Rick runs a nightclub in Casablanca, and everyone fleeing the war comes through his door, including the one woman he never got over. A war movie where the battlefield is a bar and the weapon is a pair of travel papers. Black and white, and here's looking at you, kid.

No soldiers, no front line. Just a teenage boy and his little sister after the firebombing of Kobe, rationing a tin of fruit drops and learning what war does to the people it isn't aimed at. The war film that hits hardest without firing a shot. Animated, and not for kids; have tissues.

Steven Spielberg sends Tom Hanks and a squad behind the lines after D-Day to bring one paratrooper home. The first 25 minutes on Omaha Beach rewired how movies show combat. The opening is brutal on purpose.

A rogue US general launches a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union, and the War Room has to call it off. Stanley Kubrick plays it as a comedy, with Peter Sellers in three roles. Black and white, and the joke is the end of the world.

Kirk Douglas plays a French colonel in the WWI trenches who has to defend his own men after a suicidal attack fails and the generals want someone to blame. Early Kubrick, short and furious. Black and white.

Martin Sheen heads up a river through Vietnam to find Colonel Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando, and the war gets stranger with every bend. Francis Ford Coppola made a fever dream with helicopters. The horror, the horror. Pick your cut before you press play.

A German U-boat crew on patrol in the Atlantic: a tin can full of men, far below the surface, listening for depth charges. Wolfgang Petersen keeps you inside the hull the whole time, and you'll feel every creak. Subtitled, and long-ish; worth it.

Spain, 1944. A girl moves in with her new stepfather, a brutal army captain hunting rebels in the hills, and finds a faun in the garden who says she's a lost princess. Guillermo del Toro's fairy tale, but not a kids' one; it's violent.

Akira Kurosawa turns King Lear into a samurai epic: an aging warlord splits his kingdom between three sons, and it all goes up in flames. Huge armies, huge color, huge grief. Subtitled, and long-ish; worth it.

Algeria's fight for independence from France, street by street through the Casbah. Gillo Pontecorvo shot it to look like newsreel, so it plays like you're there. Subtitled and black and white; worth it.