Best War Movies of 1988

Combat has taken its toll on Rambo, but he's finally begun to find inner peace in a monastery. When Rambo's friend and mentor Col. Trautman asks for his help on a top secret mission to Afghanistan, Rambo declines but must reconsider when Trautman is captured.

Lt. Col. Iceal "Ham" Hambleton is a weapons countermeasures expert and when his aircraft is shot over enemy territory the Air Force very much wants to get him back. Hambleton knows the area he's in is going to be carpet-bombed but a temporary shortage of helicopters causes a delay. Working with an Air Force reconnaissance pilot, Capt. Bartholomew Clark, he maps out an escape route.

Winner of a Best Documentary Academy Award, Marcel Ophuls' riveting film details the heinous legacy of the Gestapo head dubbed "The Butcher of Lyon." Responsible for over 4,000 deaths in occupied France during World War II, Barbie would escape--with U.S. help--to South America in 1951, where he lived until a global manhunt led to his 1983 arrest and subsequent trial.

A Russian KGB agent is sent to Africa to kill an anti-Communist black revolutionary. However, he has a change of heart when he sees how the Russians and their Cuban allies are killing and repressing the locals, so he switches sides and helps the rebels.

When Colonel James Braddock is told that his Asian wife and 12-year-old son are still alive in Communist Vietnam, he mounts a one-man assault to free them. Armed with the latest high-tech firepower, Braddock fights his way into the heart of the country and ends up battling his way out with several dozen abused Amerasian children in tow! Struggling to keep them alive while outmaneuvering a sadistic Vietnamese officer, Braddock ignites the jungle in a blazing cross-country race for freedom.

Two rebellious youths, Ralph and Scott, find themselves struggling with adulthood as the Vietnam War rages. Feeling trapped in their small town, Scott battles with his conservative veteran father, Cliff, and Ralph deals with his desperately sexual mother, Ev. When tragic news arrives from overseas, the entire town, inspired by Ralph and Scott's antiwar efforts, reevaluates its attitude toward the war.

A British Company in the WWI trenches await an inevitable German attack in this 1988 adaptation of R.C. Sherriff's play.

Based on a true story, The Heroes follows one of the most extraordinary and heroic exploits of World War II. After months of rigorous training in the north of Australia, a team of 14 men, most barely out of their teens, set sail from Cairns on board a leaky old fishing boat called 'The Krait'. Their mission, code-named Operation Jaywick, became a tense voyage through thousands of kilometres of Japanese held territory to launch a daring attack on Singapore Harbour. The raid is a success but within sight of safety they encounter a Japanese destroyer, and all prepare to die rather than be taken prisoner.

West Point graduate lieutenant Jeff Knight meets cynicism when taking command of sergeant Michael McNamara's tour veterans platoon in a Vietnamese trench camp. Unlike his predecessor, who hid till the end of his tour, Jeff takes charge, experiences the manual doesn't allow coping with all realities and gets wounded. He returns, now fully respect by men and superiors. Besides the Vietcong, the platoon wrestles with the inscrutable villagers, which the G.I.'s officially protect, but also fear as some collaborate with them, other covertly with the Cong, either way subject to bloody reprisals.

The film centres on the experiences of Robert Lawrence MC (played by Colin Firth), an officer of the Scots Guards during the Falklands War of 1982. While fighting at the Battle of Mount Tumbledown, Lawrence is shot in the head by an Argentine sniper, and left paralysed on his left side. He then must learn to adjust to his new disability.

In 1836, a small band of soldiers sacrifice their lives in hopeless combat against a massive army in order to prevent a tyrant from smashing the new Republic of Texas.

When an Admiral orders the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam, he has no idea the deadly consequences of his actions for his son.

A renegade team of World War II soldiers. This time, one of the 12 is a woman and, with a Nazi spy within their midst, they're up against German wartime geniuses out to establish a Fourth Reich.

A squad (stick) of South African soldiers is sent into the bush to track down some rebel fighters when things take a supernatural turn.

During the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam, Otto Frank decides to hide his family, who are Jewish, after his daughter Margot is called to appear for transport to a Nazi labour camp. Miep Gies, Otto Frank's office assistant hides them in the attic above the office. The film tells the true story of Gies' struggle to keep the family hidden and safe, as the Nazis turn Amsterdam upside-down. Based upon Gies' memoirs and Anne Frank's famous diary.

In England during World War II, a repressed dressmaker and her sister struggle looking after their 17-year-old niece, who is having a delusional affair with an American soldier.

Hanna's War is the true story of Hanna Senesh, a Hungarian-Jewish WW2 resistance fighter, who would become Israel's "Joan of Arc". As a young person, she fled Nazi-occupied Hungary for Palestine, where she was recruited and trained by the British to serve as a commando. After completing her training in Britain, she parachutes into Yugoslavia with a commando team to establish escape routes across the Hungarian-Yugoslavian border for downed British pilots. Her attempts to save Hungarian Jews in Nazi-occupied Hungary, however, leads to her capture, torture and demise at the hands of the Gestapo and the Nazi-controlled Hungarian police.

Story of the owners (Mastroianni and Schygulla) of a fancy nightclub in Budapest before and during WWII.

While on a seemingly routine delivery run for the Brigadier, Benton finds himself close to his childhood home, where ghosts from his past have never rested easily… Trapped in a nightmare world where past and present are one, will he be lost forever or can he fight his way back to reality, where he is desperately needed?

Sergeant David Callahan leads a task force of U.S. Marines on a failed mission. Five years later, working as an adviser to Thai Special Forces, he is forced to return to the Vietnamese P.O.W. camp he escaped years before, to fight a deadly duel.

For America, the Vietnam War is over. Johnny doesn't see it that way. This Special Forces soldier battles vicious Vietcong, a sadistic Russian advisor and his own peacenik girlfriend as he embarks on a deadly mission behind enemy lines.

The American army sets up a special force to free two American officers who were captured by the Vietcong in Vietnam in 1976.

A secret group of warriors for freedom against oppression in the South Pacific. consisting of secretly trained marines, performs surgeries on behalf of an elitist organization, they have in mind when the purpose of recovery of the control of the region achieved not let the group of mercenaries who used to feel strong, from the fear that such mercenary groups very easily can be found on the opposite side. To cover this eventuality hire in Alexander Sampson, not his own secret commando group, the conflict of baroutokapnismenon warriors of two specific groups will be ruthless ...

Chappy Sinclair is called to gather together a mixed Soviet/U.S. strike force that will perform a surgical strike on a massively defended nuclear missile site in the Middle East. Chappy finds that getting the Soviet and U.S. Pilots to cooperate is only the most minor of his problems as he discovers someone in the Pentagon is actively sabotaging his mission.

In the final days of the Vietnam War, someone is killing the officers of the elite Cobra Force. Two undercover M.P.'s are assigned to the case. The trail leads from the streets of Saigon to the war zone.

An Israeli agent entices an Iraqi jet pilot to defect with his MIG fighter.

Allied prisoners tunnel out of a stalag, then return to avenge fellow escapees executed by the Nazis.

An ex-GI gathers together some of his army friends to travel to a Central American dictatorship to free some American POWs being held there.

In the days following the D-Day invasion in Normandy, France, a British platoon leader named Saul (Gabriel Byrne) and his corporal (Paul Wyett) reach an isolated farmhouse and encounter a beautiful French girl named Belle (Marianne Basler). Love blooms between Saul and Belle, but the grim realities of war catch up with them when a French Resistance trio claims that Belle is a Nazi collaborator. Judge Reinhold appears briefly as the token Yank.

Two Vietnam Veterans have realistic nightmares about the war. So real are these nightmares that they start getting injured in them, and bringing things back that they had in the dream. They then buy weapons and go in to try and get one of their friends out that originally died in a POW camp during the Vietnam war. This is made harder by a traitor from the US Military Corps.

A Case of Honor is a 1991 film directed by Eddie Romero. After escaping from a Vietnamese pow camp where they had suffered for five years, five American soldiers attempt to get out of the country before being spotted by Russian and Vietnamese

World War II provides the setting for a melodramatic tale of love and revenge.

An army sergeant terrorizes his troops in this war drama.

The love story between a German prisoner of war and a British Army nurse, in an English prison camp in Rhodesia, during World War II.

After ex-cop and highly decorated war hero Chet Costa's Vietnamese girlfriend disappears, he accepts a risky mission: he shall blow up a bridge at the Vietnamese border to close the Vietcong's line of communication. He's given a group of prisoners to accompany him. Already on the way there their helicopter is shot down; a march through the wilderness begins. When his soldiers recognize that they're effectively on a suicide mission, they decide to get rid of their Seargent and to flee to Bangkok.

1988 CBC docudrama on Canada's role in WW1. Terence McKenna tours the Battlefields of Ypres, the Somme, Vimy Ridge and Paschendaele. Actors portray several Canadian soldiers in WW1 in re-enactments based on their memoirs, diaries and letters.

An Iraqi pilot crashes during the Iran-Iraq War over the Kurdish mountains, and two teams race to find him first: the Iranians who want to arrest him, and the Kurds who want to save him from Iranian capture.

A Vietnam vet who specializes in freeing POWs goes behind enemy lines on a rescue mission with a group of mercenaries.

Inside the stately Senate Hearing Room, Frank White, professional soldier, Vietnam vet and CIA operative, is fighting the toughest battle of his life: he's on trial for the assassination of Miguel Rivera, a Central American diplomat. Only two men could have made the shot - White or his friend Rick Burns, ex-military sniper now working as a Mafia hitman. Testimony unravels the intricate web created by Rivera and Daniel Waterman, head of an international cartel dabbling in both Latin American Politics and cocaine.

The F-16 Falcon, an aerodynamic masterpiece proven superior for today's combat arena designed to out-fight and armed to dominate. In this full colour panorama, pilots and crew give you the detailed look at the bsystems, weapons and "magic" which makes the F-16 a 21s' century multi-mission fighter. From Fightertown to Central Europe, you're in the cockpit during gut-wrenching dog fighting and super sonic low level attacks, Fly with the U.S. Air Force and NATO countries as they take it to the edge in the deadliest game of all. You'll fly with the best of the best at Gunsmoke and review the F-16XL Delta-wing Falcon and go down on the deck with the new Lantirn infrared night attack system. Get the first look at the new F-16N and the computerised Air Combat evaluation System, just delivered to the Navy's prestigious "Top Gun". Finally, you'll go for a high-powered ride with the world famous "Thunderbirds" as they move the sky around to the music of John Serrie.

The Russian operations in Asia are ruined by the American agents. Ivan, a KGB, is sent to Kampuchea and terminates the op-posing American forces. John Matthews, an American CIA spy, works with Jim, a patriot to offset the Russian aggression. In Kampuchea, Well’s, a military general, is recruited by the KGB secretly and he makes use of his formal cover to get rid of Jim. Realizing that he’s a traitor, Jim never drops his guard. He concentrates on destroying him along with his gangsters. During the birthday party of Wells' daughter...

Documentary using archival footage, newsreels and contemporary interviews with women of the WW2 Australian Women's Land Army.

Fly low, blasting everything in front of you to pieces was one version. The other was send light helos, like the Loach, teamed up with two gunships. Together known as "Pink Teams" they would fly low trying to draw enemy fire. When the V.C. opened up, the gunships would strike quickly with rockets and machine guns. The tactic known as Recon by Fire is just one of the operations you will experience firsthand in "CHOPPER WARS." It is a story about one of the most devastating weapons used in the Vietnam War, the Viet Cong's worst nightmare--the helicopter. "To the grunts, they were a godsend--to the enemy they were beasts from Hell--the "CHOPPERS!" -insane copy from the back of the VHS box.