoff is between two women of color who appear to be roughly the same age. There’s no telling which side would want your allegiance (and, honestly, neither deserves it). The only word we recognize, a reference to Lee’s landmark photographs of something called “the antifa massacre,” rushes past so fast that only later do we realize Garland didn’t give away whether the antifascists got slaughtered or did the slaughtering.

Garland doesn’t investigate how this war started, or how long it’s been going on, or whether it’s worth fighting. The film is, like Dunst’s Lee and her longtime colleagues Joel (Wagner Moura) and Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), coldly, deliberately incurious about the combatants and the victims. As Lee says, any moral questions about them should be asked by whoever is looking at her photos, but those theoretical observers don’t factor into the film, either. (By contrast, this year’s Oscar documentary winner “20 Days in Mariupol,” also about photographers in a war zone, threw its narrative weight behind the desperation to get its powerful images out .) When we take in Dunst’s weary gaze and welded-on grimace with the same dispassion Lee gives to her own subjects, we can’t imagine the last time she let herself feel anything at all.

Yet the blinders Garland welds onto the story make it charge forward with gusto. This is a lean, cruel film about the ethics of photographing violence, a predicament any one of us could be in if we have a smartphone in our hand during a crisis. That’s also a predicament that Garland and other big-idea, big-scare directors find themselves in when they want to tell a shocker about very bad things without overly enjoying their sadistic thrills. Garland’s first three movies — “Ex Machina,” “Annihilation” and “Men” — dug into artificial intelligence, environmental collapse and sexual aggression, some more compellingly than others. In “Civil War,” any patriotic ideals about what this country once stood for never come up. The closest anyone comes to invoking democracy is a funny gag when a hotel concierge tells Lee that, given the sporadic blackouts, she has the freedom of choice between risking the elevator or climbing 10 flights of stairs.

Most of the movie is spent embedded with Lee, Jessie, Joel and Sammy as their battered white van takes a circuitous route from Manhattan to Washington. The gang races their competitors for footage of the president. Over a soundtrack of anxious punk rock, we see the cost of nabbing the money shot: the bottles of vodka, the filthy clothes worn for days on end, the growing doubts that their press badges still offer protection. Garland has an obvious arc in mind: Jessie the rookie must shed her vulnerability (which Spaeny does, masterfully), while Lee the veteran must regain hers. But it’s hard to buy Dunst’s unflappable pro needing to be dragged around by the scruff of her bulletproof vest like a mewling kitten.

Occasionally, the film plays us for a fool. The trailers have made a fuss over a line where a rifle-wielding soldier (Jesse Plemons) asks the journalists, “What kind of Americans are you?” But in context, it turns out that the brute is asking Moura’s Joel if he might be Central or South American. (“Florida,” Joel replies.) The bully is actually “just” xenophobic — a fake-out that feels like Garland is nervously changing the subject. Yet, more often, the film feels poetically, deeply true, even when it’s suggesting that humans are more apt to tear one another apart for petty grievances than over a sincere defense of some kind of principles. In one dreamlike scene, the team is attacked by sniper fire at an abandoned winter carnival. No one knows who’s shooting, a stranger in fatigues shrugs, as they duck behind plastic penguins and plaster Santa Clauses. We never will.

R. At area theaters. Contains strong violent content, bloody/disturbing images and language throughout. 109 minutes.

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After ‘Civil War’ and mainstream success, can indie darling A24 keep its cool?

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Earlier this month, indie studio A24 released a provocative promotional image for its latest film, “Civil War” — depicting a map of a dystopian America divided into surprising alliances between the states.

With no explanation for the fictional breakdown of the republic, the image showed California and Texas united as the so-called Western Forces, whereas much of the southeast had apparently formed the Florida Alliance, leaving the rest of the country split between the New People’s Army in the northwest and the Loyalist States elsewhere.

If the idea was to ignite discourse, it succeeded — an example of the savvy marketing strategies employed by New York-based A24, known for its history of successfully selling challenging material to theatrical and television audiences.

“Civil War,” the latest effort from “Annihilation” and “Ex Machina” director Alex Garland, opened with an estimated $25.7 million in ticket sales from the U.S. and Canada, which exceeded industry expectations. It’s the biggest domestic opening weekend for an A24 movie since the company’s founding in 2012.

The A24 mystique is rare among film companies. With movies including “Hereditary,” “Lady Bird,” “Uncut Gems” and best-picture Oscar winners “Moonlight” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” the firm has developed brand recognition and a loyal following. For some moviegoers, seeing A24’s banner appear before the opening credits is a significant selling point.

As evidenced by “Civil War,” the company’s ambitions are only growing. The movie carries a reported production budget of $50 million, and the official trailer, with its harrowing shots of flying helicopters and urban warfare, could easily have been mistaken for a Gerard Butler action thriller. Fittingly, it played on Imax screens, an unusual feat for an indie film.

(Audiences, it’s worth noting, were split on “Civil War,” giving it a B-minus CinemaScore, so its domestic grosses may top out at around $70 million, according to rival distributors.)

Helping to fuel A24’s efforts to become a bigger Hollywood player is a $225-million funding round from a consortium of investors in 2022, led by Stripes, a firm founded by New York investor Ken Fox. The deal, which came at a frothy time for investment in independent production companies, valued A24 at an eye-popping $2.5 billion.

The question facing any hip entertainment company as it transitions into a more mainstream phase is the same one that successful indie rock bands have grappled with for decades: Can they maintain the essence that made them cool in the first place while also achieving greater commercial clout?

In a Bloomberg Businessweek article published in February, the company’s TV head talked about the idea of A24 having its own take on reality TV shows like “The Hills” or “Laguna Beach.”

Well, so far, so good.

A24’s efforts in television seem to have stayed true to its edgy reputation, securing a major hit with HBO’s “Euphoria,” followed by Emmy-winner “Beef” and “The Curse,” which ended with one of the strangest finales in recent memory. (“The Idol” flopped with critics and viewers, becoming a hate-watch for some.)

In film, the taste quotient remains high, with awards season contenders including “Past Lives” and “The Zone of Interest” mixed in with the artsy horror flicks such as “Talk to Me” and Ti West’s ongoing Mia Goth-starring “X” trilogy (“MaXXXine” is set for release in July).

An important question mark looming over A24’s rise is the state of the market for theatrical movies more broadly. Even at CinemaCon, the annual trade show (doubling as propaganda event) for the theater chains and studios, there were acknowledgments of the challenges in the industry as it tries to recover (still) from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Movies are expected to generate $8 billion to $8.5 billion in sales in the U.S. and Canada this year, which is way down from pre-virus years. In 2023, movies grossed $9 billion domestically. Ouch.

As my colleague Christi Carras reported all week from the Las Vegas convention at Caesars Palace, there has been constant chatter about theater operators teetering on the edge of insolvency. The 2024 slate is thin, thanks to last year’s writers’ and actors’ strikes. But that’s not the only cause for concern. Studios are cutting budgets, which means fewer movies.

A24 didn’t present at CinemaCon. Neither did its closest rival, Neon, though that company did screen an upcoming comedy, “Babes.” Sony Pictures’ film boss Tom Rothman did not take the Colosseum stage this year, depriving the festivities of much pro-theater chest-beating.

(Sony-owned anime shop Crunchyroll did present; “Sound of Freedom” firm Angel Studios held a breakfast talk about its slate.) Next year is expected to be stronger as studios release more movies, but by how much, no one really knows.

Adult-skewing indie movies are an especially challenging business after the pandemic. The bar has risen in terms of what audiences will consider worthy of trekking to their local multiplexes to see, especially if they have to pay a babysitter.

But A24 has found a lane, particularly with the types of moviegoers who enjoy sniping about film in group chats and on social media platforms, including cinephile refuge Letterboxd. But that’s not all. Part of A24’s success is due to an ability to understand its own fan base, which cares about “Dune: Part Two” as much as it flocks to Sundance midnight-screening catnip. No need to take sides there.

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Obits for two big names in television news. Robert MacNeil , the stately journalist who brought news to PBS, is dead at 93. MacNeil was the founding anchor of “PBS NewsHour.” Also, Richard Leibner, pioneering agent of TV news stars, died at 85 . Leibner negotiated for many of the biggest (and richest) names in network news, including Diane Sawyer and Mike Wallace.

Number of the week

Hannah Gutierrez, the armorer on the set of the Alec Baldwin movie “Rust,” was sentenced Monday to 18 months in New Mexico prison — the maximum penalty — after her involuntary manslaughter conviction for her role in the death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins. Baldwin’s criminal trial is set to begin in July in Santa Fe. Read Meg James’ story for more details on Gutierrez’s hearing.

Film shoots

Latest film shoot data for Los Angeles, courtesy of FilmLA.

Best of the web (and other bookmarks)

— How a case against Fox News tore apart a media-fighting law firm . (New York Times)

— If you thought Disney adults were wild ... Adult fans of Lego, known as AFOLs, are now big business for the world’s largest toy maker . (Wall Street Journal)

— Netflix’s “3 Body Problem” showcases one of China’s most successful works of culture. Instead of demonstrating pride, local social media is condemning it . (NYT)

— Coachella ticket sales were slower than in recent years. ( Read all about it here. ) Other festivals have been struggling too. Fun-flation! It was fun while it lasted.

Well, it sounds like the festival was a good time, nonetheless, if you believe my colleague Vanessa Franko (and I do).

Finally ...

This newsletter and my taxes were completed to the sounds of the latest Vampire Weekend album .

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Ryan Faughnder is a senior editor with the Los Angeles Times’ Company Town team, which covers the business of entertainment. He also hosts the entertainment industry newsletter The Wide Shot. A San Diego native, he earned a master’s degree in journalism from USC and a bachelor’s in English from UC Santa Barbara. Before joining The Times in 2013, he wrote for the Los Angeles Business Journal and Bloomberg News.

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