The theme of war has always been and will be one of the most popular in cinema. Many great directors comprehended all the horrors of the Second World War, its catastrophes and significance for humanity in their own way. However, always in these paintings, the theme of feat, heroism, the fate of man, genocide and the meaninglessness of death became at the forefront.
Reader (2008)
The tape was filmed by Stephen Daldry based on the novel by the famous German novelist Bernhard Schlink. The film was nominated four times for an Oscar and received an award for Best Actress.
The events described in the picture unfold in Germany after the end of the war. The main character is a fifteen-year-old schoolboy Mike Berg. One day, returning from classes, Mike became ill right on the street. The only person who offered to help the guy was 36-year-old Hanna Schmitz. After recovering, Mike found Hannah to thank her. He feels an incomprehensible attraction to her and soon a passion flares up between them.
Mike spends all his free time with Hannah. Sometimes a woman asks Mike to read aloud to her. Their secret romance continues until Hanna suddenly disappears. Eight years later, they meet in the courtroom. And this meeting is not at all what Mike expected. Now the whole future life of the former lover depends on his decisions.
Come and See (1985)
The Soviet drama Come and See, directed by Elem Klimov, is based on documentary facts and refers to Adamovich’s Khotyn Tale. The authors chose exactly the place and those events that became a symbol of people’s misfortune and suffering.
This tape managed to get very close to making the viewer experience the real ruthless horror of war. This picture has the most realistic depiction of the victims of the war, as well as unprecedented audio and video effects that immerse the viewer in the events unfolding on the screen.
In “Come and See” the story is told on behalf of the Belarusian teenager Fler. A sixteen-year-old boy who dug up a carbine among scraps of barbed wire and shot through helmets and went to the forest to the partisans. At the beginning of the film, he is just a child.
In the end, having gone through the horror of the punitive actions of the Nazis, he becomes an adult, frighteningly adult and even old. The war has distorted the once tender, childish features and turned them into senile wrinkles.
Dunkirk (2017)
A military drama directed by Christopher Nolan, which is based on the events of the Dunkirk operation – the evacuation by sea of English, French and Belgian units blocked by German troops near the French city of Dunkirk.
The film is set in 1940. Hundreds of thousands of French, Belgian and British soldiers were pressed by the German troops with their backs to the Atlantic Ocean. It would seem that they do not have a single chance to get out of there alive and not in captivity. To be saved, air must unite with land, sea with land, military with civilians.
It was thanks to the support of aviation, which every day sent hundreds of aircraft in defense of the troops and ordinary merchant ships and boats of the local population, that thousands of soldiers had the hope of returning home.
Saving Private Ryan (1998)
The Oscar-winning American film from Steven Spielberg, starring Tom Hanks, tells the story of the events during the Normandy operation during World War II.
The plot will reveal the full horror of war. Although America was the last to enter hostilities, the country lost thousands of heroes who fought for their homeland. The Ryan family lost three sons in this war. The mother cannot come to terms with the pain of loss, she still has a glimmer of hope that the only son who managed to survive will return home.
Captain Miller decides to save Private Ryan and entrusts this mission to a squad of soldiers. These are experienced fighters who have participated in many operations, as well as those who have never been on the battlefield.
The film is considered one of Spielberg’s most successful works, and the brilliant performance of Tom Hanks makes the tape a cult one.
Schindler’s List (1993)
The cult film about the Holocaust, based on the novel by Thomas Keneally. The film received seven Oscars. A difficult but ingenious staging of a story about a great human deed in the cruel time of Nazism. The film is black and white. Spielberg’s idea to make it exactly like that justified itself completely. In its own way, this is a brilliant movie with a strong humanistic message that harmoniously fits into the Spielberg paradigm and is addressed to human nature.
Excellent acting, incredible skill of the director and cameraman, characteristic music perfectly convey the atmosphere of complete hopelessness and loss of the meaning of life, but also prove that “he who saves one life will save the whole world.”
The plot of the film “Schindler’s List” tells about the events taking place in 1939. This is the true story of the mysterious Oskar Schindler, who was able to open a factory during the war and hire Jews. He helped many Jews to forge documents confirming their technical education.
The prisoners willingly worked for you live. Oskar Schindrel was a member of the Nazi Party and managed to save more than a hundred thousand Jews from death during World War II. The triumph of one man who saved many without pitying himself.
Pianist (2002)
Ribbon of Roman Polanski, which received the Palme d’Or and three Oscars. This film is very personal for the director, because his parents died in a concentration camp, and he himself barely escaped from the pogroms of the Krakow ghetto.
A film starring Adrien Brody who went to all sorts of extremes to get into the role. Based on the autobiography of Wladyslaw Shpilman, one of the best pianists in Poland in the 1930s, whose life changes dramatically after the Nazis come to Poland.
The life of all Jews is changing: they are placed in the Warsaw ghetto, forbidden to work, humiliated, forced to wear bandages, and after a while they are sent to a concentration camp. But Vlad managed to hide in the attic of one of the Warsaw houses.
Paradise (2017)
A dramatic film by Andrei Konchalovsky, for which the director was awarded the Silver Lion.
The plot is built around the interweaving of the fates of three main characters during the Second World War: the Russian aristocratic émigré and member of the French resistance Olga, the French collaborator Jules and the high-ranking SS officer Helmut.
Olga is arrested for hiding Jewish children from a Nazi raid. Jules is in charge of her case. He admires her and in exchange for an intimate relationship, it seems, is ready to soften the fate of the prisoner. But the ghostly hope for freedom is replaced by cruel reality – Olga ends up in a German concentration camp.
There she meets Helmut, who was once hopelessly in love with her in the past. A strange, painful relationship develops between them. The Nazis are already close to defeat, and Hellmuth decides to save Olga from the concentration camp and flee with her to South America. Olga, who has lost hope of freedom, agrees, but at the last moment she realizes that the idea of paradise has changed.
Son of Saul (2015)
The first feature film directed by Laszlo Nemes. The non-professional actor Geza Roerig starred in the title role.
The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Grand Prix. And in 2016, the film won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.
The film tells about the fate of Saul Auslander. In 1944, the man became a prisoner of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Here he was made a member of the Sonderkommando. To survive, he was forced to send prisoners like him to the gas chamber, and then burn their bodies. Saul saw thousands of deaths, no one managed to survive after the gas chamber.
However, the unheard of happens – once he saw how a German doctor finished off a boy who survived after the gas chamber. Saul thought the boy was his son. Now the main character is obsessed with the idea of burying the boy’s body according to all Jewish traditions. Meanwhile, his comrades learn that the Nazis are going to destroy them as well as ordinary prisoners.
Inglourious Basterds (2009)
Daring and surreal movie from Tarantino, which tells about nine American soldiers-Jews, who are afraid of the whole of Germany.
Tarantino swung at something that seems sacred to some and simply tore it to pieces. He wins the most terrible war in the history of mankind at the snap of his fingers and attributes the triumph to America.
Inglourious Basterds is a crystal clear visualization of the magical power of art. In Tarantino’s sense, of course. In general, his stories should be treated with a certain amount of irony.
The action of the picture takes place in occupied France. In front of Suzanne Dreyfus, her family is killed at the hands of the German colonel Hans Land. The girl miraculously manages to escape and flee to Paris. There she gets a job at the cinema.
At the same time, somewhere in Europe, Lieutenant Aldo Rain is gathering a group of Jewish soldiers who call themselves “Bastards”. They are molested by secret agent Bridget von Hammersmark, posing as an actress. Both storylines intersect when the saboteurs meet in the cinema with Suzanne, who dreams of taking revenge on the offenders.
The Thin Red Line (1998)
A 1998 war drama filmed by Torrens Malick based on the novel of the same name by James Jones. The film tells a fictional story about US troops during the Battle of Guadalcanal in World War II. The film stars Sean Penn, George Clooney and John Travolta.
The central theme of all of Malik’s work is the transition from youth to adulthood, from innocence to experience, from dreams to reality, and The Thin Red Line is no exception. Malik portrays Guadalcanal as a lost paradise. Two warring armies are essentially experiencing the same thing, and it is clear how miserable they are in front of eternal nature.
On the one hand, soldiers are individuals who go through a destructive path, and on the other hand, they are the same parts of nature as the plants, birds and insects that surround them. This is a special look at the war and at a person who looks like a god and is pathetic at the same time.
This film – continuous philosophy and reflections on human essence, on the moral and spiritual search of man, on the war of man, first of all, with himself. There are no main characters here, and the war is depicted as part of human nature and soul, and not as a social tragedy and cataclysm.