14 reviews in this category.
Paths of Glory runs 88 minutes and lands with more moral force than films three times its length. Stanley Kubrick was 29 years old when he made it, and the precision of his outrage is still shocking nearly 70 years later....
Dr. Strangelove is one of the greatest films ever made, and it is also one of the most thoroughly anti-establishment.…...
We Were Soldiers is the Vietnam War film that Hollywood would not make today. It honors the American soldiers who fought at Ia Drang without apologizing for them, while still showing the enemy as a competent military force led by a commander who is n…...
The Deer Hunter opens with a steel mill. Men in masks pour metal in a Pittsburgh suburb. The shot lasts long enough to feel like work.…...
Band of Brothers stands as the gold standard of military television, a ten-part masterwork that honors the men of Easy Company without descending into jingoism or the cynical deconstruction that defines modern war storytelling.…...
All Quiet on the Western Front is a technically brilliant film with a clear ideological agenda, and those two things are inseparable from each other....
Platoon won Best Picture in 1986. It is Oliver Stone's Vietnam experience rendered as cinema. And it is, forty years later, still one of the most honest American war films ever made.…...
Fury is a war film made by someone who actually cares about war. Not the spectacle of it. The weight of it....
This review contains a genuine disagreement with itself, and that is appropriate for a film that has been doing the same thing since 1987....
Christopher Nolan made Dunkirk at the height of his commercial and critical power, coming off Interstellar and The Dark Knight trilogy, with the creative freedom to do whatever he wanted.…...
The Patriot is the kind of film Hollywood stopped making around the time it started worrying about how America looked to foreign markets. It is unabashedly pro-American, pro-family, and pro-violent-resistance-to-tyranny.…...
The first twenty-five minutes of Saving Private Ryan are among the most important minutes in the history of American cinema. Not because they are the most technically impressive war footage ever shot, though they are that.…...
Hacksaw Ridge is one of the most purely traditional films Hollywood has produced in the last twenty years. It is a story about faith, and it takes that faith seriously in a way that most war films don't dare.…...
Eight days. That is all that separates us from finding out whether the Academy goes with the crowd-pleasing vampire epic or the art-house literary adaptation. Whether Ryan Coogler takes home the gold or Paul Thomas Anderson finally gets his due.…...
