The 20 best World War I movies of all time

From ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ to ‘Gallipoli’: Great War films ranked by historical accuracy

However you feel about the label ‘The Great War’, World War I’s filmography is indisputably outstanding. Like our memory of that complex, heavily memorialised conflict, it’s enduring too. Sam Mendes’s 1917 and Netflix’s recent re-adaption of Erich Maria Remarque’s classic anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front suggest that it’s far from played out too. But World War I films have been masterful since back in the silent era – witness the battle sequences in Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front, the scale of King Vidor’s The Big Parade and the realism of GW Pabst’s Westfront 1918.

As military historian and host of the Old Front Line podcast Paul Reed explains, they’re often good on the history and detail, too. We asked him to dig into the most realistic depictions of the war on the big screen.

Best World War I movies

1. They Shall Not Grow Old (2018)

Photograph: Wingnut Films / IWM

Not just a violent crucible but also a petri dish for technological, medical and social leaps, the First World War is still indirectly fuelling innovation a century later. Peter Jackson’s sui generis documentary joins 1917 in reinventing the grammar of war films, painstakingly colourising reams of archive footage and adding the sounds of the war – including the actual voices of veterans – to create a truly haunting immediacy. Hearing some of the soldiers recalling their sadness when the Armistice finally came is a useful reminder that the experience of war was far from homogeneous.

The expert view: ‘It’s an incredible film in the way it brings the archives to life and it’s so powerful for featuring the recordings of the veterans. It shocked me to the core to hear the voices of men who’d been dead for 30 years that I’d once interviewed. Anyone with even a passing interest in the war should see it.’

2. Journey’s End (2018)

Photograph: Steffan Hill

Frequently revived as a stage play, RC Sherriff’s claustrophobic and nail-gnawingly tense snapshot of a British dugout on the eve of the German Spring Offensive of 1918 isn’t immediately cinematic. But ‘The Duchess’ director Saul Dibbs’s adaptation – unlike the 1930 James Whale version – uses nimble camerawork and imaginative framing to expand the canvas and deliver a powerful human drama of doomed men in the subterranean world of the trenches. Strung out over a thin khaki line, the British Army is about to be battered – and this small but richly drawn platoon is at the sharpest end of it.

The expert view: ‘It depicts what, to me, is that essential moment on the eve of battle: a great storm is coming, and the men all sense it. It also shows how the officers in an infantry company lived and worked and fought and existed with each other, written by a veteran, which gives it that extra level of credibility. Adding Sheriff’s postscript showing how the losses affected those left at home – which is always missing in the play – is a nice touch.’

Read the entire article on the TimeOut website.
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