We’ve picked films that deal with soldiers, soldiering and warfare directly, meaning wartime movies set primarily away from conflict, often told largely or exclusively from the civilian perspective-a category which includes such classics as The Cranes Are Flying and Hope & Glory, Grave of the Fireflies and Forbidden Games-didn’t make the cut. With this top 100, we’ve made the decision to include only movies whose wars are based on historical conflicts, so none of the likes of Edge of Tomorrow or Starship Troopers. It’s also a malleable genre, and one that could broadly include all manner of films that we ultimately ruled out of the running in this list. It’s a genre that emphasizes action and existential angst. It’s the most masculine of genres, the fact that armies have throughout history often been almost exclusively male seeing to it that men almost always dominate these things.

And make no mistake, the war movie is almost always about men.

What is it good for? Well, if nothing else, then a tidy template for cinema: The best war movies have conflict, clear protagonists and antagonists, heightened emotions, and a generally unpredictable, lawless atmosphere which-as per the western-has, since the dawn of cinema, offered an elastic dramatic environment in which filmmakers can explore men at both their best and worst.

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