A lie in 1935 and the Dunkirk beach in one five-minute take.
A Home Army soldier ordered to kill a communist on the last day of the war; Wajda and Cybulski.
A woman waits for a soldier who will not return; the Soviet film that won the Palme d'Or.
A 12-year-old scout on the Eastern Front; Tarkovsky's first film and the dream sequences.
A Hitler Youth boy with an imaginary Hitler played by Taika Waititi hides a Jewish girl.
Gary Oldman as Churchill in May 1940, and the speech in the Underground.
A conscientious objector saves 75 men at Okinawa without a rifle; Mel Gibson's war film.
A Belarusian boy watches the SS burn villages in 1943; the most harrowing war film made.
Hitler's last twelve days in the bunker, with Bruno Ganz; the meme and the masterpiece.
Szpilman surviving the Warsaw ghetto and the ruins; Polanski's own history.
Melville's French Resistance as a grey, unglamorous business of betrayals.
Five hours in a U-boat in 1941; the claustrophobia has never been bettered.
Rossellini shot on the streets months after the Germans left; neorealism begins here.
Lubitsch's Warsaw actors outwit the Gestapo; a comedy about the Nazis made in 1942.
A Sonderkommando prisoner at Auschwitz tries to bury one boy; shot in shallow focus over his shoulder.
An RAF pilot argues for his life on a staircase to heaven; Earth in colour, heaven in black and white.
Jewish prisoners forced to forge pounds and dollars for the Reich in Sachsenhausen.
George C. Scott in front of the flag, in the biography he refused the Oscar for.
A Slovak carpenter is made "Aryan controller" of an old Jewish widow's button shop.
Oskar stops growing at three and drums through the rise of the Nazis in Danzig.
A young railway apprentice worries about sex and, by accident, the Resistance.
Eight Italian soldiers are forgotten on a Greek island for three years of the war.
A Jewish aristocratic family in Ferrara plays tennis while the racial laws close in.
A boy survives a reprisal in occupied Haarlem and spends forty years understanding that night.
British prisoners build a bridge for the Japanese, and a colonel forgets whose side he is on.
An English family through Dunkirk and the Blitz, made to bring America into the war.
Three veterans come home to the same small town and cannot fit back in.
Rick, Ilsa, the letters of transit and the most quoted script ever written.
A commandant's family keeps a tidy garden on the other side of the Auschwitz wall.
The Air Corps officers who believed precision bombing could win a war humanely, and Curtis LeMay burning Tokyo instead.
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