Best War Movies of 1981

As World War I rages, brave and youthful Australians Archy and Frank—both agile runners—become friends and enlist in the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps together. They later find themselves part of the Dardanelles Campaign on the Gallipoli peninsula, a brutal eight-month conflict which pit the British and their allies against the Ottoman Empire and left over 500,000 men dead.

Military cadets take extreme measures to ensure the future of their academy when its existence is threatened by local condo developers.

A group of POWs in a German prison camp during World War II play the German National Soccer Team in this powerful film depicting the role of prisoners during wartime.

After the destruction of the Second Temple, 900 Jewish zealots hold out against a 5000 man Roman legion on the mountaintop fortress of Masada.

Dramatization depicting the events surrounding Adolf Hitler's last weeks in and around his underground bunker in Berlin before and during the battle for the city.

The chronicle of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin and his tyranic rule from 1971 to his overthrow in 1979.

Ambitious pilot to a prospective series revolving around a combat cameraman in Vietnam. Carl Danton is in Saigon on assignment at the start of the 1968 Tet offensive with a cynical boss in the local bureau chief. His love interest is a Vietnamese doctor whose brother happens to be a leader in the Viet Cong and whose influential parents are involved in high-level corruption.

Set against the brutal chaos of World War II, a love story begins that will take two lovers through a living nightmare of captivity, across three continents and two decades. From the steamy jungles of Malaya to the dusty and desolate outback of Australia. Based on Nevil Shute's international bestselling novel A TOWN LIKE ALICE follows the lives of Jean Paget and Joe Harman. Meeting in Malaya - she an attractive young English captive and he a cheerful Australian POW tortured for a simple act of kindness. Separated first by their captors then by the distance of passing years, the two are finally reunited in the rugged outback of Australia-to face a challenge every bit as demanding as their wartime trials.

A Canadian doctor interned at a Japanese POW Camp during WWII must tend to his fellow British prisoners who are being worked to death in a mine.

Follows the crew of a Canadian submarine in World War Two and their fight against the Japanese Imperial Navy.

Mark Twain tale of cowardly Confederate soldiers.

In 1939, Charlotte Salomon leaves Berlin to seek refuge at her grandparents' villa in the south of France. A little later, war breaks out, and Charlotte must, besides forgetting all she left behind, deal with her grandmother's depression, and her mother's suicide. To fight despair, Charlotte starts to paint, producing over one thousand images. "Is my life real, or is it theater?" This is the title she gives her body of work, which highlights her former life in Berlin. She finds herself though her art, but in 1943 is deported to Germany and Auschwitz.

Informative but not dramatically charged, this fictional documentary looks at an incident in 1976 when a group of dissidents were forcibly exiled to an island hotel in order to keep them silenced during the visit of King Carlos of Spain to France. This pseudo-documentary features a Canadian filmmaker who is looking into the group of dissidents. He interviews them to get the story of what happened recorded for posterity. Among the group was another man of Spanish ancestry who suddenly arrived on the island but managed to find a way out. His future exploits are brought into question since there are certain terrorist connotations to his character.

"That order to scatter was as good as a death sentence to those merchant ships. And there isn't one officer or rating who doesn't agree with me." A British Allied convoy designated for the Soviet Union comes under attack from German forces during World War II.

Two fighter pilots, Phil Clark and Jay Rivers, who flew together in Vietnam are assigned to the elite Air Force Fighter Weapons School (known as "Red Flag") at Nellis AFB, Nevada, about a decade after the war. Brash, self-confident Clark is an instructor, while quieter, family man Rivers is the student. At first, the two men resume their friendship. But as the student starts to show the master a thing or two, tensions develop. Can their relationship survive the stresses of one of the military's top schools?