The Oscars come but once a year, and whether you love them or hate them, they provide a great opportunity to look back at film history. The Oscars are often best known for getting things wrong, and they do that plenty. Sometimes, though, the Oscars actually nail it, even if it’s not in Best Picture.
War movies are often popular Oscar fare, and while not all war movies are good, we’ve pulled together five war movies that won Oscars and are worth your attention.
Need more recommendations? Then check out the best new movies to stream this week, as well as the best shows on Netflix, best shows on Hulu, best shows on Amazon Prime Video, and best shows on Disney+.
Saving Private Ryan (1998)
One of the greatest Best Picture losers ever made, Saving Private Ryan is a war epic that follows a group of soldiers who are tasked with what is essentially a suicide mission. They must get deep behind enemy lines in order to rescue a soldier whose three brothers were all killed during the D-Day invasion. Earnest, sentimental, and horrific when it needs to be, Saving Private Ryan is exactly as good as you’ve heard it to be. It’s the kind of movie all war films should aspire to be, even if they can’t replicate the brilliance and horror of the opening D-Day sequence orchestrated by Steven Spielberg.
You can watch Saving Private Ryan on Paramount+.
Dunkirk (2017)
Christopher Nolan’s take on the war movie was as Nolan-y as you might have anticipated. Telling the story of the evacuation at Dunkirk, the film follows soldiers on the ground, two pilots surveying the scene from above, and a group of civilians steering their boats across the channel to pick up their boys.
Featuring a wide ensemble, the most remarkable thing about Dunkirk is the way it manages to build tension through its manipulation of time. You may know the outcome of this evacuation, but Dunkirk will still keep you guessing about how it will unfold.
You can watch Dunkirk on Amazon Prime Video.
The Deer Hunter (1978)
The Deer Hunter is one of the best movies ever made about the Vietnam War. Two men (Christopher Walken and Robert De Niro) from a small Pennsylvania town enlist in the war. Upon returning home, the men discover that the war has changed them forever.
Today, The Deer Hunter is best known for its Russian Roulette, which is as tense and unsettling as any movie scene ever made, but the entirety of The Deer Hunter is a stark confrontation with what war is really like and how much it destroys the men who are asked to fight in it.
You can rent The Deer Hunter on Amazon Prime Video.
The Hurt Locker (2008)
Plenty of movies have been made about the Iraq War, but most aren’t very good. The Hurt Locker bucked that trend. Kathryn Bigelow’s drama follows an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit that is given a new leader (Jeremy Renner) following the death of their previous one.
As they adjust to their new leader’s aggressive leadership style, they realize that he’s the kind of soldier who gets his kicks from war and has no idea what to do without the adrenaline that comes with risking your life. The Hurt Locker is brilliant, bracing, and grounded in a way that even the best war movies rarely are.
You can watch The Hurt Locker on Amazon Prime Video.
The Zone of Interest (2023)
One of the most brilliant and enraging war movies ever, The Zone of Interest follows Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, and his family as they go about their daily lives living adjacent to a concentration camp. The movie’s brilliance is in showing you how normal the commandant’s life is. He mostly deals with questions of logistics and bureaucracy, even as mass killings are happening just feet from his front door.
Nazis were evil, deplorable people, but they were also people who lived lives not unlike our own. The Zone of Interest is a reminder of humanity’s ability to practice great evil. We just don’t think about it.
You can watch The Zone of Interest on Max.
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