The hesitancy, the fear, and the heartbreak that soon they must all go back to killing each other is alive and potent. It sounds almost like a fairy tale, but in Christian Carion’s beautiful Joyeux Noël the filmmaker shows us just how natural, and unstable, the historical day actually was. Soldiers from opposing foxholes - British, French and German - met in the battlefield to share supplies, play football, and take mass together, in one of the most inspiring stories to emerge from The Great War. In December of 1914, in the early years of World War I, a spontaneous truce was declared along the Western Front for Christmas. Taut and intense, Black Hawk Down brings a chaotic mission into sharp focus, creating one of the most exhilarating approximations of modern warfare ever captured on screen. And thanks to Oscar-winning editing by Pietro Scalia, you never get confused about where everybody is, what their mission is, and where all those bullets are coming from.

Based on the true story of an ill-fated raid in Mogadishu, Somalia, where two Black Hawk helicopters crash-landed in the midst of hostile territory, stranded soldiers and forcing their compatriots to mount a risky rescue mission, Scott’s film keeps every member of the breathtaking ensemble cast ( Josh Hartnett, Eric Bana, Ewan McGregor, Jason Isaacs, Tom Hardy, Orlando Bloom, Sam Shepard, the list goes on and on and on) in play throughout the entire running time. Global politics lose all meaning, now only survival matters.

Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down is a masterpiece of immediacy, thrusting the audience in the midst of a seemingly infinite firefight. We extend our apologies to The Lord of the Rings and The Force Awakens, but the historical significance of the war genre is that these films help us catalogue our feelings about real-life violent conflicts, and that makes the genre distinct from otherworldly epics, or even conventional action movies. Many of these war stories are fictional, but they all take place during actual conflicts that occurred on the planet Earth. There are war movies for every kind of person in our list of The Best War Movies of the 21st Century (so far), but there’s one thing you won’t find… and that’s fictional wars. Some are ironic and funny, others are brutal and tragic. Some war movies are action-packed and rousing, others a violent and depressing. It’s a complex genre, in which some of the best films can be unironically positive about a war, while others are also entirely critical of that exact same war. But filmmakers have been trying to make anti-war movies for decades, while other filmmakers have been hard at work making pro-war movies to support their nation’s troops. François Truffaut once argued that it was impossible to make an anti-war movie, because once you put warfare on camera, it can’t help but look dramatic.

Brothers of war 2019