Louis Malle's film, set in France during the Nazi Occupation, centres on Lucien, a simple farmhand not long out of school, with a penchant for shooting rabbits. After failing to hook up with the Resistance movement, he ends up working for the Gestapo and starts to fall for the daughter of a local Jewish tailor. Bravely and controversially addressing his country's history of collaboration, Malle creates Lucien as a metaphor for his country's past, guilty of naivety and opportunism, but is he is evil as their invaders? The moral dilemma is never answered satisfactorily, but perhaps it's enough that the question was posed.

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A stirring account of the Spanish Civil War from Ken Loach, in which a young Liverpudlian communist leaves the homestead to battle against fascism on the Med. However, his idealism is quickly crushed by the horrors of the combat unfolding before him, while party politics rear their head and complicate matters further. Told largely in flashback, as the grand daughter of Hart's character discovers his possessions after his death, this is about as moving an account of war as you're likely to see.

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Daniel Day-Lewis strides heroically through 18th century war and politics as the adopted white son of a Mohican Indian in Michael Mann's adaptation of Jame's Fenimore Cooperer's novel. Day-Lewis plays Hawkeye, a white man with a Mohican father, Chingachgook (Indian activist and actor Means), and brother, Uncas (Schweig). Together they become involved with the war being waged over the colonies by the British and French. Mann stages astonishingly realised battles and even throws in a little romance for good measure between Day-Lewis and Madeleine Stowe.

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Superlative, multi-Oscar winning biography of T E Lawrence (Peter O'Toole), the Oxford-educated lieutenant who united Arab tribes against the Ottoman Turks in the First World War. While the story centres on the struggle of the unhinged anti-hero to help establish a united Arab nation, the vast, exquisitely composed desertscapes and breathtaking battle scenes equally linger in the audience's memory.

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Powell and Pressburger's fifth film, a masterwork (made despite prime minister Winston Churchill's wishes) focuses on the life of Clive Candy V.C., a heroic character rooted in the values of Edwardian England, leading up to and during the Second World War. Candy believes that any fight can be fought and settled by maintaining gentlemanly principles. It lies with his best friend, a German, to make Candy realise how different things are, since the advent of Nazism.

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