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Archive for March 12th, 2010

Top Ten War Flicks of the 80s

When you think “best war movie of the 80s”, one film instantly springs to mind. I was dumbfounded, then, after compiling the list of Top 10 War Flicks of the Eighties, that Platoon was nowhere to be found upon it. The Criticker community — always full of surprises! (Platoon finished a still-respectable 11th).

This is our third top ten list since we began this new feature at the blog. We just thought it’d be fun to choose random genres and decades and see what kind of lists appear, based on the ratings of Criticker users. Are you surprised by any of the entries or other omissions?

#1. Ran (1985) – 8.38
An elderly lord abdicates to his three sons, and the two corrupt ones turn against him.

jacobb1313Kurosawa’s late masterwork. From Shakespeare to Noh to Kurosawa’s own expressionistic painting, he uses all his sources to the fullest potency, creating a godless world of madness, war and death never seen in film since.

Ran – Criterion Collection

 

#2. Come and See (1985) – 8.29

A boy is unwillingly thrust into the atrocities of war in WWII Byelorussia, fighting for a hopelessly unequipped resistance movement against the ruthless German forces.
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#3. Grave of the Fireflies (1988) – 8.23

A tragic film covering a young boy and his little sister’s struggle to survive in Japan during World War II.
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#4. Das Boot (1981) – 8.12

It is 1942 and the German submarine fleet is heavily engaged in the so called "Battle of the Atlantic" to harass and destroy English shipping. With better escorts of the Destroyer Class, however, German U-Boats have begun to take heavy losses. Das Boot is the story of one such U-Boat crew, with the film examining how these submariners maintained their professionalism as soldiers, attempted to accomplish impossible missions, while all the time attempting to understand and obey the ideology of the government under which they served. (Sony Pictures)
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#5. Full Metal Jacket (1987) – 7.83

The story of an 18-year-old marine recruit named Private Joker – from his carnage-and-machismo boot camp to his climactic involvement in the heavy fighting in Hue during the 1968 Tet Offensive.
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#6. When the Wind Blows (1986) – 7.74

With the help of government-issued pamphlets, an elderly British couple build a shelter and prepare for an impending nuclear attack…
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#7. Breaker Morant (1980) – 7.71

Three Australian lieutenants are court martialed for executing prisoners as a way of deflecting attention from war crimes committed by their superior officers.
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#8. Threads (1984) – 7.48

A dramatization of the probable consequences of a full scale nuclear war on an English community.
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#9. Kagemusha (1980) – 7.48

When a powerful warlord in medieval Japan dies, a poor thief recruited to impersonate him finds difficulty living up to his role and clashes with the spirit of the warlord during turbulent times.
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#10. The Killing Fields (1984) – 7.41

An American citizen is trapped in Cambodia during tyrant Pol Pot's bloody “Year Zero” ethnic cleansing campaign, which claimed the lives of two million “undesirable” civilians.
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