The following article presents a brief synopsis of best films made on World War- II. The movies have been selected on the basis of ratings of Internet movie database which is the most visited website dedicated for movie reviews. The overviews have been compiled from NY Times.
‘Schindler’s List’ (1993)
Director : Steven Spielberg
Nationality : US
Language : English
IMDB Rating : 8.9/10
Metascore : 93/100
Tomatometer : 97/100
The temptation is to first cite director Steven Spielberg’s other honored World War II epic, “Saving Private Ryan.” But while that’s an example of great filmmaking, it isn’t a great film. Aside from the opening 20 minutes of documentary-style hell on Normandy Beach, the rest of it is an ordinary tale with stock characters, book-ended by a needless exercise in nostalgia. “Schindler’s List,” meanwhile, is a true masterpiece and almost completely bereft of the sentimentality Spielberg is often knocked for. Liam Neeson plays war profiteer Oskar Schindler, who eventually develops a conscience and rescues many of the Jews in his employ from certain death. The script, adapted by Steven Zaillian from a book by Thomas Keneally, builds masterfully from the early stages of the Nazis’ presence in Poland until the end of the war. The term “triumph of the human spirit” is too casually thrown around when describing such stories, but here it’s absolutely appropriate.
Casa Blanca (1942)
Director: Michael Curtiz
Nationality : Austria/Hungary
Language : English
IMDB Rating : 8.8
Metascore : No rating available
Tomatometer : 97/100
Is there anything left to say about this canonical Hollywood melodrama that hasn’t already been churned into the public consciousness? Well, newsflash: it’s still a damn great movie. Set during the Allied invasion of North Africa, it focuses on Europe’s displaced flotsam as they pass through Humphrey Bogart’s stucco Moroccan fun pub before escaping to freedom. Of course, ivories are tinkled, transit letters are hidden and old flames newly romanced, with Bergman and Bogie making for the quintessential doomed couple. Yet, during more recent viewings, it’s Claude Rains’s Vichy-appointed police captain Louis Renault who proves to be the film’s most interesting and ambiguous character, perfectly representing France’s precarious situation during the war while also subtly imparting the psychological burden of an uncertain future.
Ningen no J oken (The Human Condition) (1953)
Director: Masaki Kobayashi
Nationality : Japan
Language: Japanese
IMDB Rating : 8.7
Metascore : No rating available
Tomatometer :88/100
Originally titled Ningen No Joken, No Greater Love is the first of Japanese filmmaker Masaki Kobayashi's Human Condition trilogy. Drawing from his own experiences, Kobayashi weaves the tale of a Japanese pacifist, trying to get by as best he can during World War II. Tatsuya Nakadai plays the leading role of a mine supervisor, whose kindly treatment of POW laborers incurs the wrath of his superiors. As the war in the Pacific rages on, Japan begins suffering heavy losses and military humiliations, yet still Nakadai adheres to his principles. Ultimately overwhelmed by events, Nakadai is horribly mistreated by the powers-that-be, then ordered to don a uniform and fight for his country. Originally released at 200 minutes, No Greater Love was followed in 1961 by the first of two sequels, Road to Eternity (see entry 23819) ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Director: Steven Spielberg
Nationality: US
Language : English
IMDB Rating : 8.5/10
Metascore : 90/100
Tomatometer : 91/100
{Steven Spielberg} directed this powerful, realistic re-creation of WWII's D-day invasion and the immediate aftermat h. The story opens with a prologue in which a veteran brings his family to the American cemetery at Normandy, and a flashback then joins Capt. John Miller ({Tom Hanks}) and GIs in a landing craft making the June 6, 1944, approach to Omaha Beach to face devastating German artillery fire. This mass slaughter of American soldiers is depicted in a compelling, unforgettable 24-minute sequence. Miller's men slowly move forward to finally take a concrete pillbox. On the beach littered with bodies is one with the name "Ryan" stenciled on his backpack. Army Chief of Staff Gen. George C. Marshall ({Harve Presnell}), learning that three Ryan brothers from the same family have all been killed in a single week, requests that the surviving brother, Pvt. James Ryan ({Matt Damon}), be located and brought back to the United States. Capt. Miller gets the assignment, and he chooses a translator, Cpl. Upham ({Jeremy Davis}), skilled in language but not in combat, to join his squad of right-hand man Sgt. Horvath ({Tom Sizemore}), plus privates Mellish ({Adam Goldberg}), Medic Wade ({Giovanni Ribisi}), cynical Reiben ({Edward Burns}) from Brooklyn, Italian-American Caparzo ({Vin Diesel}), and religious Southerner Jackson ({Barry Pepper}), an ace sharpshooter who calls on the Lord while taking aim. Having previously experienced action in Italy and North Africa, the close-knit squad sets out through areas still thick with Nazis. After they lose one man in a skirmish at a bombed village, some in the group begin to question the logic of losing more lives to save a single soldier.
Das Boot (1981)
Director: Wolfgang Peterson
Nationality: Germany
Language: German
IMDB Rating : 8.5/10
Metascore : 86/100
Tomatometer : 100/100
It is 1942 and the German submarine fleet is heavily engaged in the so called "Battle of the Atlantic" to harass and destroy English shipping. With better escorts of the Destroyer Class, however, German U-Boats have begun to take heavy losses. "Das Boot" is the story of one such U-Boat crew, with the film examining how these submariners maintained their professionalism as soldiers, attempted to accomplish impossible missions, while all the time attempting to understand and obey the ideology of the government under which they served. This subtitled psychological drama about a German U-boat sub captures the claustrophobia of submarine existence in a powerful story that pulls you in and doesn’t let go. If you haven’t yet, check out the Director’s Cut of Das Boot – a longer running time, but that extra footage never bores.
Bridge on the river Kwai (1957)
Director: David Lean
Nationality : UK
Language: English
IMDB Rating : 8.4/10
Metascore : Rating not available
Tomatometer : 95/100
Narrowly beating out Sunday afternoon staple ‘The Bridge at Remagen’ (1969), David Lean’s majestic PoW classic keeps getting better with age. Alec Guinness is in fine form as a captured British Colonel, overseeing Allied troops charged with assisting the Japanese war effort by building said bridge across said river. With his stiff upper lip wilting in the maddening Burmese heat and a copy of the Geneva Convention always to hand, Guinness presents an incarnation of how we all would like to imagine we comport ourselves in such a tight spot. William Holden’s scheming, wiseacre – and all too relatable – American GI, meanwhile, is quite unshakeable in his belief that the war would get on quite well without him thank you very much, and spends an enviable amount of the film goosing the nurses in a Ceylon military hospital. In the end, both men’s attitudes are compromised to the greater good and the bridge comes crashing down in a riveting scene of unbridled catharsis.
Director: Roberto Benigni
Nationality : Italy
Language: German
IMDB Rating : 8.5/10
Metascore : 59/100
Tomatometer : 79/100
In this WW II tragicomedy, famed Italian funnyman Roberto Benigni (THE MONSTER) portrays Guido, who moves during the '30s from the country to a Tuscan town, where he is entranced by schoolteacher Dora (Nicoletta Braschi, Benigni's real-life wife). Dora likes Guido, but she remains faithful to her pompous fiancé, so Guido has an uphill struggle. Meanwhile, anti-Semitic attitudes lead to attacks against Guido's Jewish uncle (Giustino Durano). Leaping ahead to five years later, during WW II, Guido and Dora are married and have a son Giosue (Giorgio Cantarini). After they are imprisoned in a concentration camp, Guido goes to elaborate lengths to keep his son from understanding the truth of their situation. He tells the boy that they are competing with others to win an armored tank -- so everything from food shortages to tattoos is explained as necessary for participation in the contest.
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Nationality : US
Language: English
IMDB Rating : 8.4/10
Metascore : 69/100
Tomatometer : 88/100
From the moment the charming, smiling, laughing Nazi in “Inglourious Basterds,” Quentin Tarantino’s latest cinematic happening, sweeps onto the screen, he owns this film even more than its maker. Played by a little-known Austrian actor, Christoph Waltz, Col. Hans Landa is a vision of big-screen National Socialist villainy, from the smart cut of his SS coat to the soft gleam of his leather boots. There might be a fearsome skull (the death’s head, or totenkopf) grinning on his cap, but Colonel Landa has us at hallo. “Inglourious Basterds,” first shown at the Cannes Film Festival in May, is Mr. Tarantino’s sixth feature. (The bifurcated “Kill Bill” is really one film.) In many respects it looks and, as important, sounds like a typical Tarantino production with its showboating performances, encyclopedic movie references and streams of self-conscious dialogue. As usual Mr. Tarantino gives you a lot to chew on, though there’s plenty to gag on as well. Much depends on whether you can just groove on his framing and staging, his swooping crane shots, postmodern flourishes (Samuel L. Jackson in voice-over explaining the combustibility of nitrate prints) and gorgeously saturated colors, one velvety red in particular. But too often in “Inglourious Basterds” the filmmaking falls short. Mr. Tarantino is a great writer and director of individual scenes, though he can have trouble putting those together, a difficulty that has sometimes been obscured by the clever temporal kinks in his earlier work.
Director: Roman Polanski
Nationality : France
Language : English
IMDB Rating : 8.5/10
Metascore :85/100
Tomatometer : 96/100
Roman Polanski, filming in Poland for the first time in 40 years, has made one of the finest films yet about the catastrophe the Nazis visited on Poland and its Jewish population. Adrien Brody, in a fluid, understated and thoroughly unsentimental performance, plays Wladislaw Szpilman, a popular concert pianist who survived, against odds that can only be described as absurd, the German occupation of Warsaw and the inferno of the city's Jewish ghetto. With relentless clarity, Mr. Polanski tracks the deterioration of his hero's situation and the day-in, day-out assault on his humanity. There are scenes of unwatchable brutality as well as of kindness and solidarity, but what is most remarkable is the sense of daily life in impossible conditions. The last part of the movie, in which Szpilman is first trapped in a safe house and then condemned to wander the bombed-out city, is a tour de force, at once harrowing and strangely comic.
All Overviews have been picked up from New York Times- A leading US Newspaper Daily
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