With his 1959 narrative debut, Bernhard Wicki turned a “hymn to German courage” into an anti-war film by focusing on the boys behind the soldiers.

Ex Machina’s Alicia Vikander gives a touching, nuanced performance in this effective adaptation of Vera Brittain’s World War I-era memoir, about her struggles to get an education and survive the war.

Russell Crowe’s feature directorial debut casts him as a father looking for the bodies of his sons on a Turkish battlefield.

There’s a real story about injustice, legal triumph, and stolen Nazi art at the bottom of this heavy-handed historical feature. It’s just buried under force-fed emotion.

Though The Player is widely considered Robert Altman’s comeback after a difficult run in the 1980s, this unconventional Van Gogh biopic had much of the evocative vision and scope of his 1970s heyday. 

Jessica Hausner’s formally impressive but dramatically stilted Cannes favorite imagines the circumstances that led a famed German writer and a married woman of his acquaintance to commit double suicide in 1811. 

Set in Belfast during the Troubles, Yann Demange’s thrilling feature directorial debut stars Jack O’Connell as an inexperienced soldier who gets separated from his unit in a dangerous area, and has to fight his way back. 

Steven Spielberg’s morally ambiguous political thriller tracks Israel’s response to the killing of its athletes by a terrorist organization at the 1972 Olympics in Munich.

Nearly 30 years after his World War II-era reminiscence Hope And Glory become a surprise Best Picture and Best Director nominee, director John Boorman follows the adult adventures of his child protagonist in the 1950s.

After Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky won Best Picture, making him a Hollywood legend at age 30, he decided to go big. The union epic that resulted suffered from Important Follow-Up Syndrome. 

Kenneth Branagh’s directorial debut heralded a tremendous acting and filmmaking talent that never fully materialized, but the film remains a stirring, beautifully acted staging of Shakespeare. 

This panting historical drama gives international superstar David Garrett a showcase as an equally innovative Italian master, but its vapidity triumphs over its craft.

Kevin Macdonald’s gripping historical fiction casts Jude Law as a disgruntled submarine captain who plunders a U-boat in the Black Sea for Nazi gold. 

Based on the true story of three Navy men who crash into the Pacific during World War II and fight for survival over 34 days at sea, this drama makes a claim to historical accuracy, but much of it rings false. 

Two North Carolina natives, first-time director David Burris and novelist Ron Rash, collaborated on this disappointingly inauthentic drama about the state’s racial legacy.

Dominik Graf’s nearly three-hour literary epic takes the Ye Olde Us Weekly approach to a speculative love triangle between German intellectual Friedrich Schiller, his wife, and his sister-in-law.

Immediacy, in all its senses, defines Ava DuVernay’s Martin Luther King, Jr. biopic.

Based on Laura Hillenbrand’s biography about Louis Zamperini, an Olympian who survived tremendous abuse at a Japanese POW camp, Angelina Jolie’s prestige picture is handsomely mounted but unrelentingly dreary. 

In this sumptuous yet earthy biopic about early-19th-century painter J.M.W. Turner, Mike Leigh profiles an artist whose personal failings are neither forgiven nor allowed to overwhelm his accomplishments. 

Ridley Scott’s ability to incorporate cutting-edge special effects into an atmospheric whole occasionally brings this Biblical epic to startling life, but the story of Moses and Ramses is too much of a slog to be redeemed by it.