11 Anti-War and Anti-Fascist Films Everyone Should Watch

The best anti-war and anti-fascist films do not lecture. They put you inside a moment, a boot camp, a bunker, a Belfast street, a family hiding the truth from a child, and let you feel what propaganda leaves out. The eleven below range from Charlie Chaplin's 1940 satire of Hitler to a 2014 thriller about the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Several won major awards; a couple are less well known than they deserve to be.

We have grouped them by what they show: how fascism looks from inside and outside, the Second World War and its aftermath, three very different takes on Vietnam, the cost of war to one body and one city, and the way hatred can take root in an ordinary family. Each entry explains who made the film, what it is about and why it is worth your time. Together they make a strong case that remembering history honestly is one of the best defences against repeating it.

A practical note: most of these films are rated for adults because of violence and strong language. Check the rating before watching with younger viewers, and consider watching the heavier titles with someone you can talk to afterwards.

Facing fascism: satire, memory and the camps

1. Life Is Beautiful (La Vita E Bella, 1997)

Roberto Benigni co-wrote, directed and starred in this Italian tragicomedy about Guido, a Jewish bookshop owner who is deported with his young son to a Nazi camp in 1944. To protect the boy, Guido pretends the whole ordeal is an elaborate game with a tank as the prize. Benigni drew on family history: his father spent two years in a Nazi labour camp during the war. The film won the Grand Prix at Cannes and three Oscars, including Best Actor for Benigni, Best Foreign Language Film and Best Original Dramatic Score for Nicola Piovani.

2. The Great Dictator (1940)

Charlie Chaplin wrote, directed, produced and scored this satire, playing both the ranting dictator Adenoid Hynkel and a persecuted Jewish barber who is mistaken for him. It was his first true sound film and his biggest commercial success, released while the United States was still at peace with Nazi Germany. The closing speech, an appeal for liberty and human decency, is still widely shared today. Years later Chaplin wrote that he could not have made the film had he known the real horrors of the German concentration camps.

3. Downfall (2004)

Oliver Hirschbiegel's German drama follows Hitler's last days in the Berlin bunker in 1945, drawing on Joachim Fest's history Inside Hitler's Bunker and the memoir of secretary Traudl Junge. Bruno Ganz's performance as Hitler was praised as chillingly convincing and sparked debate in Germany about whether a mass murderer should be shown as a human being at all. The film was nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Its value lies in showing how loyalty, denial and fear kept a collapsing regime going while Berlin burned.

The Second World War and its aftermath

4. Saving Private Ryan (1998)

After three of the four Ryan brothers are killed, a squad led by Tom Hanks's Captain Miller is sent into Normandy to find the surviving brother and bring him home. The story was loosely inspired by the real Niland brothers. Steven Spielberg's opening recreation of the Omaha Beach landing is so intense that many veterans called it the most realistic combat they had seen on screen. The film was nominated for eleven Oscars and won five, including Spielberg's second Best Director award.

5. Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)

Alain Resnais's first feature, written by Marguerite Duras, follows a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) during a brief affair in rebuilt Hiroshima. Her memories of loving a German soldier in occupied Nevers, and of being punished with a shaved head after liberation, are set against the city's own memory of the atomic bomb. Its jumps between past and present made it one of the most influential films of the French New Wave, and Duras's script earned an Oscar nomination. It is a film about how people and nations remember, and forget, the damage of war.

Vietnam: three views of one war

6. Full Metal Jacket (1987)

Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Gustav Hasford's novel The Short-Timers splits into two halves: the dehumanising grind of Marine boot camp on Parris Island, then street fighting in Huế during the 1968 Tet Offensive. Former Marine drill instructor R. Lee Ermey largely improvised his role as the brutal Gunnery Sergeant Hartman. The film shows how training can strip recruits of individuality long before they reach the front. It earned an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, shared by Kubrick, Michael Herr and Hasford.

7. Apocalypse Now (1979)

Francis Ford Coppola moved Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness from the Congo to Vietnam. Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) travels upriver to kill Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a Special Forces officer who has gone rogue in Cambodia. The famously troubled shoot ran for over 200 days and included a typhoon that wrecked sets and a heart attack for Sheen. It shared the Palme d'Or at Cannes and is less about battles than about what war does to the mind.

8. Platoon (1986)

Oliver Stone, who served as a US infantryman in Vietnam, wrote and directed this story of a young volunteer (Charlie Sheen) caught between two sergeants, played by Tom Berenger and Willem Dafoe. Stone wanted to counter the heroic picture of the war in John Wayne's The Green Berets, and it is described as the first Hollywood film written and directed by a Vietnam veteran. It won four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. Stone followed it with Born on the Fourth of July and Heaven & Earth.

The cost to one body and one city

9. Johnny Got His Gun (1971)

Dalton Trumbo adapted his own 1939 novel in the only film he ever directed. Timothy Bottoms plays Joe Bonham, a First World War soldier who loses his limbs and face to a shell but remains conscious, trapped with his memories in a hospital bed. The film shared the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1971, and clips from it later appeared in Metallica's 1989 video for the song "One", introducing it to a new generation. Few films make the human cost of war so personal.

10. '71 (2014)

Yann Demange's first feature, written by Gregory Burke, follows Gary Hook (Jack O'Connell), a young British soldier left behind by his unit after a riot in Belfast in 1971, early in the Troubles. Over one night he is hunted through streets where loyalist and republican paramilitaries and a covert army unit all have their own agendas. The film won Best Director at the British Independent Film Awards and was widely praised by critics. It shows how quickly ordinary people become targets when a conflict turns neighbour against neighbour.

Hate at home

11. American History X (1998)

Edward Norton plays Derek Vinyard, a neo-Nazi leader from Venice, Los Angeles, who comes out of prison after three years determined to keep his younger brother Danny (Edward Furlong) from following him into the movement. Directed by Tony Kaye from a script by David McKenna, it shows how resentment, family grief and charismatic recruiters can pull young people into hate groups. Norton earned an Oscar nomination for Best Actor, losing to Roberto Benigni for Life Is Beautiful. Kaye publicly disowned the final cut after a dispute with the studio, yet the film remains one of the most discussed portrayals of radicalisation in American cinema.

Getting the most from these films

If you are new to the list, a good starting pair is The Great Dictator and Downfall: one made before the world knew the full truth about Nazism, the other made with sixty years of hindsight. For the Vietnam trio, watching Platoon, Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now close together shows how three directors saw the same war very differently.

These films work well for classrooms and discussion groups, with age-appropriate choices. Useful questions include: what made ordinary people go along with violence, which characters resisted, and what warning signs appear early in each story. For further reading, the novels and memoirs behind several of these films, such as Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun and Traudl Junge's memoir, add depth the screen cannot always hold.

Sources: Film details checked against Wikipedia: Life Is Beautiful, The Great Dictator, Downfall, Saving Private Ryan, Hiroshima mon amour, Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Johnny Got His Gun (film), '71, American History X. Image credits: Full Metal Jacket still via cinefreaks.gr; Hiroshima Mon Amour still via Pinterest; posters and stills belong to their respective studios.

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