The Greatest War Films spans every conflict and carries three First World War entries. Two of them, Paths of Glory and All Quiet on the Western Front, appear below as well, because a page about this war would be incomplete without them. Grand Illusion is on that page and has no review here yet.
The First World War is filmed far less often than the Second, and the reason is structural. There is no moral clarity to organise a story around, no single villain, and the defining experience is waiting in a hole rather than advancing on an objective.
The films that work solve that problem rather than avoiding it. Gallipoli is about two runners and ends the moment the whistle blows. 1917 gives its men an errand. The Trench never leaves the trench at all.
Every rating is the one carried by the review it links to. Ties are broken by year.
1. Wings (1927)
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"The first Best Picture winner, the only silent one, directed by a man who had flown the missions."
Wings is first because it is the only film on this list made by somebody who had done the thing it depicts. William Wellman flew with the Lafayette Flying Corps, was decorated, and brought that to a production nobody else could have supervised.
The aerial photography has never been improved on, only replaced. There were no process shots available, so cameras were bolted to the aircraft and the actors flew them, with Wellman waiting days for cloud formations because a clear sky gives an audience no sense of motion. That single observation is the reason the footage still reads as flight rather than as models.
The ground plot, two young men from the same town in love with the same girl, became a cliché because this film established it. Clara Bow was the box office draw and is given the least interesting role, and Gary Cooper appears for about two minutes and became a star from it.
It won the first Academy Award for Best Picture and the aerial photography was achieved by mounting cameras on the aircraft with the actors flying them.
Wellman had been a fighter pilot in the Lafayette Flying Corps, which is why the dogfights are staged as tactics rather than as spectacle.
Clara Bow was the biggest star in the film and has comparatively little to do, which she reportedly resented and was right to.
2. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930, 1979, 2022)
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"Three adaptations of the book the Nazis burned, and the 1930 one is still definitive."
The entry covers three films and the 1930 Milestone version is the one that earns the position. Remarque published the novel in 1929, it sold over a million copies in a year, and the Nazis burned it and stripped him of citizenship. Every adaptation is handling material that was already politically dangerous.
Milestone’s film trusts the book completely, including the ending, and it was made two years after Wings with sound arriving mid-production. The tracking shots along the trench and the sequence in the shell hole with the dying French soldier are the two that have never been bettered.
The 1979 television version is respectful and inessential. The 2022 German production is visually extraordinary, won four Academy Awards, and invents an armistice negotiation subplot the novel does not contain because a modern production wanted a ticking clock. The ratings across the three are 10, 7 and 7.
Remarque published in 1929, sold over a million copies in a year, and the Nazis burned the book and stripped him of citizenship.
Milestone’s 1930 film was made with sound arriving mid-production, and the shell hole sequence with the dying French soldier has never been bettered.
The 2022 German version invents an armistice negotiation subplot the novel does not contain, because a modern production wanted a countdown.
3. Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
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"One of the four or five best films ever made, and it never once cuts away to a woman in England."
Lawrence of Arabia is here because it is a three-hour-and-forty-seven-minute epic with no romance, no home front and no reassurance, and it was a commercial success anyway. Lean removed every conventional support and the film stands without them.
Peter O’Toole was unknown, in his first major role, and the film refuses to explain him. Lawrence is vain, brilliant, self-mythologising, and eventually frightened of how much he is enjoying the killing. Every character offers a reading of him and the film endorses none.
The match cut to the desert sunrise is the most famous edit in cinema and Freddie Young shot the mirage arrival with a lens built specially for it. The film covers the Arab Revolt, Deraa and the political settlement that betrayed everybody Lawrence had persuaded, and it does not resolve any of it.
Lean shot in 70mm across two years in Jordan, Morocco and Spain, and the film has no significant female speaking part at all.
The cut from a match being blown out to a desert sunrise is the most famous edit in cinema and was not in the screenplay.
O’Toole was largely unknown and Lean’s first choice had been Albert Finney, who turned it down rather than sign a long contract.
4. Gallipoli (1981)
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"Two sprinters from Western Australia, and the film stops at the exact moment it has to."
Gallipoli takes its position on structure. Weir builds the entire film out of one physical action, which is running. The boys are sprinters, they race each other, they cross the desert on foot, and the final act depends on a message being carried by a man who runs.
That means the ending needs nothing. The last shot is a freeze frame on a runner hit mid-stride at the Nek, arms back, chest out, in the posture of breaking a tape. No aftermath, no bodies, no music over it.
The film is also precise about who sent them. The order to charge across forty metres into machine guns came from a staff officer who was not there, relayed by a telephone line that worked, and the film shows the decision being made and not reconsidered.
Weir builds the whole film on two runners and lets the audience learn what running means to them before the ending requires it.
The final shot is a freeze frame composed from a real war photograph, which Weir has said was the reason he made the film.
Mel Gibson was twenty-five and the picture is largely responsible for the Australian New Wave reaching international audiences.
5. 1917 (2019)
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"The best war film of the last twenty years, and the single-take conceit is not a gimmick."
1917 earns the top tier because the technique serves the subject rather than announcing itself. Mendes built it from stories his grandfather Alfred told him about being a runner, and Deakins shot it to appear as one unbroken take.
Continuous shooting enforces real distance. The audience walks every metre the two lance corporals walk, cannot be cut away to safety, and cannot be given relief through editing. For a film about an errand across ground that has to be crossed, that is the correct and possibly the only technique.
The consequence is that the production had to be choreographed to the minute, with trenches dug to the exact length of the dialogue. Deakins won his second Academy Award for it and the night sequence through the burning town is the best-lit footage in any war film.
Mendes constructed it to appear as two unbroken takes, which required the sets to be built to the length of the walk rather than the other way round.
The premise came from his grandfather, who served as a message runner, and the film is dedicated to him.
Deakins won his second Academy Award for it, and the night sequence lit by flares over a ruined town is the best thing in it.
6. Sergeant York (1941)
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"Propaganda that is also a great film, and the subject controlled the production."
Sergeant York is the most interesting production story on this list. Alvin York had refused Hollywood for twenty years and agreed in 1941 only on his own terms, including that Gary Cooper play him or nobody would.
Those terms produced a better film than a studio would have chosen. Roughly the first half is about York as a Tennessee farmer and conscientious objector who does not want to fight and whose church forbids it, and the film takes the objection seriously rather than treating it as a hurdle.
It was released months before Pearl Harbor as explicit recruitment material, became the highest-grossing film of the year, and Cooper won Best Actor. A recruitment film that spends half its length on why a man should not enlist is a strange object and a better one.
York refused to permit a film for twenty years and agreed only when he needed money for a school, insisting Gary Cooper play him.
It was released months before Pearl Harbor and was explicitly intended to prepare an isolationist country for a war, which the studio did not hide.
The first half is a conversion narrative about a man who does not want to fight, which is why the second half carries any weight.
7. Paths of Glory (1957)
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"Kubrick’s court martial, where the verdict is settled before anybody speaks."
Paths of Glory is the most famous First World War film and it sits here because the rating comes from its own review rather than from its reputation. Kubrick adapts Humphrey Cobb’s novel about a 1916 French attack ordered into impossibility and three men selected almost at random for execution when it fails.
The tracking shots along the trench, camera moving backward ahead of Kirk Douglas as he walks the line, are the most imitated camera movement in war cinema and were built specifically for the film.
It was banned in France until 1975 and refused by the Swiss and Spanish governments, which is the clearest indication of how accurate the depiction of command was felt to be.
Kubrick was twenty-eight and the film was effectively banned in France for nearly twenty years.
The tracking shots through the trenches move backward ahead of the advancing men, which puts the audience in the position of retreating from them.
The final scene, a German girl made to sing to a room of French soldiers who begin humming along, is the only mercy in the film.
8. Admiral (2008)
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"A Russian biopic of a man Soviet history spent seventy years erasing."
Admiral is here because of what it represents as much as what it is. Aleksandr Kolchak was an Imperial Navy officer who became Supreme Ruler during the civil war and was executed by a Bolshevik tribunal in 1920, and Soviet history treated him as a villain for seventy years.
A major Russian production rehabilitating him in 2008 is a political act, and the film is romantic about him in ways worth noticing. It is also expensively and seriously made.
The opening Baltic engagement in 1916, a minelayer catching a German cruiser, is the best First World War naval action ever staged, and the film never reaches that level again.
A Russian production about Kolchak, an admiral who became leader of the White movement, made from a position sympathetic to him.
The naval sequences, particularly the minelaying and the pursuit in the Baltic, are the strongest material and are staged with real vessels.
It is the rare major war film made from the losing side’s perspective without irony, which is what makes it worth the entry.
9. Beneath Hill 60 (2010)
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"The part of the war nobody films, which is the part fought underground."
Beneath Hill 60 is on this list because it covers something no other film does. Australian tunnelling companies, largely recruited from mining, dug beneath the German lines at Messines and packed the chambers with explosive.
The mines detonated on 7 June 1917 killed approximately ten thousand men in seconds and were heard in London. They remain among the largest non-nuclear explosions ever produced, and one charge that failed to fire is still down there.
The film’s tension is claustrophobia and silence rather than combat. Men lying in clay listening for German counter-tunnellers, working in the dark, knowing the other side is doing exactly the same thing a few feet away.
The subject is the Australian tunnelling companies who mined under the German lines, which is the least filmed part of the war.
The tunnel sequences are genuinely claustrophobic and the film is careful about the listening, since both sides were digging toward each other.
The Messines detonation in 1917 was heard in London, which the film states plainly and does not exaggerate.
10. The Lost Battalion (2001)
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"A television movie that punches well above its budget, because the story does the work."
The Lost Battalion demonstrates how far a genuinely strong situation carries a production. Major Charles Whittlesey, a New York lawyer, advanced on schedule into the Argonne with five hundred and fifty men, was cut off when the flanking units did not move, and refused to surrender for five days.
The A&E budget is visible throughout. The forest is a few acres, the artillery is off camera, the German army is a couple of squads, and none of it matters because the situation supplies all the tension the film needs.
The detail that lands hardest is that the unit was shelled by its own artillery, and the carrier pigeon sent to stop it, Cher Ami, was shot through the breast and delivered the message anyway.
A television production about the Argonne, where a battalion advanced beyond its flanks and was cut off for five days.
The film is unusually specific about the failure, since the unit did what it was ordered to do and the units beside it did not.
Ricky Schroder plays Whittlesey as a lawyer who has been handed a command and is applying reason to a situation that has none.
11. Wonder Woman (2017)
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"A superhero film that chose the harder war, and the No Man’s Land sequence justifies it."
Wonder Woman is on a First World War list because the choice of war is the film’s most consequential decision. The character originated in the Second World War, where a superhero film gets an unambiguous enemy. Jenkins moved it to the First, which removes that entirely.
The result is a protagonist looking for a villain to defeat in a conflict that does not have one, and the film is honest enough to let that frustrate her. Ares as an explanation is the weakest part of the picture and the ambiguity before it is the strongest.
The No Man’s Land crossing is the best sequence in any DC film and it works because it is about advancing into fire everybody else has accepted as impassable, which is a First World War idea rather than a superhero one.
The First World War setting is the right choice, since a conflict with no clean side suits a character who believes in one.
Diana climbs out of a trench and walks across open ground under fire after an hour establishing that everybody has accepted it is impossible.
Jenkins reportedly had to fight to keep that sequence because the protagonist is not advancing the plot during it.
12. The Lost Battalion (1919)
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"A docudrama filmed within months of the event, acted by the men who survived it."
This exists and almost nobody has seen it. Burton King restaged the Argonne pocket within months of the armistice using the actual survivors, with Major Whittlesey appearing as himself alongside men who had been in the hole with him.
As a film it is primitive. As a document it is unrepeatable, and the 2001 version with better technology cannot produce what this has.
Whittlesey went overboard from a steamer to Havana in November 1921, three years after the events and two after making this film, having spent the intervening period as a decorated public figure obliged to attend memorials.
It was made a year after the events with survivors of the actual battalion playing themselves, including Whittlesey.
That makes it a document rather than a dramatisation, and several of the men appearing in it were dead within a few years.
Whittlesey took his own life in 1921, which the film obviously could not know and which colours every viewing since.
13. The Trench (1999)
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"Forty-eight hours in one trench before the Somme, and it never leaves."
The Trench is a novelist’s film and it shows in both directions. William Boyd wrote and directed it, his only film, and confines the whole thing to a British trench across the two days before 1 July 1916.
The audience knows what is coming and the characters do not, which is the entire mechanism. The men are cheerful, bored, writing letters, trading rations, and the film’s refusal to show the attack is its strongest decision.
Daniel Craig plays the sergeant six years before Casino Royale, doing the same compressed fury he would later build a career on, and he is the best thing in it.
The entire film takes place in a trench in the two days before the Somme, and the attack itself is the final thirty seconds.
William Boyd wrote and directed it and the claustrophobia is the point, with the audience never permitted to see over the parapet.
Daniel Craig is in it early and the film is talky in a way that reads as authentic rather than as stagey.
14. Passchendaele (2008)
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"Paul Gross wrote, directed, produced and starred, and the battle is worth the rest."
Passchendaele is a personal project with a structural problem. Gross made it from stories his grandfather told him and occupied four roles on the production, which is rarely a sign of restraint.
The bulk of the running time is a romance in Calgary between a veteran with combat fatigue and a morphine-addicted nurse, and it is the weakest material in the film by some distance.
The Third Ypres sequence at the end is genuinely well staged, was the most expensive thing Canadian cinema had attempted, and contains one image, a man carried on a plank through the mud in a deliberate crucifixion composition, that is either the boldest or the most misjudged thing on this page.
Paul Gross wrote, directed, produced and starred, financed substantially by Canadian public funding, which is visible in the ambition and the unevenness.
The mud is the subject and the battlefield sequences are the best thing in it, staged with genuine scale for a film of its budget.
The romance occupying the middle is where it loses its footing, and the final image is a religious symbol the film has not earned.
15. The Red Baron (2008)
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"A German biopic filmed in English, which explains most of what is wrong with it."
The Red Baron sits low because of a production decision made before a frame was shot. Müllerschön’s film about Manfred von Richthofen was made in Germany with German actors and filmed in English to reach an international market.
Every performance is consequently at one remove, and the dialogue has the flatness of people working in a second language for commercial reasons rather than dramatic ones.
The script also cannot decide its position. It wants the audience to admire a German aristocrat shooting down young British pilots and to grieve when he dies at twenty-five, and never resolves that into an argument. The aerial work is good.
A German production about Richthofen made in English for international sale, which is the decision that damages it most.
The aerial sequences are competent and the film is more interested in a fictional romance than in the man or the tactics.
It presents Richthofen as a reluctant celebrity uncomfortable with his own propaganda value, which is a defensible reading with no evidence behind it.
16. Zeppelin (1971)
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"A competent B-movie with model work better than its script."
Zeppelin is the bottom of the list and it is here for the miniatures. Périer’s British production has Michael York in an espionage plot involving a Zeppelin raid on a Scottish castle to steal the Magna Carta, none of which happened.
The airship work, combining large-scale models with a full-size partial interior, is genuinely impressive and was expensive. Somebody cared a great deal about getting the Zeppelins right.
Nobody appears to have cared comparably about the story around them, which is a competent spy plot executed without conviction.
A British production about an airship raid, with genuine large-scale models and a set built to the interior dimensions of a real Zeppelin.
The model work is the reason to watch it and the espionage plot around it is entirely conventional.
Michael York plays a divided-loyalty officer and the film has no position on anything, which is the main problem with it.