Best War Movies of 2009

When his helicopter goes down during his fourth tour of duty in Afghanistan, Marine Sam Cahill is presumed dead. Back home, brother Tommy steps in to look over Sam’s wife, Grace, and two children. Sam’s surprise homecoming triggers domestic mayhem.

Will Montgomery, a U.S. Army Staff Sergeant who has returned home from Iraq, is assigned to the Army’s Casualty Notification service. Montgomery is partnered with Captain Tony Stone, to give notice to the families of fallen soldiers. The Sergeant is drawn to Olivia Pitterson, to whom he has delivered news of her husband’s death.

A reporter in Iraq might just have the story of a lifetime when he meets Lyn Cassady, a guy who claims to be a former member of the U.S. Army's New Earth Army, a unit that employs paranormal powers in their missions.

BBC miniseries adaptation. During World War II, a teenage Jewish girl named Anne Frank and her family are forced into hiding in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands.

Irena Sendler is a Catholic social worker who has sympathized with the Jews since her childhood, when her physician father died of typhus contracted while treating poor Jewish patients. When she initially proposes saving Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto, her idea is met with skepticism by fellow workers, her parish priest, and even her own mother Janina.

A true-story account of a German businessman who saved more than 200,000 Chinese during the Nanjing massacre in 1937-38.

A mysterious tale set around a traditional British family on the eve of World War Two. Oblivious to the looming shadow of World War II, the wealthy Keyes maintain a confident façade in the British countryside until daughter Anne becomes an unexpected pawn. Her accidental discovery of secret recordings creates a rift in the family.

Navy SEALS mount an attack on Colombian special forces to clear their names and rescue a hostage.

In 1942, when computers were human and women were underestimated, a group of female mathematicians helped win a war and usher in the modern computer age. Sixty-five years later their story has finally been told.

The Age of Stupid is the new movie from Director Franny Armstrong (McLibel) and producer John Battsek (One Day In September). Pete Postlethwaite stars as a man living alone in the devastated future world of 2055, looking at old footage from 2008 and asking: why didn’t we stop climate change when we had the chance?

After 30 years of conspiracy theories and myth making, this film uncovers the story of the CIA's most extensive clandestine operation in the history of modern warfare: The Secret War in Laos, which was conducted alongside the Vietnam War from 1964 -1973. While the world's attention was caught by the conflict in Vietnam, the CIA built the busiest military airport in the world in neighboring and neutral Laos and recruited humanitarian aid personnel, Special Forces agents and civilian pilots to undertake what would become the most effective operation of counterinsurgency warfare. As the conflict in Vietnam grew, the objective in Laos changed from a cost effective low-key involvement to save the country from becoming communist into an all-out air war to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail and bomb Laos back into the Stone Age that it had never really left in the first place. Conventional bombs equivalent to the destructive power of 20 Hiroshima-type weapons fell on Laos each year - 2 million tons

Lt. Col. Michael Strobl, a volunteer military escort accompanies the body of Lance Cpl. Chance Phelps to his hometown in Wyoming.

American journalists in Sudan are confronted with the dilemma of whether to return home to report on the atrocities they have seen, or to stay behind and help some of the victims they have encountered.

The background to, events of and consequences of the Battle of Mers-El-Kebir on 3 July 1940. In that battle, Royal Navy ships fired on the French Fleet in order to prevent it from falling into German hands. A French battleship was sunk and several other ships damaged. Nearly 1,300 French sailors were killed.

When in 1941 Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, their troops quickly besieged Leningrad. Foreign journalists are evacuated but one of them, Kate Davies, is presumed dead and misses the plane. Alone in the city she is helped by Nina Tsvetnova a young and idealist police officer and together they will fight for their own survival and the survival of the people in the besieged Leningrad.

Director Quentin Tarantino tasked Eli Roth to craft a mini-movie called Stolz der Nation (Nation's Pride) that will be included in the theatrical cut of Inglourious Basterds. To help promote Inglourious Basterds via the film-within-a-film, Roth has slapped together a trailer for Nation's Pride blending black and white photography with modern multi-layered camera effects.

It’s 1942, somewhere in the Pacific: Deadly ambushes by entrenched Japanese in the thick jungles take a heavy toll on American troops. Marine commanders were willing to try anything, including using dogs to sniff out the hidden enemy. But even with their superior senses, nobody anticipated just how effective they would be.

The movie is set in 2007, taking place before or right after the first part of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty.

No one in high command believed that German forces would attack in the sub zero temperatures and near blizzard conditions. As the pre-dawn attack comes, with communications down Sgt. Smith is left with no choice but to make his way through enemy fire, unarmed and wounded, into town and warn of the coming attack. Based on actual accounts "Everyman's War" explores the heroic events of this decorated veterans courage and the struggle between duty and desire. Between the prospect of the life and love, Dorine that waits at home and the harsh realities of war which marks the pivotal epoch in his life as he discovers that the loss of hope can be worse than the loss of life. One man's courage... One man's hope...Everyman's War.

The movie deals with two soldiers home from the Iraq war suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but in vastly different ways. One sees her life falling apart in night-terrors, flashbacks, insomnia, and a total lack of government support. The other still believes he is fighting the war now that he is back on American soil. Still convinced he is supposed to torture and kill any and everyone who can be viewed as Anti-American. Soon they will be at a crossroads and blood will be flooding the American streets.

In 1999, a British mine clearance engineer working for the Taliban government in Afghanistan must flee the country when he becomes embroiled in a deadly game of intrigue and betrayal.

A short but harrowing look at the horrors of war and how the smallest of errors can have tragic consequences as two British paratroopers land in Nazi-occupied Sicily (beautifully filmed in and around Victoria Gate in Valletta) in 1943.

A group of U.S. soldiers on a mission in the Middle East find themselves with nothing to do in their free time. Out of sheer boredom they end up destroying an old statue in the desert, only to unleash a horrific entity.

A thriller based on true events in Norway during the WW II. Tor Lindblom makes a fortune supplying the Nazis with everything from liquor and cigarettes to cement and steel. He also owns the Club Havana, a nightclub in Oslo frequented by the industrial elite of occupied Norway, Officers of the Wehrmacht and opportunistic hustle...

A major documentary which tells the remarkable story of the people of South East Asia who fought three wars over three decades to gain their freedom using entirely original colour archive footage.

Based on the novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, a US soldier finds himself inexplicably transported to Mars in the midst of a war between two alien races.

Filmmakers investigate 2001 anthrax attacks and uncover a nightmare world.

An allegory about the moment when a child is forced to choose between ideology and humanity while living and playing in a dangerous war environment.

Even though bringing in cameras to the internment camps was prohibited, one man managed to smuggle in his own camera lens and build a camera to document life behind barbed wires, with the help of other craftsmen in the camp. That man was Toyo Miyatake, a successful issei (first generation immigrant) photographer and owner of a photo-shop in the Los Angeles Little Tokyo district, and of one of the many Americans who was interned with his family against his will. With his makeshift camera, Miyatake captured the dire conditions of life in the camps during World War II as well as the resilient spirit of his companions, many of whom were American citizens who went on to fight for their country overseas. Miyatake said, "It is my duty to record the facts, as a photographer, so that this kind of thing should never happen again."

The truth about the Auschwitz death camp was one of the most closely guarded secrets of the Third Reich. Prisoners who tried to escape were killed in public as an example to other inmates. Very few ever made it out alive. Escape From Auschwitz tells the incredible story of two young Slovak Jews, Rudolph Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, who managed to escape, determined to tell the world about the atrocities being committed by the Nazis at the camp, which resulted in the saving of thousands of lives.

It is 1775. Henry Felder, a Swiss-German colonist, lives with his family in the British colony of South Carolina. After many years of struggling with corrupt British rulers, Felder is urged by the new patriot governor to write Articles of Separation from the English King. Felder's old Indian fighting comrade forms a Tory militia to assist the Crown as the fight heats up.

A documentary which traces the controversial Anthrax Vaccine Immunization Program (AVIP) in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Tom was a soldier, a British veteran of an anonymous war from the 1990's. Whilst serving, soldiers under his command were separated from the rest of his patrol and ambushed. His search for them leads him to a traumatized soldier, shaken and confused by something he has seen inside a farm building. Tom enters the building. What happened in there will haunt him forever. He returns a decorated hero but he can't forget.

The incredible story of the Avro Lancaster, one of the finest bombers of the Second World War, which played a crucial role in the long and savage campaign to defeat Hitler's Third Reich. This documentary features interviews with surviving veterans of Bomber Command, who share frank personal accounts of their part in an aerial battle of attrition which claimed the lives of 55'000 aircrew.

In 1972, the conflict in Vietnam continues. The creeping threat of communism grips the nation in fear. In an abandoned prison on the US/Mexican border, KGB mole Nikolai Dzerzhinsky waits for his contact from the Washington Post. He holds explosive evidence against the CIA, information he will trade for asylum in the United States. Special Agent Robert Harper's orders are clear: take the documents from Dzerzhinsky and kill him.

"I learn that Chris McIntyre served in Vietnam and that "21 and a Wakeup," set in an Army hospital in the waning days of the war, is based on events that he experienced and heard about." - Roger Ebert

China, in the early sixties: an angry mob is persecuting a rich landowner. Mei, a young worker, who is part of the crowd. Suddenly she recognizes the victim who she secretly loves. Frightened of revealing her feelings, Mei doesn't know what to do.

A Young R.U.F. boy discovers the true meaning of 'being a man' through an encounter with a young Masai warrior...and a lion.