10 Most Perfect War Thrillers, Ranked

You get some slightly more exciting war films below and some of the grim thriller ones; a mix of both, really. Also, a “war thriller” here is something that has both the “war” and “thriller” genres tagged on Letterboxd, and maybe some other genres, too. So if you think Saving Private Ryan or Full Metal Jacket are thrilling, at least in parts, but feel surprised that they're not included here (same goes for any number of other war movies), then that’s probably why.

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10 'The Guns of Navarone' (1961)

The Guns of Navarone is old-fashioned and very straightforward, but much of it holds up pretty well for something that’s well over 60 years old at this point. There’s a team of saboteurs that gets assembled, and then their mission involves going to an island where there are some devastating guns situated. And then they just have to destroy the guns to help the Allied war effort.

Problem is, the island is incredibly well-defended by German forces, and an inability to destroy the guns within a certain amount of time could lead to a thousand or more lives being lost during a rescue operation. So, the stakes are high, there’s a time limit in play, and the goal is clear, with all those factors adding up to ensure that The Guns of Navarone proves to be pretty damn thrilling as far as World War II movies go.

9 'Bullet in the Head' (1990)

You get some bombastic action in Bullet in the Head, much as you can expect from the majority of films John Woo has directed, but it’s balanced against some more horrific and bleak stuff than you might be expecting. Bullet in the Head begins as a crime film, sort of, and then it feels like a thriller with its characters fleeing after a crime gone wrong, and their running eventually gets them to Saigon.

While there, they get wrapped up in part of the Vietnam War, and so Bullet in the Head also spends a decent chunk of its runtime on a prisoner of war sort of plot, like John Woo putting his own spin on The Deer Hunter. There’s so much going on here, to put it mildly, yet it all coalesces and delivers as a unique, striking, and effectively confronting war/thriller film.

8 'Where Eagles Dare' (1968)

There's a decent amount going on with Where Eagles Dare, even if it’s a pretty simple “men on a mission” kind of World War II movie, ultimately scratching a similar itch to the aforementioned The Guns of Navarone. This writer was about to say that Where Eagles Dare pairs the older Richard Burton up with the younger Clint Eastwood, but there were only five years between their births, so it’s more just the energy Burton brings to the role that feels older.

Burton plays a major, and he’s part of a mission to save a general who’s being held in a fortress that’s supposed to be impossible to break into. It’s a war movie that has an excuse to also be a thriller, an action movie, and an adventure film all at once, and it’s genuinely engaging. Some might say it’s a little too simple to be a masterpiece, but for the kind of movie it’s trying to be, it’s hard to fault.

7 'Son of Saul' (2015)

One of those war thrillers that definitely isn't exciting, and is instead a thriller in the sense of being super intense and harrowing (you know, Uncut Gems is a thriller, for a random/non-war example, even if it’s not much fun), here’s Son of Saul. The film takes place right in the thick of things in Auschwitz, and the way it’s filmed is intended to be suffocating, with it succeeding in making you feel like you're there among the horrors.

The approach here is the opposite of the more recent The Zone of Interest, which is also incredibly confronting and about the Holocaust, but it takes place outside a concentration camp. Son of Saul is about someone stuck inside one, forced to take on horrible tasks to have a chance at surviving the whole ordeal, with the bleakness becoming more and more intense with just about every passing minute. It’s a great film for sure, yet also a greatly difficult one to watch (by design).

6 'Fail Safe' (1964)

So, everyone knows about Dr. Strangelove, which is about nuclear war and failing to prevent it, but with a farcical and comedic edge. It came out in 1964, and it still holds up as a comedy. That same year, there was also Fail Safe, which might be easiest to describe by saying, “Yeah, it’s kind of Dr. Strangelove, but with the jokes taken out,” so it ends up being a good deal less fun and a lot more intense.

Even then, “fun” might be the wrong word to use to describe Dr. Strangelove, yet it’s fun compared to a comedy of errors that’s not a comedy, so it’s just errors, and those errors threaten the existence of the entire world. Fail Safe is one of the best movies about nuclear war and trying to prevent it from breaking out no matter what, and would make for a good (and/or upsetting) double feature with Dr. Strangelove (of course), Threads, or A House of Dynamite.

5 'Soldier of Orange' (1977)

The most overlooked of all the Paul Verhoeven movies (unfairly so, since this could well be his best), Soldier of Orange takes place during World War II, and it revolves around a group of friends in the Netherlands finding their friendships and lives impacted by Germany invading in 1940. It runs for close to 2.5 hours, but you really don’t feel the length.

Maybe it counts as an epic, with the scope and the decently lengthy runtime, and Soldier of Orange does also strike a balance between providing entertainment and putting forth an anti-war message. It’s gritty and unapologetically raw, much in the way you usually get with Verhoeven’s films, yet there’s more of an emotional punch here because of the particular story being told. It all adds up to something surprisingly great, and continually kind of underrated.

4 'The Train' (1964)

It’s pretty wild how The Train is more than six decades old, yet the quality of its action is so high. The 1960s might well have been the golden age for World War II movies that also functioned as action/thriller movies, because The Train delivers in a similar way to both The Guns of Navarone and Where Eagles Dare. Once more, there is a pretty simple story at the center of this one.

More specifically, it’s about a German colonel trying to steal a great deal of artwork from France in 1944, using a train, and then the French Resistance wants to put a stop to that for obvious reasons. There it is. There’s your film. Well, not just the premise, because you have to have good actors, a good director, and other people doing technical things behind the scenes well, but The Train does indeed have all those things, and so it works equally well as a World War II movie and a pretty great thriller.

3 'The Hurt Locker' (2008)

Since The Hurt Locker revolves around the members of a bomb squad and all the explosives they have to deactivate, things are often incredibly intense. It would be strange and disappointing if such a movie didn’t find ways to get tension out of the inherently stressful “Which ****ing wire do we cut?!” kind of thing, but also, thankfully, The Hurt Locker has a bit more to offer than just that sort of thing again and again.

It suggests there’s a certain thrill to some activities in war, or that they can trigger the brain belonging to certain people and thereby make war feel addictive, or compelling. The Hurt Locker is grim and unique on that front, as a psychological drama about war and living without it, once you’ve served, all the while also delivering so much by way of white-knuckle sequences.

2 'Army of Shadows' (1969)

Army of Shadows is a spy movie set during World War II, so there’s an unsurprisingly high amount of paranoia, intrigue, suspense, and just generally uneasy stuff that happens throughout. It’s about a resistance fighter who gets betrayed and then ends up in a Nazi prison camp, later escaping and trying to continue the fight he’d been fighting, but without getting caught and imprisoned again, or getting killed.

The stakes are undeniably high, and also, Army of Shadows looks very moody and striking throughout, so that adds to all the unease and suspense, in a way. It’s an excellent film that deserves its status as a classic, and if you’ve somehow never seen a French World War II movie before, it’s not a bad one to start with (its director, Jean-Pierre Melville, also has a rather impeccable filmography, since it includes the likes of Le Samouraï and Le Cercle Rouge, too).

1 'Inglourious Basterds' (2009)

There isn't much more that can be said about Inglourious Basterds. It actually competed against The Hurt Locker at the Oscars, even though The Hurt Locker was first screened in 2008 (no release wide enough, so it competed against the movies of 2009, like Avatar and Up, as well). And yes, The Hurt Locker was great, because it was mentioned here, but Inglourious Basterds is next-level stuff.

Almost every scene here builds suspense, and each scene builds a bit more suspense than the last major suspenseful scene, so on and on Inglourious Basterds goes, getting quite agonizing by the end, but in an impressive (and sort of good?) way. It’s probably the best World War II movie of the 21st century so far, and if you were to compare it to all the ones that came out in the 20th century, too, it’s also right up there quality-wise.