Malick’s adaptation of James Jones’s memoir of the battle for Guadalcanal features Sean Penn, John Cusack, Nick Nolte, George Clooney, John Travolta and Woody Harrelson, with Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Sheen, Gary Oldman and Mickey Rourke left, amazingly, on the cutting room floor. So it was no surprise that on his return to filmmaking the Hollywood elite would line up to volunteer. 💣 The 101 best action movies of all-timeĬast: Sean Penn, Adrien Brody, Jim Caviezel, Ben Chaplinīy the time of The Thin Red Line, Terrence Malick had been languishing in self-imposed exile for two decades while his first two films, Badlands and Days of Heaven, grew in stature. 🎖️ The best World War I movies, ranked by historical accuracy Written by Tom Huddleston, Adam Lee Davies, Paul Fairclough, Anna Smith, David Jenkins, Dan Jolin, Phil de Semlyen, Alim Kheraj & Matthew Singer

On the slate are wide-scale epics, personal dramas, devastating documentaries, historical revisions and even a comedy or two. And who better to ask than the man behind Inglourious Basterds and walking war-kipedia of combat flicks, Quentin Tarantino? He’s helped us parse hundreds of films down to a mere 50 all-timers. In fact, there are so many World War II movies that we needed help narrowing them down to a mere 50. What some of the very best have in common is the first-hand experiences of their filmmakers: men like Sam Fuller, Jean-Pierre Melville and John Huston saw it all for themselves and brought that authenticity to their films. There are gripping stories of resistance movies like Army of Shadows and Kanal, a whole canon of Holocaust masterpieces and a number of seminal documentaries that employ real-life footage to bring it all home. A whole genre in their own right, World War II movies come in all shapes and sizes: from gung-ho men-on-a-mission movies like Dirty Dozen and Where Eagles Dare to the bleaker, more complex visions of war that usually emerged from the vanquished nations ( Fires on the Plain, Kelly’s Heroes, Stalingrad, et al).

Crucible of War by Fred Anderson