A later version of The Dam Busters featuring a catchy theme tune, perilous mission, wooden acting, posh accents and plenty of entertainment. The brave 633 Squadron have enjoyed many successful sorties, but they are now assigned a seemingly suicidal mission - to bomb a water plant in occupied Norway, which is shielded by mountain terrain and guarded by heavy, anti-aircraft artillery.

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Werner Herzog's masterpiece has his old sparring partner Kinski as the crazed conquistador Don Lope de Aguirre embarking on a doomed attempt to discover the legendary city of El Dorado. Kinski brings his intense muscularity and a sense of dangerous madness to his role of the man who mistakes his own dementia for a kind of divine power. This is an astonishing, deceptively simple, pocket-sized epic whose influence, in terms of both style and narrative, would later be seen in Apocalypse Now.

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One of Sergei Eisenstein's most popular films, this was made just before the Second World War and tells how Russian prince Nevsky - besieged on all sides by invading Teutonic knights - raises a peasant army and mounts a counter-attack. The parallels with Stalin and Hitler are there if you care to look for them, but what is most impressive are the intense fight scenes that take up much of the film, and the way Eisenstein marries the action with the score by Prokofiev.

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Highly effective, award-winning adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's novel about a group of idealist young soldiers getting destroyed by the barbaric conflict of the First World War. Decades before Platoon and Saving Private Ryan, director Lewis Milestone and his team created a film that remains one of the most powerful screen comments on the horrors of war.

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Francis Ford Coppola's epic hallucination of the Vietnam War, in which Martin Sheen journeys through Vietnam and Cambodia to terminate a flipped-out renegade US colonel played by Marlon Brando. The shoot was notoriously troubled, but the result is a war movie unlike any other: a spectacular opera, a straightforward plot blown up by rampant imagination, and a deft comment on America's Vietnam folly.

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