The Best War Movies of All Time

Every war film in our library, ranked by composite score across the major critics' polls, institutional canons and awards.

Lawrence of Arabia (1962) leads with a composite score of 7.71.

1
Lawrence of Arabia1962 · David Lean
7.71
Oscar Best Picture winner 1962 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1963 #1 · BFI Top 100 British films #3
2
Schindler's List1993 · Steven Spielberg
7.42
Oscar Best Picture winner 1993 · BAFTA Best Film winner 1993 · AFI 100 (2007) #8
3
Apocalypse Now1979 · Francis Ford Coppola
7.15
Palme d'Or winner 1979 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1979 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #18
4
The Pianist2002 · Roman Polanski
7.15
Palme d'Or winner 2002 · BAFTA Best Film winner 2003 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 2003 #1
5
The Best Years of Our Lives1946 · William Wyler
6.85
Oscar Best Picture winner 1946 · BAFTA Best Film winner 1949 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1948 #2
6
Casablanca1942 · Michael Curtiz
6.00
Oscar Best Picture winner 1943 · AFI 100 (2007) #3 · AFI 100 (1998) #2
7
The Hurt Locker2008 · Kathryn Bigelow
5.95
Oscar Best Picture winner 2009 · BAFTA Best Film winner 2009 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 2010 #5
8
The English Patient1996 · Anthony Minghella
5.65
Oscar Best Picture winner 1996 · BAFTA Best Film winner 1997 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1997 #5
9
Forbidden Games1952 · René Clément
5.29
BAFTA Best Film winner 1954 · Venice Golden Lion winner 1952 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1953 #1
10
MASH1970 · Robert Altman
5.29
Palme d'Or winner 1970 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1970 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1970 #5
11
Dr. Strangelove1964 · Stanley Kubrick
5.25
BAFTA Best Film winner 1965 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1964 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #46
12
The Bridge on the River Kwai1957 · David Lean
5.13
Oscar Best Picture winner 1957 · BFI Top 100 British films #11 · AFI 100 (1998) #13
13
The Battle of Algiers1966 · Gillo Pontecorvo
4.80
Venice Golden Lion winner 1965 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1967 #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #22
14
Gone with the Wind1939 · Victor Fleming, George Cukor, Sam Wood
4.72
Oscar Best Picture winner 1939 · AFI 100 (2007) #6 · AFI 100 (1998) #4
15
The Deer Hunter1978 · Michael Cimino
4.70
Oscar Best Picture winner 1978 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1979 #3 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #211
16
All Quiet on the Western Front1930 · Lewis Milestone
4.49
Oscar Best Picture winner 1929 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1930 #1 · AFI 100 (1998) #54
17
Dances with Wolves1990 · Kevin Costner
4.47
Oscar Best Picture winner 1990 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1991 #1 · AFI 100 (1998) #75
18
Platoon1986 · Oliver Stone
4.40
Oscar Best Picture winner 1986 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1987 #2 · AFI 100 (2007) #86
19
Friendly Persuasion1956 · William Wyler
4.20
Palme d'Or winner 1957 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1956 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1957 #9
20
The Tin Drum1979 · Volker Schlöndorff
4.16
Palme d'Or winner 1979 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1981 #1 · Criterion Collection spine #234
21
Kagemusha1980 · Akira Kurosawa
3.79
Palme d'Or winner 1980 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (Japanese) 1980 #2 · Criterion Collection spine #267
22
Underground1995 · Emir Kusturica
3.71
Palme d'Or winner 1995 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1996 #3 · Letterboxd Top 250 #134
23
The Thin Red Line1998 · Terrence Malick
3.69
Berlin Golden Bear winner 1999 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1998 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1999 #2
24
Wings1927 · William A. Wellman, Harry d'Abbadie d'Arrast
3.61
Oscar Best Picture winner 1928 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1928 #5 · National Film Registry (inducted 1997)
25
Patton1970 · Franklin J. Schaffner
3.59
Oscar Best Picture winner 1970 · AFI 100 (1998) #89 · National Film Registry (inducted 2003)
26
From Here to Eternity1953 · Fred Zinnemann
3.49
Oscar Best Picture winner 1953 · AFI 100 (1998) #52 · National Film Registry (inducted 2002)
27
The Cranes Are Flying1957 · Mikhail Kalatozov
3.46
Palme d'Or winner 1958 · Letterboxd Top 250 #31 · Criterion Collection spine #146
28
Barry Lyndon1975 · Stanley Kubrick
3.41
Oscar Best Picture nominee 1975 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #12 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #45
29
The Wind That Shakes the Barley2006 · Ken Loach
3.39
Palme d'Or winner 2006 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 2006 #5
30
The Ascent1977 · Larisa Shepitko
3.36
Berlin Golden Bear winner 1977 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #72 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #128

A genre at war with itself

The war film has always contained two contradictory impulses, and the canon preserves both. One tradition uses war as the ultimate stage for spectacle and moral clarity — the tradition of The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962), David Lean's twin epics that between them collected fourteen Oscars and defined what "big" filmmaking meant for a generation. The other tradition treats war as an indictment: Kubrick's Paths of Glory (1957), banned in France for years over its portrayal of the French army's execution of its own soldiers, remains the sharpest court-martial drama ever filmed, and its final scene — a captured German girl singing to weeping French troops — is the genre's conscience in miniature.

What the cross-list data shows is that the second tradition ages better. The films at the top of this page are overwhelmingly anti-war films, or at least war-skeptical ones: Apocalypse Now (1979), which Coppola famously described not as being about Vietnam but as being Vietnam — a production whose chaos (typhoons, a lead actor's heart attack, years of editing) became inseparable from its subject; Schindler's List (1993), which forced the industrial machinery of the Holocaust into mainstream memory and swept both the Oscars and BAFTA; Kurosawa's Ran (1985), which translates King Lear into a medieval Japan burning under its own dynastic wars, made when its director was in his mid-seventies and partially blind.

The comic and the intimate flanks

The genre's edges matter as much as its center. Dr. Strangelove (1964) proved that the most serious statement about nuclear war available to cinema was a farce — BAFTA gave it Best Film while the Academy, revealingly, could not bring itself to do the same. Casablanca (1942) and Gone with the Wind (1939) show the war film's romantic flank: war as the pressure that makes private choices historic. And Benigni's Life Is Beautiful (1997) — divisive precisely because it brought comedy inside a concentration camp — demonstrates that the genre's boundary disputes never settle.

Our composite ordering cuts across sub-genres, eras and nations, which is the point: ranked by accumulated canonical weight rather than by battlefield, the war film reveals itself as cinema's longest-running argument about what violence does to institutions and to the people inside them.