"Vietnam"

1979 · Francis Ford Coppola · 147 min · War / Drama

Apocalypse Now remains one of the most visually and sonically overwhelming war films ever made, a journey that trades conventional combat storytelling for something closer to a fever dream. The first two acts are as good as anything in the genre, built on images and sounds that refuse to leave your memory. Where it stumbles, in a final stretch that loses the narrative momentum it spent two hours building, the stumble is fascinating rather than fatal. Francis Ford Coppola made a film that captures the madness of war by going a little mad itself, and the result is something that still feels unlike anything else.

1987 · Stanley Kubrick · 116 min · War / Drama

Full Metal Jacket delivers one of cinema's most devastating opening acts, a boot camp sequence so perfectly constructed that it threatens to overshadow everything that follows. R. Lee Ermey's drill instructor and Vincent D'Onofrio's Private Pyle created two of the most memorable characters in war film history, and Kubrick's cold, precise direction strips away every romantic notion about military service. The Vietnam half divides audiences, but its deliberate shift from structure to chaos is the entire point. This is a film about what institutional violence does to the people inside it, and Kubrick made that argument with surgical precision.