WWI

2022 · Edward Berger · 148 min · War / Drama

All Quiet on the Western Front is a stunning and merciless German-language adaptation that turns Erich Maria Remarque's novel into one of the most visceral anti-war films ever made. Edward Berger's direction, the astonishing cinematography, and a doom-laden three-note score create a portrait of World War I as pure industrial slaughter, seen through the hollowing eyes of a teenage volunteer. Readers of the novel have fair complaints about what the adaptation cuts and changes, and its relentless bleakness can shade into numbness across two and a half hours. As pure cinema, though, it's a hammer blow.

2015 · Erik Larson · 430 pages · Nonfiction / History

Dead Wake reconstructs the last crossing of the Lusitania with Erik Larson's signature dual-track engineering, the great liner's passengers cataloguing their week at sea while U-20 hunts through the same waters, two clocks converging on eighteen minutes that helped drag America toward war. The archival texture is Larson at full strength, love letters, cargo manifests, the submarine captain's war diary, and the sinking itself is rendered with devastating patience. The Washington material, Wilson's grief and courtship threaded through the politics, pads more than it propels, and readers of the author's Chicago masterpiece will find this voyage statelier. The convergence, when it comes, justifies the crossing.

2019 · Sam Mendes · 119 min · War / Drama

1917 is a staggering feat of filmmaking that drops you into a desperate mission across no man's land and refuses to let you look away. Roger Deakins' cinematography alone justifies the price of admission, and Sam Mendes wrings real tension from what is essentially a simple delivery run. The characters are thinner than the film's ambitions deserve, and the one-take approach occasionally calls more attention to itself than to the story it's telling. Those are meaningful limitations. But the sheer craft on display, and the moments where technique and emotion fully connect, make this one of the most gripping war films in recent memory.