World War II
Nineteen films, in the order the war happened.
19 entries · about 43h 41m across the 18 with a published runtime
Most lists of war films are ranked by quality, which tells you what to watch tonight and nothing about the war. This one is ordered by when the events happened, so that watching it in sequence walks through the war from the first shots to the trials.
Nineteen films rather than two hundred. The value here is not coverage, it is that every entry earns a slot by showing something no other entry on the list shows: a different front, a different year, or a different country’s account of the same event.
If you only watch 10
The Eight Hundred, Schindler’s List, Dunkirk, Tora! Tora! Tora!, The Zone of Interest, Come and See, Saving Private Ryan, Letters from Iwo Jima, Grave of the Fireflies, Downfall. That is about 23h 13m. It covers every front, every year and the civilian cost. Everything else on this list deepens a section rather than adding one.
How this is ordered
A film covering six years cannot sit at one date honestly, so each is filed at the point it enters the story, and the entry says what it spans. Schindler’s List opens in Kraków in 1939 and runs to 1945; it is filed at 1939 and labelled accordingly.
Two deliberate consequences. The list starts in 1937, not 1939, because the war in Asia began with Japan’s invasion of China and a timeline that opens in Poland is telling a European story and calling it a world war. And the same event appears more than once from opposite sides, which is the point rather than a duplication: Iwo Jima from the Japanese garrison, Berlin from inside the bunker, Pearl Harbor from both fleets.
- 01October 1937Core ten
The Eight Hundred
2020 · 2h 27m · Shanghai, Chinese account
The war starts here, two years before Poland. A few hundred Chinese soldiers hold a warehouse across a canal from the foreign concessions, close enough that Europeans watched the fighting from the other bank as entertainment. It is the single best argument that a list beginning in 1939 is a European list wearing a world war’s name.
- 02From September 1939Core ten
Schindler’s List
1993 · 3h 15m · Kraków, occupied Poland
Filed at the invasion because that is where it opens, but it is really the whole occupation in one film. It is also the entry most people have already seen, which makes it a useful anchor: everything else on this list is positioned relative to something you probably have a memory of.
Note. Runs to the Soviet liberation in 1945, with the liquidation of the Kraków ghetto in March 1943 at its centre.
- 03From September 1939
The Pianist
2002 · 2h 29m · Warsaw, occupied Poland
The same years as the entry above, a different city and a narrower lens: one man, mostly alone, mostly hiding. Where Schindler’s List is about somebody with the power to intervene, this is about somebody with none, and the two together are worth more than either twice.
Note. September 1939 to the liberation of Warsaw in January 1945.
- 04May 1940
Darkest Hour
2017 · 2h 5m · London, British government
Watch this immediately before Dunkirk. They cover the same three weeks from opposite ends of the same decision: this one is the argument in the cabinet room about whether to negotiate, the next is what that argument was actually about. Neither film mentions the other and they function as one.
- 0526 May to 4 June 1940Core ten
Dunkirk
2017 · 1h 46m · The French coast, British account
A retreat rather than a battle, told in three timeframes running at different speeds, with almost no dialogue explaining anything. It is the shortest film here and the one that best conveys that most of war is waiting somewhere frightening for something to arrive.
- 06October to December 1941
Das Boot
1981 · 2h 29m · The Atlantic, German crew
The Battle of the Atlantic ran the entire war and is otherwise absent from this list. It is also the first entry told from inside the losing side with no framing device apologising for it, which is a thing German cinema could do in 1981 and Hollywood still largely cannot.
Note. The 149-minute theatrical cut is listed. A 208-minute director’s cut and a longer series edit both exist, and the longer versions are better if you have the time.
- 077 December 1941Core ten
Tora! Tora! Tora!
1970 · 2h 24m · Pearl Harbor, both fleets
Made by American and Japanese units working in parallel, and it cuts between the two navies as a procedural rather than picking a hero. That structure is why it is here instead of the 2001 film: the interesting thing about Pearl Harbor is the sequence of decisions on both sides, not a romance.
- 08February 1943
The Bridge on the River Kwai
1957 · 2h 41m · Thailand, British prisoners
The only entry set in the Southeast Asian prisoner-of-war camps, and the only one whose subject is what captivity does to a man’s judgement rather than what combat does to his nerves. Historically loose and dramatically unmatched, which is worth knowing going in.
- 091943Core ten
The Zone of Interest
2023 · 1h 45m · Auschwitz, the commandant’s household
Auschwitz from the garden next door, where a family arranges its domestic life against a wall with the camp on the other side. The camera never goes in. It is the hardest watch here precisely because it shows nothing, and it answers a question the other Holocaust entries do not ask, which is how ordinary the people running it managed to feel.
- 101943Core ten
Come and See
1985 · 2h 22m · Byelorussia, Soviet account
The occupation of Byelorussia through a boy who joins the partisans, and the most unsparing film on this list by a distance. It is also the only real coverage of the Eastern Front here, which is the largest gap in the whole subject: the war was decided there and Western cinema barely went.
- 115 to 6 June 1944
The Longest Day
1962 · 2h 58m · Normandy, all sides
D-Day as a map: the airborne drops, the beaches, the German command trying to work out what is happening, each in its own language with subtitles. Watch it before Saving Private Ryan and the next film stops being confusing, because this one explains the operation and that one does not try to.
- 12From 6 June 1944Core ten
Saving Private Ryan
1998 · 2h 50m · Omaha Beach and Normandy, American
The twenty-five minutes on the beach changed how war is filmed and everything made since is in conversation with it. The rest is a more conventional squad picture, which is worth saying: the reputation rests on the opening and the opening deserves it.
- 13From June 1944
Band of Brothers
2001 · 10 episodes · Normandy to Bavaria, American
The only long-form entry, and the one that does what a two-hour film structurally cannot: stay with the same men long enough that attrition registers as loss rather than plot. If you watch one thing here at length, this is it.
Note. Opens with training in 1942 and runs to the end of the war in Europe. Filed at Normandy, where the fighting starts. No total runtime is published; episodes run 49 to 70 minutes.
- 14October 1944
Son of Saul
2015 · 1h 47m · Auschwitz, a Sonderkommando prisoner
A day and a half inside the camp, shot so tightly on one man’s face that the atrocity stays at the blurred edge of the frame throughout. Paired with The Zone of Interest it gives the same place from the two positions that existed in it, and neither film would work as well alone.
- 15February 1945Core ten
Letters from Iwo Jima
2006 · 2h 20m · Iwo Jima, Japanese garrison
An American studio film, in Japanese, about a garrison ordered to die on an island it knows it will lose. There is a companion film covering the American side of the same battle; this is the one that is here, because the American account of the Pacific is already the default and this one is not.
Note. Opens with the defensive preparations through 1944 before the landings in February 1945.
- 16March 1945Core ten
Grave of the Fireflies
1988 · 1h 29m · Kobe, Japanese civilians
Two children after the firebombing of Kobe, animated, and the only entry on this list with no soldiers in it worth speaking of. The strategic bombing of cities killed civilians on a scale the combat films never approach, and this is the film that makes that a fact about people rather than a number.
- 1720 April to 8 May 1945Core ten
Downfall
2004 · 2h 35m · Berlin, inside the bunker
The last eighteen days from inside the German command, played straight rather than as monstrosity, which caused an argument in Germany when it came out and is the reason it works. Watch it after Come and See, in that order, and the ending lands differently than it would alone.
- 18July 1945
Oppenheimer
2023 · 3h 0m · New Mexico, American
The thing that ended the Pacific war was being built throughout the rest of this list, in a desert nobody in any other entry has heard of. It is here for that parallel rather than for the bomb: the war people were fighting and the war being engineered were separate events until one August morning.
Note. Covers the 1930s to 1963, filed at the Trinity test. The Manhattan Project runs underneath most of the war above.
- 191947
Judgment at Nuremberg
1961 · 2h 59m · Nuremberg, American occupation zone
The reckoning, and the right place to stop. It takes the judges rather than the generals, which turns the question from who gave the orders into who administered them, and that is the harder question and the one the rest of this list keeps raising without answering.
What is missing, and why
Every list of war films implies that what it contains is what exists. The more useful thing to say is what cinema never filmed well.
The Eastern Front. Roughly eighty per cent of German military deaths happened there, and it is the thinnest section of this list by far. Come and See covers the occupation of Byelorussia and is arguably the greatest film on the subject, but the major battles, Stalingrad, Kursk, Leningrad, have no Western film of comparable standing. That is a gap in cinema, not an oversight here.
North Africa and Italy. Two full campaigns, several years, almost nothing essential. The films exist and none of them are good enough to displace anything above.
India and Southeast Asia. The Burma campaign appears here only through a British prisoner-of-war story. The Bengal famine of 1943 killed around three million people under British administration and has, effectively, no film at all.
The Holocaust outside the camps. Four entries here touch it and three are set in Poland. The killing that happened in ditches and forests across occupied Soviet territory, before the camps industrialised it, is barely on film.
If you know a film that closes one of these, the correction address is on the contact page and this list will change.
Corrections and additions go to watchinorder.in@gmail.com.