This star-studded Second World War action-film is a big, long, loud spectacular from the days when 'epic' filmmaking really meant something. With 42 international stars (including John Wayne, Robert Mitchum and Sean Connery), The Longest Day depicts the D-Day landings at Normandy from both the Allied and German perspectives, and its scope in story and production is nothing less than mammoth.

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Tom Cruise proved that he really is a top notch actor with his mesmerising perfomance as a battle scarred Vietnam vet in Oliver Stone's gut-wrenching tale of the fall-out in America that followed the conflict. The movie, for which Stone landed the year's Best Director trophy (inexplicably losing the top prize to Driving Miss Daisy), is a powerful examination of the futility of war, and in particular the senseless carnage of Vietnam.

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Stanley Kubrick's celebrated satire on the cold war features Peter Sellers in three hillarious roles and a deeply cynical ending. When U.S. Air Force Colonel Jack Ripper goes insane and orders his bombers to destroy the U.S.S.R. the Russians threaten to detonate the 'Doomsday Device' and destroy the world. Sellers sparkles as the three men that might avert disaster, British Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, U.S. President Merkin Muffley and Dr. Strangelove. Kubrick turns the end of the world into the ultimate absurdity as the world's most powerful men are caught in a trap of their own making.

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Film version of Wolfgang Petersen's superior soap set in the claustrophobic world of a World War II German submarine. The director exploits his claustrophobic setting to maximum effect, paradoxically using a steady-cam which rushes through the cramped interior only adding to the sense of isolation. Combined with the soap opera dramatics of the crew's life on board, Das Boot makes compulsive viewing.

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This is not a Second World War movie, nor an anti-war tract, rather Terrence Malick uses James Jones's novel about the stupefying struggle for a key position in the battle for Guadalcanal as a meditation on the natural world and on humanity within it. He presents the young soldiers' struggle as extraordinarily ordinary. The guys die, go berserk, get bamboozled by officers and some end up drunk back at base. Using dazzling setpieces, a choppy narrative, and poetic voice-overs, Malick forces us to view life afresh.

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