Burt Lancaster, Deborah Kerr, and Montgomery Clift star in the Oscar-winning classic romantic drama set in the days leading up to Pearl Harbor.
Category: war
Guillermo del Toro’s ‘The Devil’s Backbone’ on Amazon Prime
Guillermo del Toro directed this haunting ghost story, set in a remote orphanage in Spain, against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War.
Steven Spielberg’s ‘Empire of the Sun’ – Innocence in wartime on HBO Max
Christian Bale made his film debut as British schoolboy in a Japanese prison camp in World War II Shanghai in this superb war drama.
Charlton Heston in the battle of ‘Khartoum’ on Amazon Prime
Laurence Olivier is unfortunately cast as an Arab (complete with heavy brownface makeup) in this sweeping epic of colonial war in 1880 Sudan.
Jackie Chan leads the ‘Railroad Tigers’ on Peacock
Jackie Chan stars in Railroad Tigers (China, 2016) as the leader of a scruffy band of rural railroad porters who stage raids on Japanese trains running through occupied China in World War II. They drop into moving trains, steal food for the villagers, and leave their mark by drawing flying tigers on the bodies of […]
‘Lore’ – navigating the collapse of Nazi Germany on Criterion Channel and free on Kanopy and Hoopla
Before she was tapped to helm Black Widow for Marvel, Australian filmmaker Cate Shortland directed Lore (Germany, 2012). A coproduction of Germany and Australia with a German cast, setting, and language, Lore takes the viewer on a harrowing odyssey through Germany after the fall of Hitler. The privileged life of fresh-faced German teenager Lore (Saskia […]
‘Dr. Strangelove’ – the screwball satire of mutually assured destruction on HBO Max
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), Stanley Kubrick’s screwball satire of cold war posturing and mutually assured destruction, is the funniest film ever made about nuclear holocaust. But it didn’t begin as a comedy. The source novel, Peter George’s Red Alert, was a grave contemplation of the […]
Oscar winner ‘The Hurt Locker’ on Peacock
“Tell me something. What’s the best way to disarm one of these things?”“The way you don’t die, sir.” Set in the Iraq war after the proclamation of “Mission Accomplished” and the transformation of a battlefield army into an occupation force, The Hurt Locker (2008) follows the finals days in the rotation of a bomb disposal unit […]
John Wayne storms the ‘Sands of Iwo Jima’ on Amazon Prime
Sands of Iwo Jima (1950) is the best war film that John Wayne made outside of John Ford’s masterpiece They Were Expendable. Made four years after the end of the war in 1949, it was the biggest picture that Allan Dwan, once a major director of big silent movie spectacles and handsome star vehicles, had […]
‘The Dirty Dozen’ – the original World War II caper on HBO Max
The 1960s were full of big budget wartime caper-style films—The Great Escape, Where Eagles Dare, Kelley’s Heroes, just to name a few—but none of them have the brawny machismo and wily bad boy gusto of The Dirty Dozen (1967), Robert Aldrich’s testosterone-fueled tough guy classic. Lee Marvin is the hard-as-nails Major who is “volunteered” to […]