The 15 Best World War II Movies Of All Time, Ranked

Since World War II began, it's been a prime subject for the film industry to mine. During the war, we were treated to endless propaganda films, designed to rally both the troops and the folks back on the home front, reassuring them that victory was in sight (even when at that time it was seriously in doubt). Since then, World War II movies have romanticized the conflict, shown the gritty truth of combat, and attempted to depict under-explored perspectives. 

During the Vietnam War, World War II films even offered a prime opportunity to speak critically about the conflict during a political climate that was anything but receptive to criticism. (Notably, most of the anti-war films actually about Vietnam came out after the war had already ended.) Whether they were made during the war or decades later, however, World War II films run across a spectrum of different genres, from out-and-out action to heartbreaking drama, romance, and even comedy. 

Here are some of the very best World War II movies.

When it comes to decisive days for the American involvement in World War II, they don't get much bigger than the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941. "Tora! Tora! Tora!" captures the events of the bombing of Pearl Harbor from both sides, creating what at times feels like two distinct films. 

The American segments of the film showcase both action sequences of the attack on the ground in Hawaii, as well as the political figures attempting to deal with the crisis in Washington. Meanwhile, the Japanese segments (with work from Akira Kurosawa, who ultimately left the project) offer a glimpse at the preparations for a sneak attack which, if successful, would severely cripple the entire U.S. Pacific Fleet, hampering their ability to launch an effective response. With both American and Japanese directors working on the film, its depiction of both perspectives makes it a far more nuanced action piece than many World War II productions.

You know how there are all those stories about attempts to assassinate Hitler that almost worked, except he survived out of pure dumb luck? "Hangmen Also Die!" is a dramatization of the next best thing in terms of Nazis getting what's coming to them: Operation Anthropoid, in which Reinhard Heydrich is assassinated by a small group of Czech resistance fighters. Heydrich was the acting governor of occupied Czechoslovakia, a key architect of the Final Solution, and he was widely considered to be Hitler's annointed successor. That's certainly a high-value target.

Director Fritz Lang focuses on one fictional assassin, surgeon František Svoboda (Brian Donlevy), who goes into hiding while grappling with the knowledge that Nazi retribution on innocent civilians will be swift and harsh. Based on a story by the celebrated playwright Bertolt Brecht, "Hangmen Also Die!" cultivates a tremendous sense of atmosphere that elevates it above many other World War II films.

We often have a vision in our heads of German soldiers as the Nazis we remember watching in films like "Raiders of the Lost Ark." While plenty of them certainly fit that bill, there were also a lot of conscripted teenagers with little choice in who or where they fought. "Land of Mine," a Danish period piece set at the tail end of the war, is a reminder of the high cost of war so often paid by those with the least actual power in the military. 

As Denmark recovers from Nazi occupation, they face a significant problem in the shape of thousands of land mines buried in the sand of their many beaches. But they also have hundreds of young German prisoners-of-war (towards the end, Hitler had run out of battle-hardened soldiers and was mostly sending fresh-faced schoolboys to the front), who they quickly put to work dismantling said land mines. Which, as it turns out, is a terrifying business. Tense and often devastating, "Land of Mine" will have you in a cold sweat the entire time, not realizing until the end that you've been holding your breath for an hour and 40 minutes.

Beginning production in Rome just six months after German troops abandoned the city at the end of the war, "Rome, Open City" showcases the Italian capital without attempting to gloss over the many scars of combat in the streets. It stars Marcello Pagliero as a leader in the Italian Resistance who, with the help of other rebels and a local priest, must find a way to escape the city before being captured by a German officer who is hot in pursuit. 

"Rome, Open City" was not particularly popular among Italian viewers upon its initial release in 1945. But it found a devoted audience across Europe and America, and has since been credited for launching the genre of Italian neorealism on the film scene. Partially born out of the necessity of filming in the ruins of post-war Italy, as well as a conscious rejection of Hollywood fantasy, directors like Roberto Rossellini embraced non-professional actors, location shooting, and as much of a sense of reality as they could bring.

When Christopher Nolan makes the decision to direct a World War II movie, you kind of have to sit up and take notice. With "Dunkirk," the acclaimed director brings to life one of the most inspiring stories from the early days of the war, when a heroic effort allowed Allied forces to snatch a stay of execution from the jaws of defeat. Massively outnumbered and driven to the sea, British, Belgian, and French forces were all but sitting ducks — until Allied leadership scrambled together a convoy of 800 ships, both military and civilian, to evacuate them to safety across the channel.

"Dunkirk," in familiar Nolan style, takes an unconventional and nonlinear approach to the Dunkirk evacuation. Not only does he show it from several different perspectives — a young English soldier fighting to get on a boat home, civilian sailors making their way to Dunkirk on a ragtag rescue mission, a pilot trying to provide cover for the beached soldiers while running on fumes — he does so non-chronologically. With this storytelling choice, we're given the opportunity to explore characters, particularly Cillian Murphy's traumatized officer, in ways that lead us down unexpected paths.

"Come and See" is a truly great World War II movie. That said, is it one that we necessarily recommend you watch? Well, only if you have a strong stomach and lack an aversion to on-set practices that may or may not put child actors within range of live ammunition fire and perpetuate cruelty to animals. But the point is this: Soviet director Elem Klimov really wants you to understand the pointless brutality of war, and by the end of "Come and See," you definitely will.

"Come and See" stars Aleksei Kravchenko as Flyora, a young teenager who joins a group of underground soldiers to fight against the Nazi occupation in Belarus. But while he gets involved in the conflict for noble reasons, it isn't long before he is exposed to — and deeply traumatized by — the harsh realities of wartime atrocities. The young Kravchenko's performance is a master class, especially considering the fact that he was only 14 years old when filming began. His raw emotions are powerful, made even more so by the harrowing emptiness that eventually sets into his eyes after spending life at war.

What do you do when you're a commanding officer with a suicide mission to dole out? Well, if you're in "The Dirty Dozen," you hand it off to a group of soldiers who have already been sentenced to death or lengthy prison terms for various criminal acts while in service. If they make it through the mission alive, they'll have earned themselves a pardon. If not, well ... they're no worse off than they would have been anyway, right?

"The Dirty Dozen" has a handful of excellent combat scenes, but really, the strength of the film lies in its tremendously talented ensemble cast. Profoundly anti-social and resistant to authority by nature, each character is a character, brought to life with panache by actors like Charles Bronson, John Cassavetes, Donald Sutherland, Telly Savalas, and Jim Brown. Their violent and aggressive behavior stands in direct contradiction to the self-sacrificing heroes we often see in World War II films, and although the contrast is jarring, it gives "The Dirty Dozen" a bold and nihilistic edge that one would expect from a combat picture released near the peak of the Vietnam War.

Although "Kanal" doesn't feature the traditional battlefields of World War II, it captures a moment in the war that was no less devastating from a combat perspective. Released in 1957, it was the first film made about the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, taking place during the last days of the partisan movement against the German forces occupying Poland before it was brutally suppressed. The ragtag group of resistance fighters are hanging on by a thread, attempting one last desperate bid at freedom by escaping through the sewers of Warsaw. 

"Kanal" was controversial in its native Poland for a number of reasons, in part because Polish audiences viewed its depiction of their ultimately futile rebellion as foolish, as the characters typically depicted as martyrs and heroes in Poland crawl through raw sewage in the hopes of escape. But sacrifices are no less noble for being doomed to failure, and it's difficult not to be moved by the plight of the resistance in "Kanal," watching them fight to survive in spite of the odds stacked against them.

File this one under "we can't believe this is actually based on a true story." "Europa Europa" stars Marco Hofschneider as Solomon "Solek" Perel, a Jewish teenager who managed to survive the Holocaust by hiding in plain sight. After fleeing to eastern Poland, Solek is captured by invading Soviet forces, who place him in an orphanage where he is taught Russian. But years later, when the Germans invade, the German-born Solek seizes the opportunity to pass himself off as an Aryan orphan, and he's effortlessly welcomed back into the fold. 

They not only believe in the lie of his ethnic heritage — they actually send him off to one of the most prestigious schools for members of the Hitler Youth, where he is viewed as a German war hero for his time spent in Russia. It's as much a war film as it is a coming-of-age story about a teenager in impossible circumstances forced to suppress his very identity just when he should be figuring out what it is. "Europa Europa" asks how much of ourselves we can hide without losing who we are entirely, and the incredible lengths we'll go to in order to survive.

Let's be real, the opening D-Day sequence of "Saving Private Ryan" alone would be enough to guarantee it a spot pretty high up on this list. Director Steven Spielberg's depiction of the D-Day invasions of Normandy is awe-inspiringly vivid, creating a horrifying glimpse into a military engagement that was a meat grinder before soldiers ever even set foot on dry land. (Training for the production was so brutal that some of the cast contemplated quitting before shooting even started.) But within this larger landscape, "Saving Private Ryan" has a simple, more personal story at its heart. 

Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks) and a team of American soldiers are sent on a mission to track down Private James Ryan, delivering him a mixed bag of news. On the one hand, he's being given the rare opportunity to escape the fighting on the Western front and go home. But on the other hand, he's only being given that chance because all of his brothers have died in combat, and the U.S. army is determined to save him for his mother's sake — no matter how many other soldiers need to die to make that happen. One of the most popular combat films of all time, "Saving Private Ryan" reignited interest in World War II for audiences across the United States.

Does comedy have a place in something as solemn as a film about Nazis? Does laughing at them mean that we're not taking them seriously as a threat, or does it render them ridiculous, and thus take away some of their power as an intimidating force? Food for thought — and a conversation no less relevant today than it was when "To Be Or Not to Be" hit theaters back in 1942, when it caused something of a stir for its farcical treatment of Nazi troops. 

Carole Lombard and Jack Benny receive top billing as the two stars of a Warsaw theater troupe, who somehow find themselves embroiled in a resistance plot. To protect a leader of the Polish resistance — and, by extension, all of the people he would expose if subjected to German torture — they have to act their little hearts out. 

The film's madcap sense of humor under such dark circumstances is initially jarring, but its ability to use comedy to effectively defang Nazis at a point in the war when they seemed unbeatable is nothing short of miraculous. Sadly, star Carole Lombard didn't live long enough to see the success of "To Be Or Not to Be" — it was released a month after her untimely death in a plane crash returning home from a tour to sell war bonds.

When most people think of "Patton," they imagine the iconic monologue George C. Scott gives to his troops against a backdrop of a giant American flag. But Scott has so much more to offer in his tour-de-force leading role as the inspiring yet controversial American general. The biographical film captures the rise and fall of General George S. Patton, through his efforts in the North African campaign to turn around a ragtag group of undisciplined soldiers to his tactical prowess in planning the invasion of Sicily. 

Patton seems like he's pretty good at the whole military racket, but he also has a fatal character flaw that ultimately proves to be his undoing: He isn't much of a people person. He alienates his colleagues, belittles his inferiors (at one point even berating and smacking around a traumatized soldier), and has a precipitous fall from grace. Scott walks a fine line with the character, showcasing his flaws while still making him an utterly compelling figure to watch on screen. The performance won him an Academy Award for Best Actor — an award Scott declined, citing his lack of interest in having acting performances pitted against each other and arbitrarily judged.

In the midst of war in the Pacific theater, a group of British soldiers are sent to a prisoner-of-war camp and immediately put to work in "The Bridge on the River Kwai." Their task? Building a bridge over the River Kwai, connecting Thailand with Burma. (Personally, we'd feel a lot more confident on bridges built by civil engineers rather than malnourished prisoners suffering from heat exhaustion with dubious construction experience, but whatever.) 

Although the commandant of the camp, Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa), makes it clear that this assignment is very much not a request but a demand, it leaves the beleagured prisoners in a moral conundrum. They improve their chances of survival by build the bridge, but in doing so, they're directly aiding the enemy. As the bridge nears completion, the prisoners each have to choose a path of reluctant cooperation or sabotage. Alec Guinness puts in one of his finest performances as Colonel Nicholson (a role that was initially offered to heavyweight English actor Charles Laughton), the consummate English soldier in the uneviable position of forcing his troops to become collaborators.

Look, "Inglourious Basterds" may not be winning any awards for historical accuracy. In fact, it revels in its defiant brand of historical revisionism, where Quentin Tarantino creates an alternate version of the war where Allied operatives are able to take out most of the Nazi high command. But while it might not line up fact-for-fact with your standard history textbook, it has many other merits. Its performances, for one. Christoph Waltz will spend the rest of his life trying to top his all-timer turn as the unassuming yet wildly dangerous Nazi officer Hans Landa, while Melanie Laurent, Daniel Bruhl, Brad Pitt, and Diane Kruger all put in some of the best work of their careers. 

In addition to its snappy dialogue and eccentric sense of humor, "Inglourious Basterds" is one of Tarantino's greatest films on the strength of its set pieces alone. From the quietly tense opening sequence between Landa and the French farmer, the initial introduction of the Bear Jew (Eli Roth), the Mexican standoff in the basement pub, and the long take of Shoshanna (Laurent) getting ready for the Nazi premiere, Tarantino continually tops himself over the course of the film.

We've seen plenty of combat films, but we also have to celebrate the slow burn of a good break-out movie, of which "The Great Escape" is pretty much the gold standard. In it, a group of British and American prisoners-of-war have made it their business to attempt to escape as disruptively as they can, seeing it as their duty to help the war effort by making life as difficult as possible for the German soldiers tasked with guarding them. To that end, they've got a plan that involves tunneling, wire cutters, code names — all the makings of a truly great escape. 

Based on a true story, "The Great Escape" features both the agonizing tension of the build-up to the prison break, as they painstakingly execute their plan over the course of several months, followed by the perfect release valve of a well-constructed action set piece. And of course, the film benefits from the many charms of the impossibly cool Steve McQueen as Hilts, one of the camp's most frequent escapees. Smart and well-scripted, "The Great Escape" is about as close to perfect as they come, easily making it the best World War II movie of all time.