World War I

1957 · Stanley Kubrick · 88 min · War

Paths of Glory is 88 minutes of cold fury aimed at the machinery of war, and every second counts. Kubrick strips the anti-war film down to its essential argument: the real enemy isn't the opposing army but the institution that treats soldiers as expendable arithmetic. Kirk Douglas anchors the film with controlled outrage, the trench sequences are technically stunning, and the courtroom scenes carry more tension than most action films manage. It was banned in France for nearly two decades, which tells you everything about how effectively it hits its target. Nothing about it has aged.

1929 · Erich Maria Remarque · 296 pages · Literary Fiction

The defining novel of World War I remains the most powerful anti-war statement in literature, stripping away every romantic illusion about combat with unflinching honesty and devastating humanity.

1929 · Ernest Hemingway · 332 pages · Literary Fiction

A Farewell to Arms is Hemingway's war novel, and it does what war novels at their best should do: strip away the abstraction and show you what's left. The Caporetto retreat sequence is among the finest sustained passages in American fiction. The love story between Henry and Catherine is more polarizing, convincing some readers entirely and leaving others cold. The ending is devastating regardless. Hemingway rewrote it dozens of times, and the version he settled on earns every word of its famous final paragraph. If you've never read Hemingway, this or The Sun Also Rises is where to start.

2016 · First-Person Shooter · PC / Steam

Battlefield 1 took the enormous gamble of setting a major multiplayer shooter in World War I and won convincingly. The atmosphere is unmatched in the genre, with sound design and environmental detail that make 64-player battles feel genuinely chaotic and terrifying. Operations mode delivers the best large-scale multiplayer experience in the franchise's history, and the campaign's anthology structure offers emotional moments that the series rarely attempted. The gunplay feels deliberately heavier than modern Battlefield entries, which divides opinion, and EA's end-of-life support leaves the community maintaining what the publisher abandoned. A bold entry that earned its risk.

2017 · Patty Jenkins · 141 min · Action / Adventure / Fantasy

Wonder Woman succeeds as an origin story and as an action film for roughly two-thirds of its runtime, buoyed by Gal Gadot's magnetic presence and a handful of sequences that rank among the best the superhero genre has produced. The sincerity of its message lands, the World War I setting provides freshness, and the chemistry between its leads carries slower stretches with ease. Then the final act arrives and trades everything distinctive about the film for a CGI battle against a poorly realized villain. It's a frustrating stumble because everything before it was working so well.