time travel movie world war 2

The 25 Best Time Travel Movies to Whisk You Away from Reality

Who wouldn't love a time machine right about now?

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Meet Cute (2022)

Kaley Cuoco and Pete Davidson co-star in Peacock's Meet Cute , a delightful and often dark rom-com based around time travel. Feeling suicidal, Sheila (Cuoco) finds a time machine in a nail salon and decides to go back in time 24 hours. While re-living her first date with Gary (Davidson) again and again, Sheila loses touch with reality and might have destroyed any chance she had with him.

A Wrinkle in Time (2018)

High schooler Meg Murry travels through time and space in search of her missing astrophysicist father (Chris Pine). On her journey, Meg meets Mrs. Which (Oprah Winfrey), Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon), and Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling), as well as a whole host of dangerous beings.

The Time Traveler's Wife (2009)

Based on Audrey Niffenegger's 2003 novel of the same name, The Time Traveler's Wife tells the story of Henry (Eric Bana), a librarian who is able to randomly travel through time. After meeting Clare (Rachel McAdams) as a child, Henry later develops a romantic relationship with her. HBO's recent adaptation starring Theo James and Rose Leslie has reignited the debate regarding whether or not the story promotes grooming , or if it's a timeless romance.

Back to the Future (1985)

'80s classic Back to the Future has stood the test of time, and spawned two equally entertaining sequels. In the first film, Marty McFly is sent to the 1950s in his friend Doc Brown's time machine, a super cool DeLorean. Marty meets his parents as teenagers, and his presence risks changing history forever.

See You Yesterday (2019)

Netflix's See You Yesterday follows science prodigy C.J. (Eden Duncan-Smith), who invents time traveling backpacks. Along with her best friend Sebastian, C.J. uses her invention to go back in time to stop her brother from being murdered by a racist police officer. However, she's also forced to face up to the limitations and consequences of time travel.

About Time (2013)

Tim (Domhnall Gleeson) inherits the ability to time travel from his father, and decides to use the gift to find love. After a failed attempt at romance, Tim meets Mary (Rachel McAdams), but due to several time travel-related mishaps, romance isn't instantaneous for the pair. Written and directed by rom-com aficionado Richard Curtis.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

James Cameron's follow-up to 1984's The Terminator was a smash-hit that cemented the franchise's popularity. In the sequel, a killer T-1000 Terminator is sent back in time by Skynet to kill the future leader of the resistance, the son of Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), John (Edward Furlong). At the same time, the resistance sends a reprogrammed T-800 Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) back to protect Connor.

Hot Tub Time Machine (2010)

Four miserable friends reunite after one of them nearly dies. To cheer themselves up, they decide to spend some time together at a ski resort. Unfortunately, the resort's hot tub isn't what it seems, and they accidentally end up traveling back to 1986. The four friends scramble to find a way back to present day. Starring John Cusack and Craig Robinson.

12 Monkeys (1995)

After a deadly virus destroys humanity in 1996, survivors are forced underground. Decades later, prisoner James (Bruce Willis) agrees to go back in time to find the original virus, so that scientists can work on a cure. However, he arrives too early in 1990, and is promptly institutionalized, where he meets Jeffrey (Brad Pitt), an anti-corporate environmentalist. From there, the mystery only gets more intriguing.

Looper (2012)

In the future, time travel is used by the mob to assassinate people, who are sent back in time and killed by assassins known as "loopers." Joe's (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) older self (Bruce Willis) is sent back to be eliminated, but manages to escape before he is killed. Thus begins a twisty time travel epic, that also stars Emily Blunt.

Tenet (2020)

The Protagonist ( John David Washington ), a former CIA agent, is tasked with stopping World War III. Learning to bend time, he attempts to prevent the destruction of the world. Robert Pattinson and Elizabeth Debicki co-star.

Last Night in Soho (2021)

Aspiring fashion designer Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) manages to travel back to the 1960s, where she meets singer "Sandie" ( Anya Taylor-Joy ). What starts as a glamorous encounter with the past soon becomings a horrifying nightmare. Co-starring Matt Smith.

Déjà Vu (2006)

A top secret organization has developed the ability to see four days into the past, in order to catch criminals. While hunting a terrorist, ATF agent Doug (Denzel Washington) realizes that this new technology might allow him to stop crimes from happening altogether.

Source Code (2011)

An unusual riff on the time travel movie, Source Code stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Army Captain Colter, who is trying to identify the person responsible for bombing a commuter train. Re-living an eight minute re-creation of the moments leading up to the explosion, Colter is stuck in a terrifying loop, until he can solve the mystery.

Mirai (2018)

A young boy called Kun runs away from home, as he feels neglected by his family after the arrival of his little sister, Mirai. Kun accidentally discovers a time travel portal in a magic garden, and is transported into the past, where he meets his mother as a child. Later, he travels to the future, where he finds his sister as an adult, and completely changes his outlook in the process.

Safety Not Guaranteed (2012)

Aubrey Plaza stars as an aspiring journalist whose latest assignment involves a mysterious classified ad about time travel. "You'll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. I have only done this once before. SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED," the ad reads. Mark Duplass co-stars.

Groundhog Day (1993)

Although Groundhog Day is technically a "time loop" movie, it wouldn't feel right to leave it off the list. Phil (Bill Murray) is a disgruntled weatherman sent to cover the annual Groundhog Day event in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. When he wakes up the next day, he realizes that he's re-living February 2, which happens again and again, until he figures out how to stop it.

Needle in a Timestack (2021)

The wonderful Cynthia Erivo stars alongside Orlando Bloom, Leslie Odom Jr., and Freida Pinto in this romantic sci-fi flick. In the future, the wealthy are able to partake in "time jaunting," but the ripples from these changes often cause timelines to warp and change. Needle in a Timestack focuses on a happily married couple whose relationship is jeopardized by an ex intent on changing history.

The Lake House (2006)

Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves star in this completely cheesy but endlessly loveable rom-com that defies time. Architect Alex (Reeves) and doctor Kate (Bullock) write letters to one another via a mailbox at a lake house where they both live at separate times. Despite the time difference, they're able to communicate with one another and forge a relationship via this magical postal system that transcends time.

Predestination (2015)

Ethan Hawke stars as an agent tasked with stopping a deadly attack before it happens, via time travel. Traveling back to 1975, he attempts to find and stop a bomber in New York, but his mission is far from simple. When he returns to the future, his life only gets more complicated.

Amy Mackelden is a freelance writer, editor, and disability activist. Her bylines include Harper's BAZAAR, Nicki Swift, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, ELLE, The Independent, Bustle, Healthline, and HelloGiggles. She co-edited The Emma Press Anthology of Illness , and previously spent all of her money on Kylie Cosmetics.

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The 50 best World War II movies

From ‘Dunkirk’ to ‘Schindler's List’, here are our picks for the best World War II movies of all time

Photograph: Time Out

War is a natural source of fascination for filmmakers, what with the inherent horror, heroism and human drama it presents. And if we’re speaking specifically, no conflict has intrigued filmmakers like World War II. It’s not surprising, considering the remarkable scale of the destruction, the atrocities it involved and its long-tailed aftermath. Almost 80 years since it ended, movies are still being made about it – and there are likely many more coming.

Choosing the best World War II movies ever made, then, is clearly a challenge. That’s why, along with polling Time Out writers, we also called in an outside expert to come up with this definitive list: Quentin Tarantino, a man who knows a thing or two about making a great Dubya Dubya 2 film. Among the selections, you’ll find wide-scale epics, personal dramas, devastating documentaries, historical revisions and even a comedy or two. War, as we all know, is good for absolutely nothing – but at least we have these films to help make some sense of it.

Written by  Tom Huddleston, Adam Lee Davies, Paul Fairclough, Anna Smith, David Jenkins, Dan Jolin, Phil de Semlyen, Alim Kheraj & Matthew Singer

Recommended:

⚔️  The 50 best war movies of all-time 🎖️  The best World War I movies, ranked by historical accuracy 🇺🇸  The 20 best Memorial Day movies

Been there, done that? Think again, my friend.

Top WW2 movies

50.  paratroop command (1959).

Quentin Tarantino kicks things off with a riveting obscurity

Director:  William Witney

Cast: Richard Bakalyan, Ken Lynch, Jack Hogan

Quentin Tarantino says...   ‘This is by one of my favourite directors, William Witney, an American who quit the movie business to go into the army. You can tell it was made by someone who’d been there. It follows a group of paratroopers in Italy, but one of them’s a fuck-up who accidentally kills one of his team. So he has people in the platoon who want to kill him, just waiting for the right gunfight. And the end of the movie is so exciting. They have to cross a field of landmines, sending one guy in after another until he gets blown up. Eventually, somebody will get to the other side. All these characters just start getting wiped out.’

49.  Escape to Victory (1981)

They think it’s all over… and for you, Tommy, it is. 

Director:  John Huston

Cast: Pelé, Michael Caine, Sylvester Stallone

The sport washers have been the bad guys for decades now, as this wartime sports movie demonstrates in stirring style. This time it’s the actual Nazis doing the sportwashing, challenging a group of malnourished POWs to a prestige kickabout, hoping to get in behind the Allies’ low block and prove definitively that they are the master race… or something. But they underestimate the resilience and tactical nous of West Ham and England’s Captain John Colby (Michael Caine) and his international squad of real-life football stars (Pelé, Ossie Ardiles, Bobby Moore). Sylvester Stallone lends Hollywood star power but it’s more fun to enjoy as a high-budget game of ‘spot the Ipswich Town player’ and a Roy of the Rovers-style underdog story.

48.  Stalingrad (1993)

Winter is coming

Director: Joseph Vilsmaier

Cast: Dominique Horwitz, Thomas Kretschmann, Jochen Nickel

Forget Enemy at the Gates  and the 2015 Fyodor Bondarchuk CG-fest, this rare Germans’ eye view of the conflict is a much more authentic glimpse of the hell that was Stalingrad – the turning point in World War II and one of the most brutal battles in human history. Thomas Kretschmann plays a Nazi office leading a platoon into the crucible and, in the spirit of Das Boot  (with which this film shares producers), struggling to lead them out again. It’s harrowing, bleak viewing. It’s also an incredibly honest example of a film addressing a country’s horror-filled past: honest and uncomfortable to the last. This story had no happy ending. 

47.  Days of Glory (2006)

Out of Africa

Director: Rachid Bouchareb

Cast:  Samy Naceri, Roschdy Zem, Sami Bouajila 

There are hundreds of untold WWII stories still to be filmed. Rachid Bouchareb’s drama shines a light on those North African soldiers drafted in to fight for the Free French after D-Day. The film itself is a mite predictable, but what’s impressive are the ripples it created: after release, the French government agreed, for the first time, to begin paying compensation to the remaining widows of North African fighters. Proof that a work of art can still have direct political impact.  

46.  The Pianist (2002)

Tinkling the ivories

Director: Roman Polanski

Cast: Adrian Brody, Thomas Kretschmann, Frank Finlay

A Holocaust movie that stands alongside Schindler’s List , Roman Polanski’s Oscar-winning World War II survival drama has Jewish concert pianist Władysław Szpilman turning Robinson Crusoe in the rubble of Warsaw in the final months of the war. For as much as he’s become persona non grata , Polanski’s own experiences as a Polish Jew are movingly channelled into a historical epic that’s full of heartbreaking grace notes – the abandoned train platform, the unopenable can of fruit – and underpinned by a career-best performance from a 29-year-old Brody as a man fighting for his life and humanity amid unexpressible horror. That Oscar was richly deserved.

45.  The Dam Busters (1954)

Buuuh buh buh buh buh-buh buuuh buh…

Director:  Michael Anderson

Cast: Richard Todd, Michael Redgrave, Ursula Jeans 

The famous real-life partnership of boffin scientists and plucky pilots is brought to life in a stiff-upper-lipped war film that has endured sufficiently to spark talk of a Peter Jackson remake (still, alas, unmade). Thanks to The Dam Busters , the  1943 raid on the Ruhr dams using bouncing bombs has seeped into the public consciousness. It’s still a gem of the genre, with Michael Redgrave sincere yet conflicted as conscience-stricken inventor Barnes Wallis and Richard Todd all derring-do as RAF wing commander Guy Gibson. The special effects may look a little hokey now but they inspired the final Death Star assault in  Star Wars .

44.  I Was a Male War Bride (1949)

Cary on cross-dressing

Director:  Howard Hawks

Cast: Cary Grant, Ann Sheridan

Hollywood has a bad reputation for fixing tricky book titles, like going from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep ? to Blade Runner . In the case of French Army Officer Henri Rochard’s autobiography I Was an Alien Spouse of Female Military Personnel Enroute to the United States Under Public Law 271 of the Congress , we reckon they had a point. In this jolly gender-swap comedy from screwball master Howard Hawks, Cary Grant plays Rochard (mercifully eschewing a French accent), whose romance with chauffeur Ann Sheridan somehow leads to him dressing as a woman and smuggling himself into the US.

43.  Black Book (2006)

Dutch courage

Director: Paul Verhoeven

Cast: Carice van Houten, Sebastian Koch, Thom Hoffman

Almost three decades after his handsome but rather sedate resistance story Soldier of Orange , shockmeister Paul Verhoeven revisited WWII for a tale of Jewish subterfuge and erotic espionage, filling the screen with all the sex, death and pube-dyeing the earlier film sadly lacked. But beneath all the nudity and bloodshed is an intelligent, original study of occupation and revenge: the final shot, subtly drawing parallels between the occupation of Holland and the birth of Israel, is courageous and brilliant.  

42.  Battle of Britain (1969)

Stars over the battlefield

Director: Guy Hamilton

Cast: Michael Caine, Trevor Howard, Harry Andrews

Even if you haven’t seen the whole film, you’d probably seen bits of Battle of Britain ’s stunning aerial photography popping up in other movies. To this day, we’re not sure how they recreated 1940’s struggle between the RAF and the Lufwaffe on quite the scale that one-time 007 director Guy Hamilton and his crew manage. Its combat footage makes even Dunkirk ’ s dogfights look positively puny by comparison. The cast is meaty too, with Michael Redgrave, Trevor Howard, Laurence Olivier, Michael Caine and Ian McShane taking the fight to Adolf in rousing style. And if you haven’t seen it? Well, goggles on and chocks away.

41.  The Inglorious Bastards (1978)

Hang on, that title’s familiar…

Director: Enzo G. Castellari

Cast: Bo Svenson, Peter Hooten, Fred Williamson

Not Tarantino’s WWII picture, but the 1978 B-movie that partially inspired it. Director Enzo G Castellari is a hero to cult film fans everywhere: his 40-year career has gifted us half a dozen decent Euro-Westerns, a few rip-offs of hits such as Jaws  ( The Last Shark ) and Mad Max  ( 1990: The Bronx Warriors ) and the 1990s detective series Extralarge  on Italian TV. But thanks to Tarantino’s tribute, he’ll be best remembered for this WWII actioner. Explosive, colourful and slicker than you might expect, it follows a rag-tag bunch of Allied soldiers who… well, we don’t want to spoil it.  

40.  Hangmen Also Die! (1943)

QT takes the reins again for the tale of Heydrich’s assassination

Director: Fritz Lang

Cast: Brian Donlevy, Walter Brennan, Anna Lee, Gene Lockhart

Quentin Tarantino says...   ‘When I was writing Inglourious Basterds , I ended up looking at a different type of war film than I’d ever watched before. These were propaganda movies made in the ’40s, mostly directed by foreign directors living in Hollywood because the Nazis had occupied their home countries, like Fritz Lang who made the excellent Hangmen Also Die!  WWII was still going on, the Nazis were an actual threat, not just movie bad guys. Those directors had personal experience with the Nazis, and obviously they had to be worried about their loved ones back home. And yet those films are entertaining, they’re thrilling adventure stories, and there’s a lot of humour in them. And this goes against all the ponderous, violin-music diatribes we’ve seen in war movies since the ’80s.’

39.  A Walk in the Sun (1945)

Strolling thunder

Director: Lewis Milestone

Cast: Dana Andrews, Richard Conte, George Tyne

Director Lewis Milestone was the master of the grunt’s-eye view, and with this account of a few hours in the life of an American platoon in Italy he set the template for dozens of thoughtful war films that followed. For long stretches, nothing much happens – but when it does it’s violent and irrevocable. There’s little in the way of heroics and barely a few moments of gunfire. The impression of warfare is neither of gung-ho glory nor of pant-wetting terror: the overriding feeling is confusion, and a nagging sadness that in such a beautiful landscape one should have to be concerned with dying rather than living.  

38.  Kelly's Heroes (1970)

War is the ultimate bummer

Director: Brain G. Hutton

Cast: Clint Eastwood, Telly Savalas, Don Rickles, Donald Sutherland

‘Why don’t you knock it off with them negative waves?’ Yes, the hippies finally do their part for global security as Donald Sutherland’s superfreaky tank commander Oddball joins up with Clint Eastwood’s surly one-man warzone, Kelly, on a mission to raid a French bank and hightail it with buckets of Nazi loot. Director Brian G Hutton dispenses pretty much entirely with historical reality, leading some to accuse the film of trivialising the war effort. Which it does, but with such warmth, wit and insouciance that it’s impossible to resist. Pure pleasure.

37.  The English Patient (1996)

Not feeling Fiennes

Director: Anthony Minghella

Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, Willem Dafoe, Kristin Scott Thomas

Wartime has rarely been as atmospherically and artfully shot as it is in Anthony Minghella’s Academy Award-winning romance. Adapted (some would say quite loosely) from Michael Ondaatje’s novel, this amorous epic stars Ralph Fiennes as the unknown ‘English patient’ who, covered in burns, is being cared for by a young Canadian nurse (Juliet Binoche). Under her unerringly tender care, fleeting memories of life prior to injury return to the ailing patient, including, most significantly, the juicy affair he had with a friend’s wife (Kristin Scott Thomas, looking enigmatic in linen). Ridiculously attractive people swooning in the desert: oh go on, you’ll enjoy watching it really. 

36.  Germany, Pale Mother (1980)

For the Mutterland

Director: Helma Sanders-Brahms

Cast: Eva Mattes, ‎Ernst Jacobi

One of the lynchpins of New German Cinema and, alas, the only female-directed film on this list (which says something about war movies). Helma Sanders-Brahms’s film presents a dewy-eyed romance between Lene (Eva Mattes) and Hans (Ernst Jacobi) that blossoms into marriage. But their bliss is short-lived when Hans is called away to fight and Lene’s life spirals into disaster. It may sound brutal, but Sanders-Brahms never judges her characters (who are based on her own parents), bluntly demonstrating how relentlessly grim life in wartime can be for women as well as men.  

35.  Letters From Iwo Jima (2006)

Both sides now

Director: Clint Eastwood

Stars: Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya

Given his hard-bitten reputation, it’s surprising Clint Eastwood hadn’t got around to directing a World War II movie before 2006. But he made up for it with a groundbreaking one-two punch: a pair of films exploring the battle of Iwo Jima from both the American and Japanese perspectives. Flags of our Fathers  was weak, exploring the American culture of war. But Letters from Iwo Jima  is stunning, depicting a group of soldiers even more bound by tradition and honour than their American counterparts, trapped in an unwinnable war and dreaming only of home.  

34.  Millions Like Us (1943)

Keep the home fires burning

Directors: Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder

Cast: Eric Portman, Gordon Jackson, Patricia Roc, Basil Radford

No film evokes the everyday British experience of WWII better than Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder’s stiff-upper-lipped drama. It’s a masterpiece of social observation, reflecting the national shift towards social inclusion in its depiction of the lives, loves and heartrending losses endured by the lower-middle-class Crowson family. The closing sequence – in which munitions worker Celia (Patricia Roc) forcibly represses her grief over her dead lover and joins in a rousing factory singalong – is almost unbearably moving.  

33.  Ice Cold In Alex (1958)

Shouting lager lager lager

Director: J. Lee Thompson

Cast: John Mills, Sylvia Syms, Anthony Quayle

Britain’s obsession with the demon drink has made for some terrific cinema, and second only to Whisky Galore  in the pantheon of pissed-up pictures is this rousing, surprisingly hard-nosed tale of dipsomania in the desert. When his unit is attacked by the Germans, army captain Anson (John Mills) hijacks an ambulance and heads across the Sahara with two nurses and a dubious South African officer in tow. They’re bound for Alexandria, and the refrigerated lager Anson imagines he’ll find there – provided the Bosch don’t do for them first. Terse and stiff-lipped but never to a fault, this is one of the archetypal British combat films.  

32.  Hell in the Pacific (1968)

Two tickets to paradise

Director: John Boorman

Cast: Lee Marvin; ‎Toshirō Mifune

‘Two Enemies! One Island! No Subtitles!’ was not the tagline for John Boorman’s allegorical yarn about a Japanese soldier (Toshiro Mifune) and an American pilot (Lee Marvin) stranded on a beautiful, isolated South Seas island, but it damn well should have been. This perfectly pitched two-hander might have descended into an unholy mess of sentimentality and earnestness. But Deliverance director Boorman has never had too much time for easy resolution, and maintains an even strain as his leads realise that the only way to survive is to collaborate.  

31.  Empire of the Sun (1987)

Bale begins

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Christian Bale, John Malkovich, Miranda Richardson, Nigel Havers

Empire of the Sun  came smack in the centre of Steven Spielberg’s mid-’80s slump: Temple of Doom  had been criticised for excessive violence, and there was still Always  and Hook  to come. But there’s incredible work in Empire of the Sun . The decision to hire Tom Stoppard to adapt JG Ballard’s fictionalised memoir of his days in a Japanese internment camp pays off with a focused script and some wonderfully memorable characters. Best of all is John Malkovich’s Machiavellian hipster Basie. Christian Bale is a star in the making as young Jim, while Allen Daviau’s cinematography adds grandeur, drenching the screen with dazzling searchlights, blazing buildings and, at the climax, Hiroshima itself.  

30.  Saving Private Ryan (1998)

The Normandy conquest

Cast: Tom Hanks, Tom Sizemore, Matt Damon, Jeremy Davies

Spielberg, Hanks, all those Academy Awards. It’s easy to be a tad sceptical about Private Ryan . A repeat viewing, however, blows away the cobwebs with a furious men-in-combat film that balances comradely bromance with gale-force action.   ALD

Quentin Tarantino says : ‘I really liked Saving Private Ryan , in particular the Omaha beach scene. You’re watching that sequence and you think, could anything be worth this? Ultimately, I guess the answer is yes. But when you’re watching it, it seems unfathomable that anything could be worth that.’

29.  The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

A troubled bridge over water

Director: David Lean

Cast: William Holden, Alec Guinness, Jack Hawkins, Sessue Hayakawa

At once one of cinema’s truest epics and among the most meditative of all large-scale war movies, David Lean’s Oscar-winning classic features little in the way of sweeping battle sequences, yet few films manage to convey the madness of war better – and with greater suspense. Alec Guinness is the movie’s deeply compromised centre as Colonel Nicholson, a British office interned at a remote Japanese POW camp in Thailand and forced to oversee the construction of a bridge meant to ferry munitions between Bangkok and Rangoon. Driven by national pride, he gradually becomes obsessed with the project, despite the fact that it’s directly assisting the enemy. Meanwhile, William Holden’s begrudgingly Shears, a US Navy commander and former prisoner, is sent on a mission to destroy the bridge, putting him on a collision course not just with ruthless Japanese commandant Saito (Sessue Hayakawa) but Nicholson as well. Lean casts the conflicts in deep shades of grey, interrogating the notion of heroes and villains in the context of combat, building to a finale that’s both cathartic and crushing.       

28.  The Zone of Interest (2023)

Director: Jonathan Glazer

Cast: Christian Friedel, Sandra Hüller

The other side of the wall

Nothing much happens in front of the camera in Jonathan Glazer’s Holocaust drama. An Auschwitz camp commandant and his wife oversee an idyllic domestic life. He goes to work, she gardens. The kids frolic in the yard. His mother-in-law visits. The major conflict involves a promotion that may force them to leave their dream home, which happens to share a wall with his place of employment. It’s effectively plotless. And yet, it is more horrifying, pointed and potent than so many other films on the subject, less for what’s shown than what is implied – in the small visual details and, especially, the sound design, an incessant white noise of gunshots, yelling guards and not-so-distant screams. Like Claude Lanzmann and Shoah , Glazer approaches history’s greatest atrocity without sentiment, stripping it to its barest parts, and the result is gutting. Rarely has the banality of evil been presented with such banality, and thus looked so evil.

27.  Army of Shadows (1969)

Vive le resistance!

Director: Jean-Pierre Melville

Cast: Lino Ventura, Simone Signoret, Paul Meurisse

Jean-Pierre Melville’s film opens on a shot of the Arc de Triomphe as, slowly, a long line of Nazi soldiers goose-step across the screen. This insidious, softly-softly approach to the traumas suffered by the people of Paris during the occupation sets the tone for a riveting, steely-eyed chronicle of resistance. Prizing restraint, Melville adopts a curt, undemonstrative shooting style to present his ‘heroes’ as a self-hating cadre who think nothing of risking life and limb in the name of their nation. Prison escapes are brief and unglamorous, espionage is gruelling and perilous and emotions, speeches and friendships remain suppressed at all times. A cold, meticulous drama about the pressures of propping an entire country on your shoulders.  

26.  Attack (1956)

Director: Robert Aldrich 

Cast: Jack Palance, Eddie Albert, Lee Marvin, William Smithers

As cutting as piano wire and cynical to the core, Robert Aldrich’s whipsmart drama follows through on the queasy promise of its tagline: ‘Rips open the hot hell behind the glory!’ Joining up with the daintily named Fragile Fox company for a botched support mission during the Battle of the Bulge, we find ourselves caught between company captain and ‘gutless wonder’ Eddie Albert, Lee Marvin’s manipulative institutional horse-trader and platoon leader Jack Palance, cracking with frustration at the sharp end. A minor landmark which dared to suggest that, in war, ‘Not everyone is a hero and not every gun is pointed at the enemy’.

25.  To Be or Not To Be (1942)

Director: Ernst Lubitsch

Cast: Carole Lombard, Jack Benny, Robert Stack

‘So, they call me concentration camp Ehrhardt, do they?’ It’s hard to imagine the shock that must’ve greeted Ernst Lubitsch’s frothy comedy on release in 1942. Here we were, in the grip of the most bloody conflict in Earth’s history, and along comes German Jewish émigré Ernst Lubitsch with a broad Hollywood satire lampooning Nazism, spies, the camps, the whole damn shooting match. A story of mistaken identities, backstage hi-jinks and theatrical misunderstandings set in occupied Poland, the film is genuinely funny. But if you actually stop to think about it, you may start screaming.  

24.  The Great Escape (1963)

Makes you proud to be British. Or American

Director: John Sturges

Director: Steve McQueen, James Garner, Richard Attenborough, James Donald

Maybe the most flat-out enjoyable WWII film of them all, this bank holiday classic continues to win fans, inform ad campaigns and drown out England football matches every time an impromptu rendition of its impossibly chipper theme tune sounds. Steve McQueen heads a top-notch cast of international talent, all of whom are given plenty to do by the lively script and nimbly wrangled by John Sturges’s muscular direction.   ALD

Quentin Tarantino says : ‘One of my favourite movies of all time, not just war movies. I love that film. It’s one of those bunch-of-guys-on-a-mission movies that got me to sit down and write Inglourious Basterds .’

23.  Son of Saul (2015)

Up close and personal

Director: László Nemes

Cast: Géza Röhrig, Levente Molnár, Urs Rechn

The degradation and horror of the Holocaust has never been captured with such ferocity as in László Nemes’s extraordinary debut. Saul is a member of the Sonderkommando, the Jewish concentration camp prisoners tasked with dealing with the bodies of those murdered in the gas chambers. Nemes’s camera stays – literally – right in Saul’s face, using as few cuts as possible to immerse the viewer in an all-too-believable vision of hell. If it sounds tough, it is – but, until virtual reality technology improves, this is the closest you’re going to come to a bone-deep understanding of what really happened.  

22.  Downfall (2004)

Only 23? *Angry Hitler gif!*

Director: Oliver Hirschbiegel

Cast: Bruno Ganz, Alexandra Maria Lara, Corinna Harfouch, Ulrich Matthes

We’ve all been there. You haven’t slept for days. The place is a wreck. There are empties everywhere and you don’t even know who half these people are. Admit it: the Party’s over. This claustrophobic account of the last days of Nazi Germany takes place within the dank corridors of Hitler’s bunker. The sense of impending doom is palpable and, as much of it is based on the recollections of Hitler’s secretary, scenes like a wild champagne party to the backbeat of Russian artillery ring bizarrely true. Sadly for these guests, history was about to gatecrash.  

21.  The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)

Brothers in arms

Directors: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

Cast: Roger Livesey, Anton Walbrook, Deborah Kerr

‘[A] highly elaborate, flashy, flabby and costly film, the most disgraceful production that has ever emanated from a British film studio.’ That’s from a pamphlet entitled ‘The Shame and Disgrace of Colonel Blimp’, foisted on the ticket-buying public when Powell and Pressburger’s heartfelt biopic of a fictional British army officer was first released in 1943. The film’s great crime was to depict a German character in a positive light – indeed, to plead for understanding between two countries at war. It still feels like a brave move – and it lends a film that could’ve been fusty and traditionalist a genuine cutting edge.

20.  Ivan's Childhood (1962)

Scouting for boys

Director: Andrei Tarkovsky

Cast: Nikolai Burlyayev, Valentin Zubkov, Evgeny Zharikov

By the early 1960s, the bloom was off the war – WWII movies no longer needed to focus exclusively on square-jawed men nobly battling fascism. Heck, they might even suggest that the conflict took a toll on both sides. In Andrei Tarkovsky’s shimmering (and surprisingly short) debut, a boy stumbles into the headquarters of a Russian platoon on the Eastern front, claiming to have important information. It transpires that he’s a junior spy used by his own side, who play on his hatred for the German who murdered his family. Dreamlike and devastating, this was a new kind of war movie. 

19.  Where Eagles Dare (1968)

‘Broadsword calling Danny Boy...’

Director: Brian G. Hutton

Cast: Richard Burton, Clint Eastwood

Famous for the cinema’s best ever punch-up on a moving cable car, this behind-the-lines romp is also reputed to clock up the highest body count of any Clint Eastwood film, with hundreds of Germans throwing themselves headlong into a storm of lead. The plot serves up a string of icepick-sharp set-pieces but more importantly provides an excuse for Richard Burton and Clint to get out of their itchy, ill-fitting British togs and look sharp in German officers’ uniforms. Those Nazis: no moral compass, but what tailoring!  

18.  From Here to Eternity (1953)

Burt on the beach

Director: Fred Zinnemann

Cast: Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Deborah Kerr, Donna Reed, Frank Sinatra If all you remember is Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr rolling in the Hawaiian surf, it’s time to take another look at this hard-headed wartime drama set in the run-up to the attack on Pearl Harbour. Sure, it’s not as tough (or as foul-mouthed) as James Jones’s inflammatory source novel, but there’s still plenty that shocks in Fred Zinnemann’s adaptation: the adultery, the prostitution, the fact that Frank Sinatra can act. And the attack itself is a belter: lasting mere minutes on the screen, it’s got more punch than all three hours of Michael Bay’s awful Pearl Harbour .  

17.  Night And Fog (1956)

Director: Alain Resnais

Ten years after the liberation of the concentration camps, Alain Resnais made this mournful 32-minute documentary that offers as clear-sighted and painful an insight into the National Socialist mindset as any film before or since. Austerely constructed, the film simply juxtaposes German newsreel and films shot by the Allies as they liberated the camps with newly filmed shots of disused railway sidings, empty fields and husks of buildings where thousands lost their lives. As a yardstick for the gravity of Nazi atrocities, Resnais’s film takes some beating.  

16.  Listen to Britain (1942) and Fires Were Started (1943)

This is Britain, and it’s fine

Directors: Humphrey Jennings and Stewart McAllister

Cast: Chesney Allen, Bud Flanagan/William Sansomm George Gravett

At the beginning of WWII, all UK cinemas were closed. But Churchill’s cabinet quickly realised that not only were the movies a great way for a put-upon populace to relax, they were also a perfect channel for propaganda. But while Humphrey Jennings’s twin masterpieces may be unashamedly patriotic, they’re also two of the most inventive documentaries ever made. The former, co-directed with Stewart McAllister, is more sedate, a sort of Radio 4 with pictures, all twittering songbirds and the smack of leather on willow. Fires Were Started  is pitched between documentary and drama in its depiction of a day in the life of a fireman in the Blitz, but through all the banter there’s an inescapable sense of dread, of a city on the brink of collapse.

15.  The Dirty Dozen (1967)

Twelve angry men

Director: Robert Aldrich

Cast: Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Charles Bronson, Jim Brown  Foul-tempered, lusty and ludicrously enjoyable, this suicidal symphony to the futility of war fully deserves its status as ‘The Greatest Men-On-A-Mission Movie Ever Made.’ Quentin Tarantino says...   ‘The thing that’s just amazing about The Dirty Dozen , and why I don’t think it could ever be duplicated today, is the fact that you could never find eight actors like that now. It was just a different breed of man. Robert Aldrich threw a rock in a tree and Jim Brown fell out, Charles Bronson fell out, John Cassavetes fell out, and Telly Savalas… and that’s without even mentioning Lee Marvin. There aren’t guys like that running around anymore.’

14.  Rome, Open City (1945)

Spaghetti realism

Director: Roberto Rossellini

Cast: Aldo Fabrizi, Anna Magnani, Marcello Pagliero The wounds of European conflict and Nazi occupation were still tender in Rome in late 1944, which chimed with the documentary instincts of Italian filmmaker Roberto Rossellini. Rome, Open City  drew on real issues and situations during the years of conflict. Needless to say, the brutality of the occupying regime is presented with a shocking frankness, not only its indifference to class, age, gender and religion, but its total lack of logical purpose. Rossellini shot the film using leftover celluloid from other movies, which not only lent it a gritty newsreel aesthetic, but a real sense of urgency and anguish. Three years later he would tell a similar story from a different perspective in Germany, Year Zero .  

13.  Cross of Iron (1977)

Withdrawal method

Director: Sam Peckinpah

Cast: James Coburn, Maximilian Schell, James Mason Sam Peckinpah’s only war film follows a German platoon through the 1943 retreat on the Russian front. Sombre and claustrophobic photography and Peckinpah’s clear understanding of a working platoon of men are all far removed from the monotonous simplicity of most big-budget war films. Quentin Tarantino says:   ‘I’m a big fan of Cross of Iron , it’s really cool. I saw it the day it opened. I was a little boy; I didn’t know anything about the Russian front. I guess it went over my head, but I learned to appreciate it later. But one of the interesting things about Cross of Iron  is that it came and went in America, but it was such a huge hit in Europe that it actually inspired rip-offs for years, which I get a huge kick out of. And one of them is the movie that I took the name Inglourious Basterds  from.’

12.  Kanal (1956)

Tunnel vision

Director: Andrzej Wajda

Cast: Teresa Iżewska, Tadeusz Janczar, Wieńczysław Gliński Polish master director Andrzej Wajda’s second film follows the remnants of a ragtag platoon through the last days of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, beating a retreat in the face of German aggression. Left with no other option they take refuge in the sewers, where one by one they succumb to malnutrition, madness and death. Wajda lets us know from the very beginning what we’re up against, as a doom-laden voiceover informs us: ‘These are the tragic heroes. Watch them closely in the remaining hours of their lives.’ But he forces us to relate to these characters, sketching their personalities in subtle, effective strokes: the grim and desperate captain, the lovestruck youth, the out-of-place artist. Each is given a reason to live; that we know they won’t only makes us care more deeply.  

11.  Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

Before the bomb

Director: Isao Takahata

Cast: Tsutomu Tatsumi, Ayano Shiraishi

Studio Ghibli number-two Isao Takahata’s haunting animated drama adopts a template familiar from Ivan’s Childhood  and Come and See , offering a child’s-eye-perspective of wartime atrocities. But like his colleague Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbour Totoro  from the same year, it also expounds on the methods used by children to block out the horrors of the world (namely daydreaming, fantasy and unrealistic optimism). It cannot be overstated how heartbreaking and painful Grave of the Fireflies  is, following a boy and his toddler sister as they are forced to go it alone in the Japanese wilderness as US bombers lay waste to the cities. Roger Ebert rightly named it one of the greatest war movies ever made: once seen, it will never be forgotten.  

10.  The Big Red One (1980)

European vacation

Director: ​​Samuel Fuller

Cast: Lee Marvin, Mark Hamill, Robert Carradine The original Band of Brothers , and one of the most detailed and nourishing WWII flicks of them all (at least in its epic director’s cut). Essentially a memoir of director Sam Fuller’s own wartime experiences – and a fitting tribute to the men who served alongside him – the film takes in almost the entire European theatre, from North Africa to Italy and up into France, Germany and Czechoslovakia. But this is far from a straightforward shoot-’em-up, bringing in bizarre and often cruel humour, marvellous characterisation and one of the oddest war-movie scenes of them all, as our heroes assist with childbirth in the belly of a stranded tank.  

9.  A Matter of Life and Death (1946)

Stairway to heaven

Directors: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger 

Cast: David Niven, Roger Livesey, Raymond Massey Powell and Pressburger’s soaring story of love after death was initially inspired by a government request for a film emphasising the common ground between the UK and America as the latter entered the war. In the hands of just about any other filmmaking team this would probably have resulted in something fairly traditional: a lads-together-behind-enemy-lines actioner, perhaps. But in the hands of the most imaginative filmmakers this country has ever produced, such a straightforward narrative was unlikely. Starting in outer space and incorporating a fatal plane crash, French ghosts, naked pan-pipe playing children, brain surgery, feverish hallucinations, Abraham Lincoln, gushing romance and the halls of heaven itself, this is one of British film’s grandest fantasies.  

8.  The Cranes Are Flying (1957)

Mother Russia

Director: Mikhail Kalatozov

Cast: Tatyana Samojlova, Aleksey Batalov, Vasili Merkuryev Made in the wake of Stalin’s death, this visually rapturous masterpiece is more akin in tone to ’40s British morale boosters than Soviet propaganda pieces of the post-war period. The story – of young lovers torn apart and dragged where the currents of war pull them – bucked the prevailing trend towards willing sacrifice and noble collective spirit. Director Mikhail Kalatozov and cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky would go on to make Soy Cuba , and their singular, mesmeric photographic style is evident here too: a startling blend of audacious framing and hand-held intimacy that wouldn’t filter into Western cinema for years. 

7.  Dunkirk (2017)

Oh, we don’t like to be beside the seaside

Director: Christopher Nolan

Cast: Tom Hardy, Mark Rylance, Barry Keoghan, Fionn Whitehead

It’s often said that Christopher Nolan doesn’t do things the ordinary way. But Dunkirk , his visceral, fist-gnawingly tense ticking-clock, actually harks back to an era of war epics like The Longest Day  and A Bridge Too Far . Back then, casts were so colossal and the props budgets so enormous, you sometimes wondered if it wouldn’t be easier just declaring war for real. Nolan’s achievement is giving his film scale and intimacy at the same time. There’s not an inch of fat on its bones, just tommies, citizen sailors and the odd officer struggling bitterly for salvation in the face of extraordinary odds. 

6.  Went the Day Well?

Stiff lips and sharp axes

Director: Alberto Cavalcanti

Cast: Leslie Banks, Mervyn Johns, Basil Sydney

Those of us who grew up with national treasure Dame Thora Hird being frightfully lovely on the BBC can only watch in amazement as, at the climax of Alberto Cavalcanti’s masterful wartime chiller, she gamely starts picking off invading Nazis with a rusty old hunting rifle. The plot, in which a German parachutes into a sleepy English village and sets about clearing the way for a major invasion, may be fantasy, but it’s alarmingly powerful. Released before the Normandy landings, Went The Day Well?  was precision-tooled to remind all those bicycling bobbies, cheeky pub-dwelling chappies and self-satisfied lairds that they, too, may one day have to take on an entire paratroop division armed only with national pride and a malacca walking stick.

5.  Das Boot (1981)

Deeper and down

Director: Wolfgang Petersen

Cast: Jürgen Prochnow, Herbert Grönemeyer, Klaus Wennemann Originally made as a five-hour miniseries for German TV, cut to feature-length for worldwide consumption and finally expanded again to a 210-minute ‘director’s cut’, Wolfgang Petersen’s breathless, terrifying U-boat drama remains the most claustrophobic of all WWII movies. The film is a masterclass in economical, tight-space storytelling, piling the pressure on both characters and audience until the sprockets squeak. The infamous ‘tiefer…’ sequence, as captain Jürgen Prochnow pushes his sub to life-threatening depths, is still almost unwatchable.

4.  Shoah (1985)

The unvarnished truth

Director: Claude Lanzmann

Early in his nine-and-a-half hour Holocaust documentary, Claude Lanzmann asks a survivor why he is recalling the horror of his experience for the camera. “Because you’re insisting on it,” he answers. Lanzmann spent 11 years imploring witnesses to the atrocity—including the perpetrators—to share their memories. He does not offer closure or catharsis. His goal is only to get them on record while he can. He presses for the details and arranges them in no true narrative order and without any historical footage nor emotional manipulation. And yet, that is enough to make every minute crucial. Lanzmann’s accomplishment is in realizing that what matters most are the voices of those who were there. With the number of such voices dwindling, the importance of his insistence that they speak grows with each passing year.

3.  Schindler's List (1993)

In the ghetto

Cast: Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes, Caroline Goodall At the height of his blockbuster powers, it probably seemed unlikely, if not unwise, that Spielberg would tackle the Holocaust, even though he’d dabbled with its imagery in the past. (The Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark , for just one obvious example.) But his imprimatur made Schindler’s List a true cultural event, and his unparalleled facility with widescreen storytelling made the film among the most powerful of any that have ever grappled with the atrocity. Decades later, it’s Liam Neeson’s lead performance, as the German industrialist Oskar Schindler, that endures most. He manages to bring a deep humanism to the role of a businessman who keeps his empathy shrouded behind a veneer of capitalist opportunism – until, of course, the famously crushing denouement.

2.  The Thin Red Line (1998)

Fight or flight

Director: Terrence Malick

Cast: Sean Penn, Adrien Brody, Jim Caviezel, Ben Chaplin By the time of The Thin Red Line , Terrence Malick had been languishing in self-imposed exile for two decades while his first two films, Badlands  and Days of Heaven , grew in stature. So it was no surprise that on his return to filmmaking the Hollywood elite would line up to volunteer. Malick’s adaptation of James Jones’s memoir of the battle for Guadalcanal features Sean Penn, John Cusack, Nick Nolte, George Clooney, John Travolta and Woody Harrelson, with Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Sheen, Gary Oldman and Mickey Rourke left, amazingly, on the cutting room floor. The overriding theme in Malick’s work has always been the transition from youth to adulthood, from innocence to experience, from paradise to reality, and this is no exception. Malick paints the disputed island as a lost Eden, the two opposing armies as insignificant in the face of eternal nature. The soldiers are viewed as individuals, questing souls on their own ultimately destructive spiritual journeys, but also as mere facets of the natural world, no more important than the plants, birds and insects that surround them. It’s an extraordinary vision of war, and indeed of humanity – godlike but ultimately sympathetic, exploring not just hearts and minds, but the souls of men in combat.

1.  Come and See (1985)

About a boy

Director: Elem Klimov

Cast: Aleksei Kravchenko, Olga Mironova Making the infamous opening of Saving Private Ryan  look like a Sunday stroll in the park, Elem Klimov’s hallucinatory masterpiece feels like the nearest cinema has ever come to recreating the ruthlessly discombobulating sensory experience of war. After much deliberation, we thought it fitting to place this singular film at the top of our list, not just for its strikingly candid take on the human toll of warfare but as a work of sublime visual and aural intensity that uses every tool in the filmmaker’s arsenal to unforgettable and often nauseating effect. Come and See  is told from the perspective of Byelorussian lad Flyora (Aleksei Kravchenko), an army recruit whose plucky optimism is torn away as the platoon he’s inducted into are massacred. Forced to survive alone in the wilderness, he suffers unspeakable indignities at every turn. Klimov’s film argues convincingly that there are no heroes in war, only victims and perpetrators, and that no amount of guns and ammo will be able to reconcile the memory of the Holocaust. A disorienting, downbeat and unforgettable classic. 

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The 35 Best Time Travel Movies

Ready for 1.21 gigawatts of sci-fi greatness?

These are the 35 best sci-fi films that explore the fluidity of time.

🤯 You love mind-bending science. So do we. Let’s nerd out over it together.

35. Timecop

Jean-Claude Van Damme is a cop who polices time. Don’t need to say more, but I guess I will. In 1994, time travel becomes a favorite pastime of criminals, and timecops like Van Damme must catch any chronal abusers and bring them to justice. As is often the case, Van Damme’s own time-muckery with the past creates different and divergent timelines that not even Doc Brown’s chalkboard could work out. But Timecop isn’t exactly a film that’s going for narrative clarity here.

34. The Final Countdown / The Philadelphia Experiment

Although most people would file this film under “flop,” The Final Countdown contains such an amazing premise it has to be recognized. The crew of the U.S.S. Nimitz enters a storm vortex and is transported to Pearl Harbor in 1941, turning a favorite imaginary war-game scenario into real life. Although the actual film elements aren’t necessarily memorable, it does give us an incredibly good look at the Nimitz (the film was shot on the actual carrier).

We tossed in The Philadelphia Experiment at the same spot, since it’s essentially the reverse of The Final Countdown .

33. Men in Black 3

By the time director Barry Sonnenfeld directed Men in Black 3 in 2012, the franchise was 15 years removed from its fun and campy original, and Men in Black 2 had sucked out much of the charm. That’s why MiB 3 , despite its faults, is still a surprising underdog of a film.

Agent J (Will Smith) goes back in time to stop an alien from mucking up the past and killing Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones/Josh Brolin). The film recaptures much of the original’s fun, and Josh Brolin’s portrayal of a young Tommy Lee Jones playing Agent K is simply awe-inspiring. Honestly, that acting work alone earns this spot for MiB 3.

32. Flight of the Navigator

Sort of like E.T. , but with time travel. What Flight of the Navigator lacks in a substantial plot, it more than makes up for in charm.

David Scott Freeman falls into a ravine and is knocked unconscious—for eight years. Although he doesn’t age, everyone he knows does, and he soon finds he’s part of something much larger. It’s a fun film that will never outshine any Spielberg classics, but its campiness is too genuine to ignore.

31. Time After Time

H.G. Wells, Jack the Ripper, and time travel ... that’s it . Just click the arrow.

30. Timecrimes

A film with perhaps the lowest budget on this list, Timecrimes is a Spanish-language movie that follows a typical time travel trope (many copies of one person causing major problems) but creates 92 minutes of truly enjoyable cinema. The fun moments of Timecrimes are the reveal after reveal after reveal, which snowballs into a fascinating plot.

29. Source Code

Source Code is like Groundhog Day and Edge of Tomorrow with a twist. Instead of going back in time as himself, Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) enters the body of someone else as he tries to stop a mass murder attempt. What the film lacks in depth, it more than makes up for in pulse-pumping action, and the premise itself is a refreshing take on the usual time travel idea.

It will likely never be considered an example of high science fiction, but as far as time travel goes, it gets good grades.

28. Donnie Darko

Perfect amounts creepy and perplexing, Donnie Darko is another strange example of time travel, which is why it belongs on this list all the more. Darko (Gyllenhaal again) is a high school kid with a less-than-sunny disposition. But when he begins seeing frightening hallucinations of a deranged and grotesque rabbit, things slowly begin to unravel, going from bad to weird pretty quickly.

For such a small-budget film (that was almost released straight to home video!) it’s made an outsized impact on science fiction and indie filmmaking. It’s a great movie, but also a polarizing one.

27. Safety Not Guaranteed

Director Colin Trevorrow’s debut film Safety Not Guaranteed follows three journalists—well, one journalist and two interns—on a road trip to meet the eccentric Kenneth (Mark Duplass), who placed an ad in a local newspaper looking for a time-travel companion. Although at its heart a romantic comedy, the film explores human perception of time and the indelible regrets, traumas, and even fantasies that fill our memories. Although the idea of actual time travel plays a significant role in the film, it’s used mostly as a symbol to analyze the importance of being present and always looking with hope toward the future.

26. X-Men: Days of Future Past

Smashing together the old X-Men guard with the new is what makes X-Men: Days of Future Past one of the more successful cinematic outings for the mutant team.

In the film, Kitty Pryde sends Wolverine back through time to stop apocalyptic events from unfolding. Maybe that’s not the most original plot, but it’s one that’s too fun to resist (if only for the Quicksilver scene alone ).

25. Predestination

Based on Robert Heinlein’s sci-fi short story “All You Zombies,” Predestination is a head trip, like any proper time travel film should be. With a strong performance from Ethan Hawke and a script that will keep you guessing, the film is one of the more solid time travel entries in recent years and is a film that garners a rewatch so you can catch every detail.

24. Star Trek: First Contact

The Next Generation ’s big screen outings are a mixed bag, to put it nicely, but the best film by far is the time-bending Star Trek: First Contact . Jean-Luc Picard and the crew of the USS Enterprise-E travel to the past to prevent the cybernetic Borg from mucking with Earth’s history. It’s a good film all by itself, but even more excellent if you’re an invested Star Trek fan. We get to see huge, never-before-seen moments in the Star Trek universe, like humanity’s first encounter with the Vulcans, and the Borg are just an excellent adversary.

23. Army of Darkness

“Shop Smart. Shop, S-Mart.”

Depending on who you ask, Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness is either the best sequel to any film ever, or the worst—there isn’t much room in between. The chainsaw-toting Ashley “Ash” Williams is tossed back to medieval times where he must fight off a horde of undead monstrosities with only his ingenuity and his “boom stick.”

Even though it’s slapstick comedy with wonderfully B-movie action sequences, it remains an absolute joy to watch.

22. Doctor Strange

In this Marvel sleeper hit , Stephen Strange (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) becomes the Sorcerer Supreme, and in typical Marvel fashion, is tasked with saving the world. Although the visuals alone are worthing giving this movie a shot, its manipulation of time as a superpower rather than a world-altering plot device is what sets it apart from the rest.

21. Sleeper

Although not technically time travel (long stretches of cryo-sleep instead), Sleeper is Woody Allen’s sci-fi comedy that’s absurd, hilarious, and strangely poignant. Miles Monroe is a jazz musician and health-food-store owner who wakes up in the 22nd century after a botched gall bladder operation. The world is, as you’d expect, quite different, and Monroe is a hilarious character to explore it with.

Tenet is an “A for effort” addition to this list. The film has all the trappings of a Christopher Nolan flick—stunning cinematography, a star-studded cast, head-scratching plot points, etc., etc. And Tenet does take time travel movies one step further with the introduction of time inversion, the idea that objects and people can travel into the past at the same temporal pace that they can travel into the future. Although a fascinating concept, it’s also a confusing one, which is why Nolan spends much of the film’s 150-minute runtime explaining what’s going on. Tenet is a fascinating time travel story though ultimately one a bit lost in its own exposition.

19. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time

This 2006 award-winning anime is a coming-of-age time travel story that even rivals Back to the Future . After schoolgirl Mokoto Konno discovers a time travel device that gives her the power to leap through time, she uses her new gifts for mundane high school stuff, passing tests, avoiding awkward conversations, and to address her chronic lateness.

When she learns what her time traveling does to others around her, and as the seriousness of her time jumping becomes more apparent, the film blossoms into an important story about loss and friendship.

Crime noir meets science fiction in Rian Johnson’s Looper , and the match is magical. In a future where time travel is invented and immediately made illegal, crime syndicates use the technology for time-hopping assassinations. But to tie off some temporal inconsistencies, the assassin must eventually become the target—and that’s where things get interesting. This isn’t flawless sci-fi, but it’s certainly inventive.

17. Run Lola Run

On its surface, the German film Run Lola Run is about a blazingly red-headed woman running through the streets of Berlin in an attempt to save her boyfriend’s life. However, the twist is that once Lola reaches a dead-end (sometimes literally) in one of her runs, the film starts over from the beginning and Lola runs through Berlin once again, only this time small changes in her path create largely divergent outcomes by the film’s end. Although time is more of a thematic device than a strictly plot-driven one in Run Lola Run, its ruminations on time and the exploration of the Butterfly Effect , the idea that small incidents can have lasting repercussions, makes Run Lola Run one of the most unique films on this list.

16. Avengers: Endgame

What happens when the big purple monster man annihilates half the population? Time travel, baby. Tony Stark and gang concoct a convoluted plan that’ll save the universe from being cleaved in two, including some very inventive scenes that play with time travel. Like most time travel plots, Endgame creates more questions than it answers, but it’s best to just sit back and enjoy.

Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough. 

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Will Bedingfield

The Best Time Travel Movies of … All Time

Time—ravager of youth; spoiler of milk; humanity’s oldest and deadliest foe. Yet in films we can conquer time easily: running it forwards and backward, skipping into the future or past with a simple edit. Filmmakers constantly time travel, so it’s no coincidence that there are so many films where this trick becomes a plot conceit.

But unfortunately for their protagonists, the best time travel films often show us that time’s prison is inescapable. Even when these protagonists look like they’ve found a way out, from natural wormholes to heretical machines, their fates are usually shown to be predetermined: Often they end up stuck in time loops, or just dead. Time and death are close companions .

Of course, this chaos translates into mind-bending entertainment for the viewer, so without further ado, let us introduce our picks for the best time travel movies.

Terminator 1 and 2 are really quite different movies. In the first, Arnie—the terminator—is the bad guy. He’s sent back in time by our machine overlords to kill a woman who will give birth to a child that will lead the human resistance to victory. A human from said resistance is sent back to stop Arnie. It’s a dark and weird story: a classic action film made on a stringent budget. The second, in contrast, is a big-budget extravaganza, featuring perhaps the greatest special effects in movie history relative to their time. Here, Arnie, now a blockbuster star, demanded to play the good guy: He’s still a robot, but he’s defending the key kid from the icy, and more advanced, T-1000 robot.

The most famous art house film about time travel, La Jetée follows a man sent back from a post-World War III dystopia to save the future, and to find the truth behind a traumatic memory for his past. Only 28 minutes long, the film is a simple series of black and white photographs put to a hazy narrative, yet it's captivating. Terry Gilliam turned it into 12 Monkeys , a zany, colorful caper starring Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt, a similarly weird but tonally different film.

This modern sci-fi classic follows the alien “arrival” of giant, peaceful, ink-inscribing squids. Before geopolitical squabbles can escalate the situation into a nuclear exchange, Amy Adams must translate the squid’s inky pleas into American English. (Spoiler: It relates to time travel.) This visually stunning film is based on Story of Your Life , a short by Ted Chiang, one of the best living sci-fi writers. The movie is a great introduction to his writing.

A classic featuring Bill Murray at his laid-back best. Murray plays a jerkish newsman who wakes up one morning to find that he is stuck in a time loop on Groundhog Day (and, yes, that is where the term comes from). Fear gives way to joy as he realizes he is now an omniscient god. This then gives way to boredom as he lives out the same day an infinite number of times, and Murray must work out why he has been cursed. Still a moving and thoughtful comedy.

This is really the time travel movie to beat them all, if you really want to get into the nuts and bolts of time travel itself. Two engineers accidentally discover an “A-to-B” causal loop side effect: They can basically travel back a short distance of time, and begin to use it to make huge amounts of money on the stock market. What follows is a highly technical and philosophical take on the implications of time travel.

Looper is just an air tight, fantastic action film: a compelling world, sketched in just under two hours, with entertaining and interesting characters. Joseph Gordon Levitt plays a contract killer who kills and disposes of his targets in the past, in order to avoid detection in the future. Bruce Willis plays his older self, who Levitt is tasked to kill. The time travel aspect being realistic isn’t really the point of the film: Writer Rian Johnson contrasted it directly to Primer , where the rules of time travel are so important; Looper was intended instead as a character driven thriller.

One of the highest-grossing anime films of all time, Your Name is a slick, ever so slightly hollow affair, but undoubtedly fantastic entertainment. Two school kids swap bodies each night, bicker about wrecking each other's lives, then eventually fall in love. They must fight through time to save a town from an apocalyptic disaster. The animation is gorgeous, painterly and fluid, the music from Radwimps is brilliant earworm pop, and the story is a real tearjerker.

Where the time travel in Tenet was left largely unexplained, in Interstellar Nolan actually seems interested in teaching his audience, and does an admirable job depicting some of the implications of Einsteins’ theory of general relativity. The movie’s dialog can be a bit saccharine and vapid, but the visit to the mountain-high planet of waves, where years pass as minutes, is just a great piece of cinema, worth the price of entry alone.

A cult classic that rocketed Jake Gyllenhaal to massive fame. It’s one of those high concept films that bombards you with lore, but really isn't as smart as it thinks it is. It’s better to just sit back and let it wash over you, including, of course, Frank, the iconic black bunny rabbit, who tells Gyllenhaal the world will end in 28 days. It’s also an important artifact of a certain section of Millennial culture: any Gen Z cultural critic trying to understand Millennial neuroses should definitely add this film to their research.

The original Planet of the Apes is a deeply odd film—there’s something disconcerting about the apes now: the prosthetic makeup techniques by artist John Chambers were revolutionary at the time. But while the prequels with Andy Serkis are certainly more action packed, the original has got to make the list because it features the most iconic time travel “twist” in cinema. Charlton Heston’s final revelation as he smashes his fists into the beach at the film’s end has been parodied to death, most notably by The Simpsons . (Which also created a fantastic musical adaptation of the film.)

This story originally appeared on WIRED UK .  

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The 25 Greatest Time-Travel Movies Ever Made

It must say something, surely, about humans, how often time-travel movies are about returning to the past rather than jumping to the future. As Mark Duplass’s forlorn character says in Safety Not Guaranteed , “The mission has to do with regret.” With all the potential to explore the unknown world of the future, so often when our minds conspire to bend the rules of time it’s instead to rehash the old. It’s compelling to watch a character in a movie do what we cannot — right past wrongs or uncover the reason for or meaning behind the events in their lives, whether they be emotionally catastrophic or merely geopolitically motivated.

So absent is the future from the canon, in fact, that when it is involved, typically future dwellers are leaving their own time to come back to the present. Back to the Future Part II aside, it seems as if there’s something about going forward in time that just doesn’t track for humans. (Of course, you could argue that this is because the present-day concept of bidirectional time travel would infinitely multiply or change beyond recognition any future that may occur, but that’s a knot for another article.)

In any case, the time-travel stories deemed worthy of Hollywood budgets aren’t always straightforward in their mechanics. Some films on this list barely qualify as time-travel movies at all; others could hardly qualify as anything else. There are movies about trips through time but also ones about the bending and fracturing and muddying thereof; then there are those about, as Andy Samberg aptly puts it in Palm Springs , “one of those infinite time-loop situations you might have heard about.” There’s even a movie in which we get only 13 seconds’ worth of time travel, when it functions more like a joke whose punch line hits at the film’s climax.

What these films all do have in common is a fascination with changing the way time works. That being said, the list leaves out movies in larger, more extended franchises in which time meddling is a one-off dalliance thrown into a sequel with little by way of foreshadowing: think Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban , Avengers: Endgame , and Men in Black III . (It also leaves off perhaps the Ur-time-travel movie, Primer , and the quite good Midnight in Paris because their directors don’t deserve the column inches.) We’re looking at self-contained stories using time mechanics from the start, with preference given to those that involve themselves more intently with the ins and outs of time travel; that ask questions about time, aging, memory and so forth; and that try to succeed at it in new and interesting ways. So let’s get to it.

25. Galaxy Quest (1999)

Does Galaxy Quest really count as a time-travel movie? Some compelling reasons argue that it doesn’t: Time travel isn’t a major factor in the plot, and the time traveling that does occur is, yes, only a 13-second jump. But its use of time travel is meaningful insofar as the movie itself is a loving spoof of Star Trek , which makes use of time travel in three films ( one of which made this list ), not to mention dozens of episodes across its various TV iterations. Tacking on time travel as a deus ex machina for the actors in a Star Trek– like show pressed into service as an actual space crew by an endangered alien race is the exact right amount of ribbing in a movie that’s as on point as it is hilarious.

Galaxy Quest is available to rent on Amazon .

24. Happy Death Day (2017)

Pick away at the surface of a time-loop movie and you find a horror movie. Most of the entries on this list are covered in enough feel-good spin to land as comedies, but Happy Death Day stares the horror of the time-loop phenomenon right in the face. (It’s also quite funny.) Reliving the same day over and over is an unimaginably potent form of psychological torture, and adding murder to the equation does little to dull that edge. The film follows a college-age protagonist struggling to escape from a masked slasher hell-bent on killing her again and again while she tries to solve the mystery of how she got stuck in a time loop.

Happy Death Day is available to rent on Amazon .

23. Back to the Future Part II (1989)

Seriously, this may be the only good movie in which the film’s whole focus is using a time machine to travel into the future. The fact that it’s a sequel is telling — the characters already traveled into the past in the first movie , and the filmmakers decided to save “traveling even further into the past“ for the third film in the trilogy. Still, Back to the Future Part II is a fun time that makes great use of sight gags and references, recasting scenes from the first film in the distant future year of 2015 with all its hoverboards and self-lacing Nikes.

Back to the Future Part II is available to rent on Amazon .

22. See You Yesterday (2019)

It’s a dirty little secret of time-travel movies that they tend to be, well, pretty white. Tenet ’s Protagonist aside, if Hollywood’s sending someone through time, they’re almost certainly not a Black person, and for obvious reasons: Most of post-contact North American history is deeply unfriendly to people of color, and the problems a person running around out of time and place is going to encounter are deeply compounded if they’ll likely be the target of racist abuse or violence — which makes See You Yesterday all the more compelling. Produced by Spike Lee and featuring one of filmdom’s most famous time travelers in a cameo role, it follows a Black teenage science prodigy who uses a time machine to try to save her brother from being killed by a police officer.

See You Yesterday is streaming on Netflix .

21. Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)

No offense to the Back to the Future franchise, but time travel never looks more fun on film than it does in the first Bill & Ted movie. It’s a concept that feels distinctly of a different era, so pure is its zaniness, that it’s hard to imagine anyone concocting it today. The titular duo, Californian high-school students in the ’80s, travel through the past looking for historical figures in order to ace a history project, then bring them all back to the present. High jinks ensue! We get Genghis Khan in a sporting-goods store and Mozart on an electric keyboard. What more could you want?

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is streaming on HBO Max .

20. Source Code (2011)

Time-travel-film aficionados know this won’t be Jake Gyllenhaal’s only stop on this list, but no matter. Source Code finds him repeating the same eight minutes over and over as he struggles to find the culprit in a train bombing — with each replay ending in his own death by explosion. For some reason, a romantic subplot is shoehorned into this, along with a bunch of frankly unnecessary technical mumbo-jumbo, but the core idea is a compelling mix of the time-loop movie and the train whodunit that Gyllenhaal is a perfect fit for.

Source Code is available to rent on Amazon .

19. 12 Monkeys (1995)

Some sort of law of nature dictates that every genuinely good idea and/or piece of true art has to at some point be turned into a Hollywood movie. Thank God La Jetée was adapted into something that can stand on its own feet artistically. 12 Monkeys may not retain its source material’s black-and-white look or stripped-down, static-image presentation, but it is a rollicking good time nonetheless. That’s in no small part due to director Terry Gilliam getting the best out of Bruce Willis and a young Brad Pitt, and recasting World War III as a planet-decimating virus. Which, like at least one other movie on this list , “speaks to the present moment,” or whatever.

12 Monkeys is available to rent on Amazon .

18. Run Lola Run (1998)

Unlike almost all of the other films on this list, the terms time travel and time machine don’t show up anywhere in Run Lola Run . Rather, it’s a sort of de facto time-loop scenario in which the protagonist tries repeatedly to pay a ransom to save her boyfriend’s life. In fact, if not for a few key details, it could easily be characterized (and often has been) as an alternate-endings movie rather than a time-travel film. But the fact that Lola seems to be learning from her past attempts with each successive one suggests that she is, indeed, using knowledge gained from previous loops to bring a satisfactory end to this situation.

Run Lola Run is available to rent on Amazon .

17. Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

One of the most striking things about Groundhog Day is the mutability and replicability of its core conceit. Perhaps the best case in point is Edge of Tomorrow , sometimes known as Live. Die. Repeat. after its original tagline. It’s the kind of physically grueling movie only an actor as genuinely unhinged as Tom Cruise could pull off. A noncombatant thrust into a war against invading aliens, Cruise’s character finds himself reliving day one of combat over and over, slowly but surely refining his techniques in order to survive the extraterrestrial onslaught. Like the central twosome in the much less violent Palm Springs , he winds up with a partner in (war) crime, teaming up with the similarly time-trapped Emily Blunt, and the explanation for the replay glitch here is actually pretty satisfying.

Edge of Tomorrow is streaming on Fubo TV .

16. Star Trek (2009)

If you could create some sort of an advanced stat to measure controversy generated per unit of interesting filmmaking decisions, J.J. Abrams would have to be near the top in terms of his ability to rig up movie drama from almost nothing. This is a guy whose filmography is like Godzilla rip-off, Spielberg homage, safe reboot of cherished IP, repeat. Star Trek may be his best film, though, a sure-footed reinvention of a dorky sci-fi franchise that made it, well, cool. Somehow, the beauty of Spock and Kirk’s bromance being woven through chance encounters with future selves kind of … works?

Star Trek is available to rent on Amazon .

15. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006)

There’s a relative dearth of time travel in animated film, which perhaps is a function simply of the fact that it’s less impressive to stage in a world that’s already unreal. If you can Looney Tunes your way through physics, what’s so special about grabbing the flow of time and tying it into a bow? Still, the original Girl Who Leapt Through Time deserves mention here. It’s a beautiful story that interlaces the complexity of time leaping with the intensity of teenage emotion and the thorny process of growing up where the opportunity to redo things leads, over time, to growth — a less shitty Groundhog Day , in a way.

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is available to rent on Amazon .

14. Safety Not Guaranteed (2012)

She may not be the most famous, decorated, or emulated actress of her generation, but Aubrey Plaza is someone whose personality spoke to the irony-soaked 2010s in a way that simply could not be denied. Her character on Parks and Recreation , April Ludgate, was, by all accounts, created specifically to channel Plaza’s real-life personality to the screen, and she plays essentially the same character in Safety Not Guaranteed . Here, she’s a sarcastic intern at a magazine working on a story about a would-be time traveler and using her feminine wiles to slowly gain his trust. The chemistry between Plaza and Mark Duplass is probably the film’s high point; the subplot about the FBI feels like it was clipped out of a bad X-Files episode.

Safety Not Guaranteed is streaming on Tubi .

13. La Jetée (1962)

At only a 28-minute run time, La Jetée is arguably too short to merit inclusion on this list. However, what it lacks in content (and in, well, moving images; it’s almost exclusively a collection of static black-and-white shots set to voice-over), it more than makes up for in inventiveness and influence, and it would be a travesty to leave it out in favor of more recent by-the-book fare. Tracing the tale of a man held prisoner in post-WWIII Paris being used in time-travel experiments as his captors seek to remedy the postapocalyptic state of the world, he’s sent into both the future and the past and ends up unraveling a lifelong personal mystery while he’s at it.

La Jetée is streaming on the Criterion Channel .

12. Planet of the Apes (1968)

Unlike the worse but more straightforwardly time-traveling Tim Burton remake, the relationship between the original Planet of the Apes and time travel is inexact — technically, the astronaut crew that lands on the titular planet does travel forward 2,000 years, but it’s not done via a time machine. The travel isn’t instantaneous: It literally does take them 2,000 years to get there; they’re just unconscious and on life support. Still, the way the film’s ending handles the iconic reveal is exactly in line with the best of the time-travel canon, the telescoping, mise en abyme feeling of the world shifting in front of your very eyes without your moving an inch.

Planet of the Apes is available to rent on Amazon .

11. Groundhog Day (1993)

The famous Bill Murray vehicle essentially invented the infinite-time-loop genre (and it’s hardly a movie that succeeds on the strength of its concept alone), but the idea at its core is so steeped in the casual misogyny of late-’80s and early-’90s cinema that it’s hard to watch today without cringing. Murray’s character employing what amounts to PUA-style techniques over and over and over in a desperate bid to fuck his hapless co-worker just doesn’t hit the way it did back then. If the story arc didn’t present a guy detoxifying himself of the worst aspects of masculinity in order to be worthy of a woman’s love as the primary way for a 20th-century white man to achieve full personhood, this would be much higher on the list.

Groundhog Day is streaming on Starz .

10. Predestination (2014)

This is probably the most complicated film on the list. Following a “temporal agent” (played by Ethan Hawke) who’s trying to prevent a bombing in 1970s New York, it’s based on a Robert A. Heinlein short story and features Shiv Roy herself, Sarah Snook, in a star-making turn as someone with a complicated backstory and a secret. Like the best sci-fi, the film’s premise raises all kinds of fascinating questions about the titular concept and throws in some interesting musings on sex, gender, and the self in the process.

Predestination is streaming on Tubi .

9. Looper (2012)

Wes Anderson gets a lot of flak for his overwrought twee visuals, but Rian Johnson has a knack for making movies that feel and function like dioramas even if they don’t look it. Narratively speaking, everything here is constructed just so — and there’s a certain beauty in that — but who ever had a profound experience of art by looking at a diorama? Looper was probably Johnson’s least precious pre– Star Wars film, which is nice because the temptation to drastically overmaneuver the mechanics of a time-travel story can lead to disaster. The tech used to Bruce Willis–ify Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s face is distracting, and the third act’s retreat from the postapocalyptic city of the future to the postapocalyptic corn farm of the future is a brave choice that the film struggles to land. Still, Johnson’s vision of a future in which organized crime runs time travel is compelling and well worth a watch.

Looper is streaming on Netflix .

8. Donnie Darko (2001)

Donnie Darko is a bit of a genre mash-up. Part high-school movie, part sci-fi flick, part bleak meditation on the soullessness of late-’80s America, it’s nevertheless a weirdly successful piece of filmmaking that makes fantastic use of a young Jake Gyllenhaal, a great supporting cast (Maggie Gyllenhaal, Drew Barrymore, Jena Malone, and Patrick Swayze among others), and an absolutely iconic haunting cover of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World.” Watching high schoolers navigate parallel universes, wormholes, and time travel is a dicey proposition, but director Richard Kelly makes it work, somehow.

Donnie Darko is streaming on HBO Max .

7. Back to the Future (1984)

While it’s clearly superior to the sequel (and leagues ahead of the final film in the trilogy), the original Back to the Future is a bit of a mess (John Mulaney was right , to be honest). Its racial and gender politics are cringey, and the incest subplot is weird (“It’s your cousin Marvin. Marvin Pornhub . You know that new plot element you’ve been looking for?”), but there’s a clear interest in time travel beyond its shimmering surface: the very real addressing of the “grandfather problem” in time travel via the slow disappearance of Marty from his family photo, the accidental invention of rock music, and a genuine curiosity about the nuts-and-bolts mechanics of time machines. Ahh, what the hell. It’s a romp.

Back to the Future is available to rent on Amazon .

6. Palm Springs (2020)

No offense to Gen-Xers and boomers, but the best time-loop movie of all time is Palm Springs . The film isn’t without its missteps, but it’s much more curious about life than Groundhog Day was through the eyes of Murray’s misanthrope. Cristin Milioti and Andy Samberg‘s characters, stuck in the loop together, are a perfect comedic match, and their shared humanity makes for a beautiful arc. The film raises questions about what’s worth doing in life when nothing lasts and how to stay sane when every day is the same. Of course, as a sort of polar opposite of Tenet , it benefited from coming out during the pandemic by speaking, as it does, to the experience of lockdown.

Palm Springs is streaming on Hulu .

5. Tenet (2020)

Interstellar wasn’t enough for Chris Nolan, apparently. Tenet ’s legacy may end up being little more than that of the COVID action movie no one saw — a bloated thriller that Nolan fought to get into theaters and bar from home viewing reportedly to swell the size of his own pockets. It really did suffer from bad timing, though, because this is genuinely a quintessential big-screen popcorn movie whose absurdity is all the more palatable when it’s given the audiovisual bombast it deserves. Ambitious in scope as it traces a war on the past by the future (yes, you read that right), Tenet is as enamored of action tropes as it is in bucking them, and its investment in rendering visible the brain-bendingly knotty mechanics of moving through time is laudable, even when the movie itself remains opaque — as impenetrable as the future, as hazy as the past.

Tenet is streaming on HBO Max .

4. The Terminator (1984)

A partner to Blade Runner in the mid-’80s invention of sci-fi noir, The Terminator is a stunning film in many ways, despite the third act’s now-iffy visual effects. While it’s not James Cameron’s debut, and it would go on to be bested by its sequel , it functions as an incredible showcase for an emerging young director who would exclusively make big stories for the rest of his career. Arnold Schwarzenegger is perfectly cast as the relentless, unemotional killer cyborg sent back from the future to terminate the mother of the eventual resistance leader, and the film’s romantic subplot has just the perfect amount of time-travel-induced cheesiness for it to work.

The Terminator is streaming on Amazon Prime Video .

3. Interstellar (2014)

It’s not inaccurate to say Christopher Nolan is a director who’s more interested in scale and scope than in expressing the minutiae of the human experience in its purest form. But in Interstellar, a Nolan movie in its titular ambitions, there’s a core element of time travel wrought not as sci-fi fireworks but as a paean to the sheer force and will of the power of love. It both does and doesn’t work, depending on your capacity for cheese in space, but even besides that, Nolan’s use of time as story arc — the way Miller’s planet functions, in particular — is conceptually masterful in the best kind of time-travel-movie way.

Interstellar is streaming on Paramount+ .

2. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

Whereas the franchise’s first movie spends more time on the question of time travel, in the second it takes a bit of a back seat to the action itself. It’s hard to fault director James Cameron for this decision; T2 remains one of the best action movies of the ’90s and — along with Jurassic Park and The Matrix — one of the decade’s best when for special effects. The groundbreaking T-1000 would honestly be enough to get this movie on the list; a tween John Connor grappling with questions of predestination and the fact that he is vicariously responsible for his own conception feel almost like icing on the time-travel cake. Much as in 12 Monkeys , time travel here is mistaken for delusion, as valiant Sarah Connor, in a Cassandra-esque nightmare, has to battle against the future only she knows is coming. Of course, Cassandra never had access to any firepower stored in underground desert arsenals.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day is streaming on Netflix .

1. Arrival (2016)

It’s fair to wonder whether Arrival really is, in fact, a time-travel movie. The Ted Chiang short story it’s based on isn’t about time travel per se; rather, it’s an exploration of alternate forms of temporal understanding. The linguist protagonist, played by Amy Adams, doesn’t travel through time so much as come to experience it differently. Still, the plot ends up hinging on foreknowledge that she is granted not via visions but by actually experiencing her future simultaneously with her present and past. For our purposes, though, that’s time fuckery enough to merit inclusion, and boy howdy does the film deliver in overall quality. Partly, that’s simply a question of the source material. Chiang is arguably the most talented (and possibly the most decorated) American sci-fi writer of his generation. But the source story is not especially Hollywood friendly, and director Denis Villeneuve has adopted it lovingly, borrowing a plot device from another of Chiang’s stories, the more straightforwardly time-travel-based “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” in order to add some third-act blockbuster flavor. The result is a beautiful meditation on love, choice, and courage that packs art-film ethos into a genuine sci-fi blockbuster.

Arrival is streaming on Hulu and Paramount+ .

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CinemaBlend

10 World War II Movies And Where They Take Place

Posted: June 24, 2024 | Last updated: June 24, 2024

World War II was exactly as it was billed, fought all over the world. World War II movies, of which there are many, are set across the world as well. Across Europe, Africa, and Asia, if there was fighting, there is probably a movie about it. Here is a list of some of those many movies -- some of which are among the best war movies of all time -- and where they took place.

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The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is like an origin story for Guy Ritchie’s whole thing

Now available on digital release and 4K, the Henry Cavill movie takes Ritchie’s gentleman thugs back to basics

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Share All sharing options for: The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is like an origin story for Guy Ritchie’s whole thing

British movie director Guy Ritchie loves nothing more than the collision of class and thuggery. It’s like catnip to him. In movies like Snatch and 2019’s The Gentlemen , he thrives on putting plummy toffs next to venal crims and seeing what happens — or combining the two. This is the director who turned Sherlock Holmes into a pugilist , after all. His idea of Englishness encompasses the wood-paneled manor and the stinking fish market, but nothing in between. His idea of masculinity is Vinnie Jones, the foul-mouthed, brutal Cockney soccer player, but dressed like a country squire, with a hunting shotgun in the crook of his arm.

Ritchie has actually made all kinds of movies in all kinds of modes, from the rom-com Swept Away to Disney’s live-action Aladdin remake . But he remains defined by the tone he set in his first two films, 1998’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and 2000’s Snatch — laddish crime capers that at the time felt like a Britpop answer to Quentin Tarantino. These movies pinned down a regional genre that Ritchie’s former collaborator Matthew Vaughn later supercharged into something more stylized and ironized, especially in the cartoonish, James Bond-baiting Kingsman series of spy flicks .

Because Ritchie’s early movies loom so large, and because his legacy and Vaughn’s have been so muddled together, it’s natural to expect Ritchie’s World War II film The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare to play in similarly over-the-top fashion, like a mix of Kingsman and Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds . The title and trailer of the movie, which is now available on DVD, 4K UHD, and on demand, seem to suggest that, too.

But Ritchie isn’t that kind of director anymore, if he ever was. In the last few years, he’s reined in his stylistic flourishes, dialed down his budgets, and settled into a comfortable rhythm as a fast-moving genre workhorse, cranking out well-crafted, efficient, unvarnished films at a pace that should impress even Steven Soderbergh. Ungentlemanly Warfare is one of these: a brisk, no-nonsense wartime adventure as clipped as the posh accent of its star, Henry Cavill. It’s got more in common with the original 1967 version of The Dirty Dozen than with Tarantino’s postmodern take on it .

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare ’s premise is that Winston Churchill himself (Rory Kinnear) commissions a deniable black ops mission to a neutral West African port, with the goal of destroying the supply lines feeding the Nazi U-boats that have a stranglehold on the Atlantic. This actually happened; it was called Operation Postmaster , and Ritchie’s movie is based on Damien Lewis’ nonfiction book about it . Many of the film’s characters, including Cavill’s Captain Gus March-Phillipps, are real people, but the story has been very heavily fictionalized.

In Ritchie’s version, March-Phillipps is an unruly loose cannon who just happens to have the perfect manners of the old Etonian he is. (The real March-Phillipps was supposedly one of Ian Fleming’s models for James Bond; Slow Horses ’ Freddie Fox plays Fleming in the movie, in his days as a naval intelligence officer.) March-Phillipps is tasked with putting together a commando team of similarly reckless ne’er-do-wells to carry out Churchill’s plan. He assembles a group whose chiseled good looks and extreme muscle definition are only matched by their impeccable sang-froid.

In truth, they’re a more forgettable bunch than is ideal for a movie like this, with the exception of ginormous actor Alan Ritchson ( Reacher ) as Anders Lassen — though he’s memorable for both good and bad reasons. Ritchson’s brutal fight scenes are among the movie’s biggest pleasures, but the film’s biggest shock comes when you realize he’ll be doing that terrible Danish accent for the whole story.

There isn’t much more to relate about this extremely simple film. There’s a sadistic Nazi bad guy played by Til Schweiger. There are a couple of intrepid spies (Eiza González and Babs Olusanmokun) who almost have more to do than the commandos themselves, and definitely have more charisma. Kinnear underplays Churchill, and unfortunately, so does his makeup. Ritchie includes one of those rather sad scenes that attempts to set up a movie franchise you just know will never come to pass.

The dialogue (by Ritchie and three other screenwriters) is lumpy and unconvincing, but that’s not why anyone watches a film like this. It’s a romp, disposable but sturdily made, with satisfyingly blunt action scenes that have been framed by a true master. Lots of things blow up, Ritchson murders many a Nazi, and Cavill sticks his tongue out while firing a machine gun. (Remember when he fired one one-handed while leaning out of a helicopter in Mission: Impossible - Fallout ? Has anyone other than Arnie looked better handling a machine gun on screen? I don’t think so.)

Ungentlemanly Warfare is a serviceable action movie, and its plainness is, paradoxically, the most interesting thing about it. At one point, Cavill persuades a local African warlord (Danny Sapani) to join his mission, essentially by pointing out that they both went to Eton. Their connection is laden with social, racial, and colonial baggage, but Ritchie makes nothing more of it than a celebration of this ancient brotherhood of privileged bullies. Old Etonians know when something’s just not cricket, and they’ll bloody well roll their sleeves up and slaughter whoever gets in their way if they need to, won’t they, old chap?

Forgive me; as a Brit who’s spent the last 14 years living under the casually cruel rule of exactly this breed of entitled, stiff-upper-lip, overgrown schoolboy, I can do without it. Ungentlemanly Warfare modernizes and diversifies the archetype’s self-glorifying narrative a bit, but without really examining it. Ritchie seems happy to have found a straightforward, harmonized historical origin point for his manly ideal of well-bred thugs — and never mind all that problematic stuff about Empire.

He can do better. I prefer his current Netflix series The Gentlemen , adapted from his 2019 film, about a young duke who discovers that his inherited estate comes with a profitable marijuana farm attached. That series is just as obsessed with the collision of class and violence; in the first episode, “Refined Aggression,” Giancarlo Esposito delivers a speech — almost a manifesto — that perfectly distills the Ritchie aesthetic. (“People either survive in the jungle or exist in the zoo; few recognize the significance of the paradoxical reconciliation of the two.”) Netflix’s The Gentlemen is mostly played for broad comedy and thrills. But in its modern setting, it finds some interesting, inverted power dynamics among its cast of toffs, gangsters, and ruthless moneymen — and it’s almost satirical in the way it portrays them.

Guy Ritchie knows his patch. In The Gentlemen , he rakes it over thoroughly, turning up new material. In The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare , he retreats into its comforting lies to spin another yarn about chaps who are a bit naughty, and jolly good at killing. Both of these projects are entertaining enough while they last, but only one of them bears thinking about afterward.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is now available for rental or purchase on Amazon , Vudu , and other digital platforms, and on DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K SteelBook .

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The 22 best World War II movies of all time

The Greatest Generation provided inspiration for some of the most compelling moments in cinema history. Here are the best World War II movies to educate and entertain you.

Ilana Gordon is an entertainment, culture, and comedy writer originally from Connecticut. She currently lives in Los Angeles.

The six years of global conflict that constituted World War II transformed the world politically, culturally, and technologically — and paved the way for some of the most provocative, engaging, and horrifying pieces of cinema ever created. From classics like Casablanca (1942) to recent Oscar winners such as Oppenheimer (2023) and The Zone of Interest (2023), the films on this list pay homage to the battles fought on land and sea and in the air. They also document the extremist minds that helped design and execute the Holocaust, and tell the stories of the innocent people who survived or perished in concentration camps.

From those who lost their lives fighting on behalf of others, to unsung heroes, to those who made it home but were unable to free themselves from the mental shackles of their experiences, the movies and filmmakers featured on this list ensure the tragedies and traumas of WWII will never be forgotten. With the 80th anniversary of D-Day only recently behind us, here is an opportunity to take in some of the best WWII films of all time.

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

Released a year after the end of the war, The Best Years of Our Lives is an epic film about three soldiers who return home and soon realize their families are irrevocably changed. William Wyler 's nearly three-hour masterpiece was both timely and timeless, with a smart script and a full range of emotional depth. The movie took home seven Academy Awards , including Best Picture and an Honorary Oscar for actor Harold Russell for "bringing hope and courage to his fellow veterans." —Robert English

Where to watch The Best Years of Our Lives : Amazon Prime Video

The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

Long before he was dueling Darth Vader in Star Wars , Sir Alec Guinness starred in this tour de force WWII film as Colonel Nicholson, a British POW who, with his unit, is tasked with building a railway bridge across the river Kwai in occupied Burma while Allied forces plan to destroy it. The film is grand on every level, delving into the gray areas of war with a bombastic final act that rivals action scenes today. Director David Lean is perhaps the king of 20th-century historical epics ( Lawrence of Arabia , Doctor Zhivago ), but The Bridge on the River Kwai was his first foray into the genre, one that would lay the groundwork for his legacy. —R.E.

Where to watch The Bridge on the River Kwai : Amazon Prime Video (to rent)

Casablanca (1942)

Despite boasting some of the best quotes in all of cinematic history,  Casablanca  was just one of many films churned out by the studio system in the early years of World War II. But something about the movie's heart-wrenching love triangle, political and social relevance, and lush setting charmed viewers, propelling the project to an unexpected Best Picture win, and a permanent spot on almost every "best of" list. Electricity rations were common at the time of the movie's release, but entirely unnecessary — the undeniable sparks between stars  Humphrey Bogart  and  Ingrid Bergman  had to have been strong enough to generate power for a small city, at the very least.  —Ilana Gordon

Where to watch  Casablanca : Max

Come and See (1985)

Few films have captured the horrific experiences of war as vividly and poetically as director Elim Kilmov's 1985 picture. Come and See follows Flyora, a young Belarusian boy who joins the Soviet resistance against German forces after finding an old rifle. Atrocities await the child soldier at every turn, as he endures unimaginable suffering through a lens that's somehow both surreal and all too real. Drawn from the personal experiences of Kilmov and co-writer Ales Adamovich, Come and See is a truly terrifying spectacle — and it's one of the most poignant anti-war films ever made. —R.E.

Where to watch Come and See : Amazon Prime Video (to rent)

Das Boot (1981)

Wolfgang Peterson 's war epic (translated to The Boat ) depicts the claustrophobic world of a German U-boat during the Battle of the Atlantic. The film was shot in chronological order over the course of a year to capture a pale, bearded crew hardened by months at sea that feel like a lifetime. The result brings stunning realism to the terror and conditions of naval warfare, with intense action sequences and a great eye for detail. Even at two-and-a-half hours, Das Boot is a relentless, emotional ride that grows grimmer by the minute. —R.E.

Where to watch Das Boot : Amazon Prime Video (to rent)

Downfall (2004)

Downfall recounts the final days of Adolf Hitler and his entourage in their fatalistic bunker as the Soviets close in on Berlin. Bruno Ganz — who was originally hesitant to take on the role — brings complex depth to the Führer, so much so that the film received backlash for humanizing one of history's worst dictators. Still, it was released to critical and financial success, earning a nomination for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars. Director Oliver Hirschbiegel relied on eyewitness accounts and historical records to ensure accuracy while tackling the unthinkable: exploring the many dimensions of a man whose evil knows no bounds. —R.E.

Where to watch Downfall : Peacock

Dunkirk (2017)

Christopher Nolan puts on a structural master class in Dunkirk , one of the filmmaker’s shortest works to date. A World War II epic that chronicles the British Army’s strategic evacuation of thousands of soldiers from the Dunkirk beaches, the film combines multiple perspectives from those on the land, in the air, and at sea. Based on real events from 1940 and communicated with limited dialogue, Dunkirk is not your typical Hollywood war story: There are no Americans involved, the heroes retreat rather than prevail, and Harry Styles is there. Nolan’s large-scale production was well-recognized by the Academy, taking home three trophies in production categories and receiving eight nominations total, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Cinematography. —I.G.

Where to watch Dunkirk : Amazon Prime Video (to rent)

Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

Studio Ghibli , the hallowed film company behind animated classics like My Neighbor Totoro ( 1988), Spirited Away (2001), and Howl's Moving Castle (2004), is known for its mystical creatures and fantastical worlds. But in 1988, writer-director Isao Takahata cast aside the feel-good formula and created this heart-wrenching tale of two siblings trying to survive in Japan as World War II draws to a close. In a world where animated movies can sometimes be regarded as vapid pieces of children's entertainment, Grave of the Fireflies remains one of the most visually stunning and emotionally moving genre films of all time, no matter your age. Make sure to bring tissues for this one. —R.E.

Grave of the Fireflies is presently not available to watch or rent.

The Great Escape (1963)

An epic World War II classic highlighting the resiliency of the human spirit,  The Great Escape  is a 1963 adventure film directed by John Sturges and starring an ensemble cast led by  Steve McQueen ,  Richard Attenborough , and James Garner. Loosely based on the true story of a mass escape from a German POW camp — and crafted with many narrative concessions intended to appease American viewing audiences — the action unfolds like a heist movie as a group of British soldiers plots to free 250 men from detention at great risk to their lives. The film was mostly overlooked on the awards circuit, only winning one Oscar for Best Film Editing, but it was a hit at the box office and with critics and remains one of the most enduring WWII films to this day.  —I.G.

Where to watch The Great Escape : Amazon Prime Video (to rent)

The Imitation Game (2014)

The Imitation Game proves that mathematics can be just as tense and interesting as warfare. Based on the book by Andrew Hodges, the film stars Benedict Cumberbatch as the ingenious Alan Turing, a British cryptographer who attempts to crack German intelligence codes while coming to terms with his sexuality. The well-written script shines a light on a lesser-known pocket of WWII history, and its stirring acting makes this period drama all the more memorable. Cumberbatch received his first Oscar nod working alongside a cast of British acting elite including Keira Knightley , Mark Strong , Rory Kinnear , and Charles Dance . —R.E.

Where to watch The Imitation Game : Netflix

Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Bloody shootouts, quippy dialogue, historical revisionism — it's trademark Quentin Tarantino at his best. Inglourious Basterds follows a group of Jewish US Soldiers led by a fearless lieutenant as they plot to assassinate Nazi leaders while a French theater owner pursues her own revenge. The two-and-a-half hour runtime races by as we're treated to audacious, history-defying scenes and nail-biting confrontations. The cast includes the likes of Brad Pitt , Diane Kruger , and Melanie Laurent , but stealing the show is Christoph Waltz in his Oscar-winning performance as Colonel Hans Landa, who Tarantino called the "best character I've written and maybe the best I ever will write." —R.E.

Where to watch Inglourious Basterds : Amazon Prime Video (to rent)

Jojo Rabbit (2019)

It's definitely a bold choice for a director to portray Adolf Hitler as a playful imaginary friend to a 10-year-old Nazi boy, but Taika Waititi managed to pull it off. Jojo Rabbit follows Jojo, played by the adorable Roman Griffin Davis as a devoted Hitler Youth who finds out his less-than-ardent mother ( Scarlett Johansson ) is hiding a Jewish girl in their walls. The Thor: Love and Thunder (2022) helmer passionately directs a story that's both hopeful and deeply tragic, putting children at the forefront of a world undergoing dramatic change. With vibrant colors, complex characters, and an upbeat soundtrack, Jojo Rabbit is an endlessly entertaining satire that you'll enjoy with every rewatch. —R.E.

Where to watch JoJo Rabbit : Amazon Prime Video (to rent)

Letters From Iwo Jima (2006)

Clint Eastwood shot Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima simultaneously, giving perspectives on the battle of Iwo Jima from both the American and Japanese sides. The latter stands out as the superior of the two films, as it did critically at the time, garnering four Oscar nominations. It's a sorrowful, intimate story reminding us that regardless of which side they were fighting on, at the war's center, the soldiers were just human beings. —R.E.

Where to watch Letters From Iwo Jima : Amazon Prime Video (to rent)

The Longest Day (1962)

Even though Saving Private Ryan (1998) is perhaps the pinnacle of D-Day portrayed on the silver screen, 1962's The Longest Day is still a crowning achievement. Based on the nonfiction book by Cornelius Ryan, the film tells the events of the invasion from American, French, British, and German perspectives. It also features an ensemble cast with some of the biggest names in Hollywood history, including John Wayne , Sean Connery , Henry Fonda, and Richard Burton (and almost starred former president Dwight D. Eisenhower as himself). While the film falters in the distraction of some of the well-known Hollywood players, the close-up style works well in depicting the historic events, the grand scale of the invasion, and an insightful picture of everyone involved on the fateful day. —R.E.

Where to watch The Longest Day : Amazon Prime Video (to rent)

Mudbound (2017)

Two families are mired in poverty, each with a son who fought bravely in World War II only to return to the Mississippi Delta with nothing but PTSD to show for their troubles. But the only difference between the Jacksons and McAllans is the color of their skin. Dee Rees'  Mudbound  follows the two families as they fight their wars both abroad and within the home, and discover that trauma bonds deeper than blood.  Jason Mitchell  is exceptional as Ronsel Jackson, bringing emotional honesty to a war hero who, because he is Black, is treated like anything but. Also featuring an all-star ensemble that includes  Mary J. Blige ,  Carey Mulligan ,  Jason Clarke,  and  Garrett Hedlund ,  EW's critic writes  that " Mudbound  is never preachy, reductive, or undercut by its own good intentions. Just the opposite. It's a deeply felt American tale told with heart and humanity." — I.G.

Where to watch Mudbound : Netflix

Oppenheimer (2023)

Winner of seven Academy Awards including Best Picture, Christopher Nolan’s latest film is also his longest, but the movie’s three-hour viewing time is put to good use. Nolan gives audiences two stories for the price of one, combining the history of J. Robert Oppenheimer ( Cillian Murphy ), the "father of the atomic bomb” and a hero of World War II, with Oppenheimer’s later political woes, orchestrated by rivals intent on steering the country’s post-war nuclear policy. Playing with cinematic devices like color and point of view to ground audiences even as it flits across decades and perspectives, Oppenheimer is a movie that demands focus and attention from its viewers. Filled with a sizable ensemble cast of known actors playing real historical figures, Oppenheimer doesn’t make physics fun, but it does find ways to explain the mental and moral journey that went into creating the world’s first atomic bomb. —I.G.

Where to watch Oppenheimer : Peacock

The Pianist (2002)

The Pianist is a harrowing look at the destruction of Warsaw and the horrors of the Holocaust through the eyes of a Jewish musician. Unfortunately, the film is shrouded in the continuing controversy of its director, Roman Polanski . But that doesn't diminish the remarkable achievements of the rest of the cast and the crew, especially Adrien Brody , who, at the tender age of 29, is still the youngest actor to win the Best Actor award for playing the role with heart, power, and deep sadness. —R.E.

Where to watch The Pianist : Amazon Prime Video

Saving Private Ryan (1998)

Steven Spielberg 's Saving Private Ryan brings viewers to the ground level of the Normandy invasion, complete with intense bloodshed and incredible attention to detail. Starring Tom Hanks , Vin Diesel , and Matt Damon alongside a dazzling ensemble cast, the film follows one unit's heroic mission to bring a private home after his three brothers perished in action on D-Day. It's still a shock that the film lost the Best Picture Oscar to Shakespeare in Love (though Spielberg did win for Best Directing), but the test of time has looked more favorably on Saving Private Ryan . —R.E.

Where to watch Saving Private Ryan : Paramount+

Schindler's List (1993)

Another much-revered Spielberg-directed war film, Schindler's List is one of the most intimate and affecting onscreen depictions of the Holocaust. Liam Neeson stars as Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who operates under the radar to save his Jewish workers from Nazi persecution. In a year when he also released Jurassic Park , Spielberg returns with a movie that remains hopeful in one of the darkest corners of human history, paying tribute to the millions who lost their lives and to those who survived. It's a hard movie to watch, but it's one that everyone should experience at least once. —R.E.

Where to watch Schindler's List : Amazon Prime Video

Son of Saul (2015)

A haunting Hungarian historical drama directed by László Nemes that unfolds in stoic sequences that feel like a documentary, 2015’s Son of Saul is a Holocaust story that’s hard to forget. The film stars actor Géza Röhrig in his feature debut as Saul Ausländer, a Jewish concentration camp prisoner forced to work for the Nazis sorting through the belongings of fellow prisoners murdered in the gas chambers. After Saul finds his son among the dead, he becomes obsessed with the mission to secure a Jewish burial for him. Son of Saul may have earned an A from EW’s critic, but he doesn’t mince words in his review when he says, “As easy as it is to appreciate Nemes and Röhrig’s achievements, Son of Saul is an extremely difficult film to watch. But there’s a moment at the end of the film that hints at something like grace, as fleeting as it may be.” —I.G.

Where to watch Son of Saul : Amazon Prime Video (to rent)

Sophie's Choice (1982)

The early-'80s psychological drama Sophie's Choice is notorious for being the vehicle that won Meryl Streep her first Best Actress Oscar — her second Oscar win overall — but the film's narrative is far less established. Adapted and directed by Alan J. Pakula from William Styron 's 1979 novel, Sophie's Choice tells the story of Catholic, Polish Auschwitz survivor Sophie (Streep) who, after immigrating to America, engages in a tumultuous love affair with an American Jew named Nathan ( Kevin Kline ). Nathan and Sophie befriend Stingo ( Peter MacNicol ), an aspiring novelist who recently moved to their New York City boarding house, but the connection between the three friends threatens to topple years of secrets that Sophie has worked hard to obscure. The titular scene is eternally haunting , but the rest of the film is just as compelling, and at times, even stumbles into heartwarming territory, before descending into madness and misery. —I.G.

Where to watch Sophie's Choice : Amazon Prime Video (to rent)

The Zone of Interest (2023)

While many WWII movies depict the horrors of the Holocaust, Jonathan Glazer 's The Zone of Interest prompts viewers to exercise their mind's eye in what remains unseen. Loosely based on Martin Amis' eponymous 2014 novel , the film follows Auschwitz commander Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife, Hedwig ( Sandra Hüller , acclaimed for Anatomy of a Fall the same year), as they bask in domesticity just beyond the walls of the concentration camp. Amid garden parties and pool days for the Höss family, a haunting soundscape of diegetic echoes — from gunfire to hair-raising screams — and faraway glimpses of brutality create an unsettling sensory experience. As lauded by EW's critic , The Zone of Interest is a "formalized and frightening Holocaust film" that serves as "a stark reminder of our complicity and the capacity for great evil in the most mundane of circumstances." — James Mercadante

Where to watch The Zone of Interest : Max

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• How Christopher Nolan crafted his WWII masterpiece, Dunkirk
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The 25 Best World War II (WWII) Movies of All Time, Ranked

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Many wars have been featured in film, but no other war has been the backdrop to as many movies as World War II.

This makes sense, of course, given how many angles a filmmaker can take when approaching WWII: life in the trenches and life at home; the Holocaust, secret plots, and POW camps; soldier stories, Hitler Youth, and government officials; both Axis and Allied powers.

World War II was global, complex, intricate, and comprised of more than a million events and individual stories. It's a goldmine for cinematic drama and tense action!

Over 1,300 WWII movies have been made and released to date. Here are our picks for the best movies about World War II.

25. Their Finest (2016)

Directed by Lone Scherfig

Starring Gemma Arterton, Sam Claflin, Bill Nighy

Comedy, Drama, Romance (1h 57m)

6.8 on IMDb — 90% on RT

Their Finest isn't an epic piece of Oscar-winning cinema, but it does take a unique angle on the effects of war—by looking at how World War II affected the movie business.

By this time, cinema was no longer just a pastime. It could be used as a propaganda tool to aid in the war effort.

And since half the male population had been shipped off to fight, women were finally given a narrow space in the film industry, tasked with writing scripts of British heroism and love reunited.

Their Finest is one of the more inspiriting, family-friendly WWII movies, a quality born from Lissa Evans's original heartwarming novel.

24. Hacksaw Ridge (2016)

Directed by Mel Gibson

Starring Andrew Garfield, Sam Worthington, Luke Bracey

Drama, History, War (2h 19m)

8.1 on IMDb — 84% on RT

It would be fair to assume that half the entire WWII movie genre is made up of true stories, as there were so many experiences to be told! That's certainly the case for Hacksaw Ridge .

Hacksaw Ridge takes us to the muddy banks of southern Okinawa, where a 500-foot-high plateau marked the edge of Japanese territory being invaded by the US in 1945.

Technically, the Allies won the Battle of Okinawa, but the cost in casualties was great—and it would've been greater if not for combat medic Desmond Doss (portrayed by Andrew Garfield).

Desmond Doss saved 75 men by lowering them down the cliff, which is even more impressive given that he was a devoutly religious conscientious objector who refused to bear arms!

23. Unbroken (2014)

Directed by Angelina Jolie

Starring Jack O'Connell, Miyavi, Domhnall Gleeson

Action, Biography, Drama (2h 17m)

7.2 on IMDb — 52% on RT

In World War II, the Olympic distance runner Louie Zamperini was fighting the Japanese in a POW camp—and this was after being stranded in a lifeboat for 47 days.

Unbroken makes you question just how far the human will can take you, as Zamperini (played by Jack O'Connell) should have died several times throughout the film.

Angelina Jolie and the Coen brothers were behind the camera of this shocking biopic, which rewards us with a sweet finale clip of 80-year-old Zamperini carrying the Olympic torch as a free, unbroken man.

22. A Hidden Life (2019)

Directed by Terrence Malick

Starring August Diehl, Valerie Pachner, Maria Simon

Biography, Drama, Romance (2h 54m)

7.4 on IMDb — 82% on RT

A visceral, panoramic treat for the eyes that unfurls in the Austrian mountains, A Hidden Life isn't like most war movies.

In depicting the life of a real conscientious objector, director Terrence Malick spends the first hour showing us how important the small and simple things are in life. Then, the war hits—and Franz Jägerstätter (played by August Diehl) refuses to join the Nazis.

A Hidden Life is three hours of incredible fish-eye shots that infuse this war story with a spiritual quality. (If you want something more Hollywood, check out Malick's first WWII movie, The Thin Red Line , which brags an A-list ensemble cast.)

21. Fury (2014)

Directed by David Ayer

Starring Brad Pitt, Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman

Action, Drama, War (2h 14m)

7.6 on IMDb — 76% on RT

Brad Pitt has been in his fair share of war movies, but Fury is one of his finest. Starring as the no-nonsense commander of an M4 Sherman tank, Don "Wardaddy" Collier must suppress every ounce of emotion and humanity to toughen up his crew and win the war.

Fury is a tense, gritty, and mud-caked battle of morals—raw and unrefined, never trying to sugarcoat the truth.

Yet, Director David Ayer doesn't lets the macho bravado kill the narrative either. Below its metallic surface, Fury is as sensitive as the rest of the movies on this list. (That said, if you're not one for gore, you might want to look away.)

20. The Longest Day (1962)

Directed by Ken Annakin, Andrew Marton, and Bernhard Wicki

Starring John Wayne, Robert Ryan, Richard Burton

Action, Drama, History (2h 58m)

7.7 on IMDb — 87% on RT

The Battle of Stalingrad, the Attack on Pearl Harbor, the evacuation of Dunkirk, and the Normandy landings are among the key events that took place during WWII. The Longest Day features the latter.

More commonly known as D-Day, the Allied invasion of Normandy remains the largest seaborne invasion in history, so it's only fitting there should be an epic movie made about it—one with three directors (a British, an American, and a German).

The Longest Day is adapted from the 1959 book by Cornelius Ryan, complete with an ensemble cast of legends too vast to list here. And the filmmakers were so reliant on historians and consultants, The Longest Day almost feels like a grand documentary.

19. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (2008)

Directed by Mark Herman

Starring Asa Butterfield, David Thewlis, Rupert Friend

Drama, War (1h 34m)

7.7 on IMDb — 65% on RT

What can make you cry harder than a romance film? A war film. But in this case, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas won't just make you cry—it'll make you weep in the ugliest yet most beautiful of ways.

The horrors of war are only more horrifying when afflicted on children, which they most certainly were.

Although not historically accurate, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas tackles the emotional side of war rather than the factual by depicting a friendship between two eight-year-old boys on either side of a fence.

That fence, of course, is a barbed wire divide between a rural woodland free-for-all and a Nazi extermination camp...

18. Empire of the Sun (1987)

Directed by Steven Spielberg

Starring Christian Bale, John Malkovich, Miranda Richardson

Drama, War (2h 33m)

7.7 on IMDb — 77% on RT

Before he was Batman, Patrick Bateman, or Dick Cheney, Christian Bale was already impressing critics in Empire of the Sun as a British school boy in Shanghai. Yes—a movie where he speaks in his own, real accent!

Jamie "Jim" Graham lives a privileged upper-class life before the war rips it away from him. When Japan invades China, Jamie is lost in the evacuation and forced to survive on his own.

Empire of the Sun is semi-autobiographical of the original book's author, J. G. Ballard. And even as a kid, Bale displayed a strong knack for acting, leading one of Steven Spielberg's less whimsical family movies.

17. Son of Saul (2015)

Directed by László Nemes

Starring Géza Röhrig, Levente Molnár, Urs Rechn

Drama, War (1h 47m)

7.4 on IMDb — 96% on RT

Hungarian filmmaker László Nemes's feature directorial debut was a sensational success in artistic circles—a success that translated commercially to win an Academy Award!

Filmed in real-time, Son of Saul might be a slice-of-life movie, but it isn't one we'd wish to experience ourselves. In it, Nemes guides us through a normal day in an Auschwitz concentration camp.

Saul Ausländer (played by Géza Röhrig) is an Auschwitz prisoner who's forced to salvage valuables from corpses and scrub down the gas chambers. It's an important but unpleasant watch.

16. From Here to Eternity (1953)

Directed by Fred Zinnemann

Starring Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Deborah Kerr

Drama, Romance, War (1h 58m)

7.6 on IMDb — 88% on RT

From Here to Eternity is a rose-tinted illustration of World War II, but what else would you expect from a 1950s romance movie?

Based on the debut novel of James Jones (who also wrote The Thin Red Line ), From Here to Eternity focuses on the lead up to Pearl Harbor, giving the luscious Hawaiian beaches a melancholy tinge.

Fred Zinnemann's big-screen adaptation won 8 Oscars out of 13 nominations, and it starred Golden Age legends Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Deborah Kerr, Donna Reed, and Frank Sinatra.

15. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

Directed by David Lean

Starring William Holden, Alec Guinness, Jack Hawkins

Adventure, Drama, War (2h 41m)

8.1 on IMDb — 96% on RT

The Bridge on the River Kwai is a 1950s war epic that's heavy on plot and detail. The original theatrical poster reads "Destined to become a classic!"—and they were absolutely right.

In fact, David Lean's historical war drama is now considered one of the greatest British movies of the 20th century.

When a Japanese commandant forces British prisoners of war to rebuild the Burma Railway, the only thing on the soldiers' minds are delay and escape. Even if the thick Thai jungle makes escape nearly impossible, it's still worth the risk.

14. Jojo Rabbit (2019)

Directed by Taika Waititi

Starring Roman Griffin Davis, Thomasin McKenzie, Scarlett Johansson

Comedy, Drama, War (1h 48m)

7.9 on IMDb — 80% on RT

Using WWII as a vehicle for comedy is a risky move at best, but it can be extremely powerful (and entertaining) when done right. One such example of success would be Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator .

But there's another more modern movie that also mocks Adolf Hitler—in a more direct way than Chaplin did, since Chaplin's film was made while the war was still raging!—and that film is Jojo Rabbit .

Director Taika Waititi plays the imaginary friend of a Hitler Youth kid, who unsurprisingly happens to be Hitler. But when Jojo (played by Roman Griffin Davis) finds a Jewish girl hiding in his attic, who will he be loyal to—the party or his mother?

13. The Great Escape (1963)

Directed by John Sturges

Starring Steve McQueen, James Garner, Richard Attenborough

Adventure, Drama, History (2h 52m)

8.2 on IMDb — 94% on RT

The 20th century was obsessed with epics: Spartacus , Lawrence of Arabia , Ben-Hur , Cleopatra , and, of course, The Great Escape .

The "King of Cool" Steve McQueen ended up landing his most iconic role in John Sturges's classic war film, in which he motorcycles his way through one of the best on-screen stunts.

Based on an incredible true story, The Great Escape takes us through the planning and execution of a mass POW breakout in Germany.

Alongside James Garner and Richard Attenborough, Steve McQueen leads as Captain Virgil Hilts, resulting in a nail-biting and witty underground journey that thrills to this day.

12. Casablanca (1942)

Directed by Michael Curtiz

Starring Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid

Drama, Romance, War (1h 42m)

8.5 on IMDb — 99% on RT

Casablanca is an emblem of Old Hollywood with Humphrey Bogart front and center. The noir-infused war romance takes place during a not-so-festive December in Morocco, 1941.

Moody nightclub owner Rick Blaine (played by Humphrey Bogart) reluctantly agrees to help his ex-lover cross the border with her new husband. Everything that follows was written on the fly.

Even Casablanca 's famous line—"Here's lookin' at you, kid"—was completely improvised by Bogart to co-star Ingrid Bergman!

WWII is background noise in Michael Curtiz's landmark movie, but background necessary to put pressure on the central love triangle.

11. Dunkirk (2017)

Directed by Christopher Nolan

Starring Fionn Whitehead, Barry Keoghan, Mark Rylance

Action, Drama, History (1h 46m)

7.8 on IMDb — 92% on RT

Dunkirk is one of those rare action movies that feels minimal and artistic, without all the blood-pumping CGI explosions that give you whiplash just to watch.

Christopher Nolan's historical thriller is split into three sections: Air, Land, and Sea. Across these three landscapes, an established cast—including Fionn Whitehead, Kenneth Branagh, Cillian Murphy, Tom Hardy, and... Harry Styles?—try to evacuate Dunkirk.

Terrified characters and roaring visuals make up the portrait of chaos and destruction. Filmed on 65mm IMAX film stock, Dunkirk will leave you filled with a breathless sort of awe.

10. Atonement (2007)

Directed by Joe Wright

Starring Keira Knightley, James McAvoy, Brenda Blethyn

Drama, Mystery, Romance (2h 3m)

7.8 on IMDb — 83% on RT

How many lovers have been separated by wars, never to reunite again? Usually it's because of a draft letter, but in Atonement , Robbie (played by James McAvoy) and Cecilia (played by Keira Knightley) are torn apart even before he's sent off to war.

In fact, they're torn apart the very same day they get together. Something involving a false accusation sends Robbie to serve in the military prematurely as a substitute for going to prison.

The green dress, the trick ending, and the heartbreaking long-take on the beaches of Dunkirk are just some of the iconic elements that made Joe Wright's war romance an enduring hit.

9. Letters From Iwo Jima (2006)

Directed by Clint Eastwood

Starring Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya, Tsuyoshi Ihara

Action, Adventure, Drama (2h 21m)

7.8 on IMDb — 91% on RT

Clint Eastwood directing a Japanese movie? Yes, you read that right! And yes, you'll need subtitles if you don't speak Japanese.

The reason for Eastwood being behind Letters From Iwo Jima is because it's one in a pair of movies. Flags of Our Fathers depicts the American side of the Battle of Iwo Jima, while Letters From Iwo Jima tells the Japanese side of the same battle.

Japanese critics were relieved to find the cast made up of native speakers rather than the usual, jarring use of Asian-American actors. That's just one of a handful of reasons why Letters From Iwo Jima ended up being the better of the two WWII movies.

8. The Pianist (2002)

Directed by Roman Polanski

Starring Adrien Brody, Thomas Kretschmann, Frank Finlay

Biography, Drama, Music (2h 30m)

8.5 on IMDb — 95% on RT

It's one thing to be a method actor. It's another to sell all your belongings, chuck your phone, leave your girlfriend, lose 30 pounds, and move to Europe—all for a film role.

Well, Adrien Brody did all that for The Pianist ! And thankfully for him, it seemed to have paid off with a great performance as the Holocaust survivor Władysław Szpilman.

The Polish pianist wrote about his devastating concentration camp experience in his memoirs not long after WWII, which was originally censored but then made public by filmmaker Roman Polanski.

7. Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Directed by Quentin Tarantino

Starring Brad Pitt, Mélanie Laurent, Christoph Waltz

Adventure, Drama, War (2h 33m)

8.3 on IMDb — 89% on RT

Inglourious Basterds isn't sad, horrifying, or soppy. It is, however, extremely tense and brilliantly acted, particularly by Christoph Waltz in the now-iconic opening scene.

Besides the dazzling cast and big blood budget, Quentin Tarantino delivers his usual caliber of dialogue that pushes us to the edges of our seats through simple conversation.

Some critics criticized the historical inaccuracies, despite the fact Inglourious Basterds is supposed to be an alternate history film. Obviously Adolf Hitler didn't get machine-gunned down in a cinema in real life...!

6. Saving Private Ryan (1998)

Starring Tom Hanks, Matt Damon, Tom Sizemore

Drama, War (2h 49m)

8.6 on IMDb — 94% on RT

Saving Private Ryan contains both sappy patriotism and starkly realistic action scenes that lend it the title "greatest war movie ever made."

Although not everybody agrees, Saving Private Ryan is still up there with the best cinematic presentations of something that can never be fully expressed through a camera alone.

Most people know about the iconic opening scene, in which dazed men run and duck their way through open fire and ceaseless chaos on D-Day, emphasized by the handheld filming.

American favorites Tom Hanks, Matt Damon, and Steven Spielberg teamed up to bring us this tale of bravery and heroism in WWII.

5. The Imitation Game (2014)

Directed by Morten Tyldum

Starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode

Biography, Drama, Thriller (1h 54m)

8.0 on IMDb — 90% on RT

The foreground of war is made up of battles, invasions, evacuations, and entrapments. But who's behind all of that?

It takes skill not just to plan a victory, but to keep it hidden from the other players. The Nazis did this well with their Enigma machine—something not even a cryptographer from Oxford could crack.

Then came the socially challenged genius Alan Turing (played by Benedict Cumberbatch), who not only solved the Enigma but also created the first computer prototype.

Sadly, his autism and homosexuality made him a criminal outcast back in the 1940s, making him one of the most tragic figures of WWII.

4. Oppenheimer (2023)

Starring Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon

Biography, Drama, History (3h)

8.5 on IMDb — 93% on RT

Christopher Nolan's refusal to use CGI only gets more remarkable with time. It's not just about blowing up buildings anymore—Nolan is now filming atomic bombs without any special effects.

As such, the famed director's latest epic about the first nuclear weapons is best watched on the big screen.

The film centers on the character of J. Robert Oppenheimer (portrayed by Cillian Murphy), who's in a race to develop the atomic bomb in order to defeat the Germans during World War II. But, of course, the film is also about so much more than just that.

3. Schindler's List (1993)

Starring Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes, Ben Kingsley

Biography, Drama, History (3h 15m)

9.0 on IMDb — 98% on RT

Is there any such thing as a good Nazi? Oskar Schindler was, though he was only a Nazi member in name, not belief.

In fact, Schindler used his high industrialist position to save over a thousand Jewish lives, as recounted by Steven Spielberg in his black-and-white historical drama Schindler's List .

Liam Neeson stars as the savior who employed Jewish refugees in his factories, all while facing opposition from one of cinema's cruelest villains: Amon Göth (chillingly played by Ralph Fiennes).

Of the Schindlerjuden ("Schindler Jews"), Poldek Pfefferberg made it his mission to bring Oskar's bravery to the history books.

2. Life Is Beautiful (1997)

Directed by Roberto Benigni

Starring Roberto Benigni, Nicoletta Braschi, Giorgio Cantarini

Comedy, Drama, Romance (1h 56m)

8.6 on IMDb — 80% on RT

Italian director Roberto Benigni did the impossible when he made an uplifting Holocaust movie. The very title of his comedy-drama— Life Is Beautiful —is a bow of gratitude, despite the fact its protagonists are imprisoned in a concentration camp.

Benigni himself stars in Life Is Beautiful as the Italian-Jewish father who tricks his son into thinking the camp is one big game. Benigni's Chaplin-like gags in such a grotesque setting will have you laughing and crying at the same time.

The Grand Prix-winning movie remains one of the highest-grossing foreign films of all time, and is nothing if not thought-provoking.

1. Come and See (1985)

Directed by Elem Klimov

Starring Aleksey Kravchenko, Olga Mironova, Liubomiras Laucevicius

Drama, Thriller, War (2h 22m)

8.4 on IMDb — 90% on RT

Come and See is an unforgettable, flesh-searing anti-war drama that you need to prepare yourself for before watching.

This Soviet film by Elem Klimov—which took eight years to overcome censorship—follows a teenage boy who joins the Belarusian resistance movement and has no idea of the atrocities he'll soon face.

Come and See blends opposing styles of realism and surrealism to give an unflinching look at what war can do to a person.

The head shots of burnt, bloody, and terrified young faces are particularly potent, calling to mind the haunting before-and-after images of real soldiers who age decades within a matter of years.

If you're looking for an emotional, impactful, and heavy-hitting film about World War II, there's none better than Come and See .

'Amazing Stories' Episode 5 Review: 'The Rift' shows a WWII soldier stuck in a time warp, but is that possible?

Spoilers for 'Amazing Stories' Episode 5 'The Rift' 

Is a time warp between two eras possible? 'Amazing Stories' is back with a new time travel tale and it does make you wonder if any of these fictional stories could come true. 

The story follows a WWII pilot, Lieutenant Theodore Cole (Austin Stowell) who crashes in modern-day Ohio. A young widow, Mary Ann Whitaker (Kerry Bishé) and her stepson, Elijah Whitaker (Duncan Joiner) are swept up in his search for home.

Developed by Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, the Apple TV+ series delves deep into the life of the pilot who seems to have landed in the present era. When he talks gibberish about how he was supposed to be in Rangoon, mentions the date December 24, 1941, and talks about World War II, it strikes the little boy how he could have entered the space through an anomaly.

"What if he is telling the truth?" he asks his mom and shows Whiz bars as proof, which were made 30 years ago. "Why are we in such a rush? We have to help him," he begs her. They stumble upon an old newspaper clipping and a photograph at the police station that proves he was a pilot in 1938.

While heading back, he comes in their way yet again and the mother-son duo tries to help escape. Even as his mom is ready to give up, he follows the pilot's trail and helps him escape the eyes of the soldiers looking for him. One of the best scenes, probably, is when Theo and Elijah drive like maniacs into the woods and have a heartwarming conversation near the picturesque waterfalls. 

Soon, they realize he has to go back into the rift or everyone within one meter away from him will die. During the time he is still there, he goes back to his house and meets his love, Pauline and tells her, "I am sorry that I never said goodbye."

Finally, the soldier bids goodbye to Elijah and Mary Ann and makes his way back to the rift with his lover's photo in his hand. Everyone watches over him and he enters a flash of lightning through the cloudy pathways. 

The cinematography and direction are commendable but the performances of the two lead actors, Bishé and Stowell, ranges between fair to middling. The performance of the little boy will make your heart giddy, but the story does no magic on you and only makes you wonder if such a time-lapse was really possible.

Directed by Mark Mylod and written by Don Handfield and Richard Rayner, the episode is another sci-fi marvel but it gets slightly frustrating in the end when you realize that it has no logical scope of coming true in real life.

The 50 Best World War 2 Movies of All Time

1. Casablanca

2. Schindler's List

3. Das Boot

4. The Cranes Are Flying

5. The Best Years of Our Lives

7. Inglourious Basterds

8. The Pianist

9. Pan's Labyrinth

10. Downfall

11. Oppenheimer

12. A Hidden Life

13. Jojo Rabbit

14. Atonement

15. To Be or Not to Be

16. A Matter of Life and Death

17. Sophie's Choice

18. The Great Escape

19. Goodbye, Children

20. Ballad of a Soldier

21. The Dirty Dozen

22. The Thin Red Line

23. Cabaret

24. Night and Fog

25. Saving Private Ryan

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