Only the genius of Stanley Kubrick could get away with staging Vietnam in London's Isle Of Dogs. Matthew Modine is among the new recruits undergoing brutal training at the hands of drill intructor R Lee Ermey. Dehumanised and turned into killing machines, they are then unleashed into the battle to suffer the misery of war. Bleak and darkly funny, Full Metal Jacket suggests that there is so much war, because men enjoy it.

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Author Thomas Keneally won a Booker Prize for Schindler's Ark, but it took Steven Spielberg to tell the story of shady Nazi industrialist Schindler (Liam Neeson), who saved hundreds of Jews from the Polish death camps, to a worldwide audience. It won buckets of Oscars, but its best tribute is the shocked, tearful silence of audiences everywhere. An outstanding, harrowing piece of cinema.

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Steve McQueen is brilliantly opaque in this ace war film, about a mass breakout from Stalag Luft. The all-star ensemble includes James Coburn, Richard Attenborough, Charles Bronson, Donald Pleasence and James Garner. Once the boys have made their break-out, McQueen's attempt to motorcycle himself out of trouble rates as one of the most memorable action sequences ever, while the rest of the movie ticks along just nicely with its finely tuned mixture of humour counterpoised with darkness when many of the officers are re-captured and summarily executed.

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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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The first 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan is a visual assault, acclaimed as one of cinema's most accurate realisations of warfare. Capt John Miller (Tom Hanks) is among the US troops storming Omaha Beach on D-Day. Thereafter, you follow this everyman soldier on a humanitarian military mission to rescue the surviving brother of three soldiers killed in the same week. Spielberg crafts a shocking and moving illustration of the Second World War.

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