Sightlines · a viewing thread

The Futility of War

A run of films about ordinary men fed into war's machinery — from the trenches to the Casbah to the Warsaw sewers — where the futility and human cost rhyme across a century and a dozen conflicts.

Film-school anti-war canon at its most durable: it mixes broad crowd favorites (1917, All Quiet, Platoon) with cinephile touchstones (The Battle of Algiers, Bresson, Jancsó), so it's mostly approachable but reaches into demanding, devastating territory — watch when you're ready to be moved rather than entertained.

• Paths of Glory (1957)
• The Red and the White (1967)
• Spartacus (1960)
• 1917 (2019)
• All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)
• Glory (1989)
• Platoon (1986)
• The Battle of Algiers (1966)
• Kanal (1957)
• The Cranes Are Flying (1957)
• Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
• A Man Escaped (1956)
• The Thin Red Line (1998) — The overlooked Malick that rhymes with Platoon and Paths of Glory — the one you meant to sit with when you had the patience, where a rifle company bleeds up a Guadalcanal hill while the film drifts into the men's private terror and awe.
• The Great War (1959) — The under-seen Italian one that sits beside All Quiet and The Great War's own trenches — Monicelli's two braggart conscripts joke their way through 1916 until the futility turns, suddenly, mortal.
• The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006) — If Battle of Algiers landed, this is the Loach to finally pull down — ordinary Irishmen fed into the machinery of occupation and then civil war, and the human cost paid within a single family.
• Ballad of a Soldier (1959) — The tender Soviet companion to The Cranes Are Flying you forgot you'd saved — a boy's few days' leave home becomes a quiet accounting of everything the war takes from ordinary people.
• Das Boot (1981) — The full-length U-boat epic waiting on your list — young men sealed into the Atlantic's machinery, the boredom and depth-charge terror rhyming with these on how war grinds down its own, whichever side.
• The Bridge (1959) — The devastating German deep-cut that answers All Quiet from the other end of the century — seven schoolboys posted to guard a bridge that never mattered, dying for it anyway.
• Lion of the Desert (1981) — The forgotten desert companion to Lawrence and Algiers — an aging teacher leading Bedouin horsemen against Mussolini's army, colonial futility written across the Libyan sand.
• Bloody Sunday (2002) — The Greengrass docudrama that is Battle of Algiers' direct heir — a single day in Derry rendered hour by hour, the occupying army and the marchers colliding into atrocity.