A British frigate hunts a French privateer round Cape Horn; the best sailing film there is.
A smuggler, a fisherman and a journalist chase a pink diamond through the Sierra Leone civil war.
The Iliad as a summer blockbuster, with Pitt as an Achilles who fights like a dancer.
A Vietnam volunteer comes home paralysed and turns against the war that sent him.
The 54th Massachusetts, the first Black regiment of the Civil War, marching to Fort Wagner.
A Polish survivor in post-war Brooklyn, and the decision on the ramp at Auschwitz she cannot say out loud.
An armed forces radio DJ in 1965 Saigon, improvising his way past the censors.
Two Napoleonic officers keep meeting to fight over an insult neither can remember; Scott's first feature.
Austerlitz and Waterloo hung on a marriage; Phoenix plays him as a sulk.
A blacksmith becomes a knight and holds Jerusalem against Saladin; watch the director’s cut, not the release.
Demi Moore shaves her head to get through SEAL selection as a senator’s test case.
Caesar hunts a colonel who has put apes in a labour camp; Andy Serkis in performance capture from end to end.
Two musicians on an island are overtaken by a civil war they had ignored.
AP journalists inside the besieged city in 2022; Ukraine's first Oscar.
Robert McNamara's eleven lessons on Vietnam and Cuba; Errol Morris's Interrotron interview.
A station at a wormhole and the Dominion War; the Trek that did serialised drama first.
The Marines from Guadalcanal to Okinawa; the harder companion to Band of Brothers.
A Korean War field hospital for eleven seasons; the finale is still the most watched episode ever.
A ghost in an orphanage during the Spanish Civil War; del Toro's companion to Pan's Labyrinth.
A lie in 1935 and the Dunkirk beach in one five-minute take.
Two brothers in the Irish War of Independence and the civil war after; Loach's Palme d'Or.
A Resistance prisoner plans his escape from Montluc in real detail; Bresson's truest film.
Fifty years of Yugoslavia in a cellar with a brass band; Kusturica's second Palme d'Or.
A 12-year-old scout on the Eastern Front; Tarkovsky's first film and the dream sequences.
An Israeli veteran reconstructs the 1982 Lebanon war in animated interviews.
A woman waits for a soldier who will not return; the Soviet film that won the Palme d'Or.
A Home Army soldier ordered to kill a communist on the last day of the war; Wajda and Cybulski.
War photographers drive to a besieged Washington in a near-future America; Alex Garland.
A Navy SEAL platoon in Ramadi in 2006, reconstructed in real time from memory; Garland and Ray Mendoza.
Two soldiers cross no man's land to stop an attack, in what looks like one continuous shot.
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