Best War Movies of 2016

An American Ambassador is killed during an attack at a U.S. compound in Libya as a security team struggles to make sense out of the chaos.

A UK-based military officer in command of a top secret drone operation to capture terrorists in Kenya discovers the targets are planning a suicide bombing and the mission escalates from “capture” to “kill.” As American pilot Steve Watts is about to engage, a nine-year old girl enters the kill zone, triggering an international dispute reaching the highest levels of US and British government over the moral, political, and personal implications of modern warfare.

In 1942, an intelligence officer in North Africa encounters a female French Resistance fighter on a deadly mission behind enemy lines. When they reunite in London, their relationship is tested by the pressures of war.

In 1863, Mississippi farmer Newt Knight serves as a medic for the Confederate Army. Opposed to slavery, Knight would rather help the wounded than fight the Union. After his nephew dies in battle, Newt returns home to Jones County to safeguard his family but is soon branded an outlaw deserter. Forced to flee, he finds refuge with a group of runaway slaves hiding out in the swamps. Forging an alliance with the slaves and other farmers, Knight leads a rebellion that would forever change history.

In December 1941, Czech soldiers Jozef Gab?ík and Jan Kubiš parachute into their occupied homeland to assassinate Nazi officer Reinhard Heydrich.

Irish Commandant Pat Quinlan leads a stand off with troops against French and Belgian Mercenaries in the Congo during the early 1960s.

After a failed assassination attempt, a soldier finds himself stranded in the desert. Exposed to the elements, he must survive the dangers of the desert and battle the psychological and physical toll of the treacherous conditions.

Sumptuous BBC mini-series following the fortunes and the rise and fall of five aristocratic families in the waning days of imperial Russia.

In 2002, cable news producer Kim Barker decides to shake up her routine by taking a daring new assignment in Kabul, Afghanistan. Dislodged from her comfortable American lifestyle, Barker finds herself in the middle of an out-of-control war zone. Luckily, she meets Tanya Vanderpoel, a fellow journalist who takes the shell-shocked reporter under her wing. Amid the militants, warlords and nighttime partying, Barker discovers the key to becoming a successful correspondent.

19-year-old Billy Lynn is brought home for a victory tour after a harrowing Iraq battle. Through flashbacks the film shows what really happened to his squad - contrasting the realities of war with America's perceptions.

The epic love story tells the tragic tale of young Vietnamese bar girl Kim, orphaned by war, who falls in love with American GI Chris — but their lives are torn apart by the fall of Saigon.

Berlin in June of 1940. While Nazi propaganda celebrates the regime’s victory over France, a kitchen-cum-living room in Prenzlauer Berg is filled with grief. Anna and Otto Quangel’s son has been killed at the front. This working class couple had long believed in the ‘Führer’ and followed him willingly, but now they realise that his promises are nothing but lies and deceit. They begin writing postcards as a form of resistance and in a bid to raise awareness: Stop the war machine! Kill Hitler! Putting their lives at risk, they distribute these cards in the entrances of tenement buildings and in stairwells. But the SS and the Gestapo are soon onto them, and even their neighbours pose a threat.

The harrowing true story of the crew of the USS Indianapolis, who were stranded in the Philippine Sea for five days after delivering the atomic weapons that would eventually end WWII. As they awaited rescue, they endured extreme thirst, hunger, and relentless shark attacks.

This hand drawn animated film, based on the award winning graphic novel by Raymond Briggs, is an intimate and affectionate depiction of the life and times of his parents, two ordinary Londoners living through extraordinary events.

Drama series set in 1943 following the Coyne family and their neighbours as they struggle to maintain a normal life after a US Army Air Force base is set up in the middle of their rural parish.

Elite snipers Brandon Beckett and Richard Miller are tasked with protecting a gas pipeline from terrorists looking to make a statement. When battles with the enemy lead to snipers being killed by a ghost shooter who knows their exact location, tensions boil as a security breach is suspected. Is there someone working with the enemy on the inside? Is the mission a front for other activity? Is the Colonel pulling the strings?

Corporal Evan Albright joined the elite Marine Corps Security Guards to save the world and see some action-not necessarily in that order. But his first assignment, protecting a U. S. Embassy in a seemingly safe Middle Eastern capitol, relegates his unit to wrangling "gate groupies" protesting outside the compound and honing their marksmanship by playing video games. So Albright and his team are caught off guard when well-armed and well-trained militants launch a surprise attack aimed at killing an informant in the embassy. Heavily out-gunned, they will have to muster all the courage and fire power they can as their once routine assignment spirals into all-out war.

Rebellion is a five part serial drama about the birth of modern Ireland. The story is told from the perspectives of a group of fictional characters who live through the political events of the 1916 Easter Rising.

A documentary exploring the experience of going to war with a Military Working Dog, trained to find bombs before they can kill or maim soldiers, often at the expense of the dog's sanity.

Hidden in the heart of Russia, there is a Soviet-era city where thousands of people live and work behind barbed-wire fences monitored by armed guards. It is Ozyorsk (Ozersk), located in the Chelyabinsk Oblast, one of the most polluted places on the planet and home to the largest stockpiles of nuclear material. Its code name: City 40.

The remarkable story of WWII infantryman and photographer Tony Vaccaro, who created one of the most comprehensive, haunting and intimate photographic records of the war using a smuggled $47 camera while developing the negatives in his helmet at night.

The story of a long-lost book that mysteriously reappears and connects an old man searching for his son with a girl seeking a cure for her mother's loneliness.

The Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the Pentagon is recalled via the first-person accounts of Pentagon personnel, first responders, aviation experts and journalists. Included: Department of Defense footage from inside the Pentagon.

Following the crisis in Ukraine and Russia's involvement in Syria, the world is closer to superpower confrontation than at any time since the end of the Cold War. Now, a war room of senior former British military and diplomatic figures comes together to war-game a hypothetical 'hot war' in eastern Europe, including the unthinkable - nuclear confrontation.

In this unique and riveting film, a troubled man has a series of dreams in which he finds himself thrown back to a time before his birth, into the Angolan Border War, as a combat soldier. There he meets his father as a young man, when he was a member of the Special Forces. As they go through combat together, the son gets to know his father in a way he never has, giving him insight and compassion, and he is able to let go of lifelong feelings of abandonment, resentment and anger. This leads to forgiveness and a real-life reconciliation, which drives home the underlying message of this film restoring the hearts of the fathers to the children and the hearts of the children to the fathers.

A cinema remake of the classic sitcom Dad's Army (1968). The Walmington-on-Sea Home Guard platoon deal with a visiting female journalist and a German spy as World War II draws to its conclusion.

Eric Liddell - China's first gold medalist and one of Scotland's greatest athletes - returns to war-torn China.

In the thick of World War I, Allied forces attempt the daring feat of planting over a million pounds of explosives beneath enemy lines.

Horrific Nazi experiments have left a surviving WWII soldier with a terrifying condition: at the sight of fresh blood, he transforms into a man-sized, blood-sucking killer insect. Refusing to let his affliction destroy him and all he loves, he instead commits himself to using his "powers" for good-by finding the people responsible and bringing them to justice.

A Viet Cong soldier stationed in the claustrophobic tunnels of Cu Chi during the Vietnam War finds himself haunted by the ghost of a fallen comrade after the burial ceremony is compromised.

They belong to the armed wing of the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers' Party, which is also an active guerrilla movement. The mission of these female fighters? Defend Kurdish territory in Iraq and Syria, and defeat ISIS (the armed militants of the so-called Islamic State group), all while embodying a revolutionary ideal advocating female empowerment. As filmmaker Zaynê Akyol follows their highly regimented lives, seasoned fighters like Rojen and Sozdar openly share with us their most intimate thoughts and dreams. Even as fighting against ISIS intensifies in the Middle East, these women bravely continue their battle against barbarism. Offering a window into this largely unknown world, Gulîstan, Land of Roses exposes the hidden face of this highly mediatized war: the female, feminist face of a revolutionary group united by a common vision of freedom.

Sparrow is the beautiful story of a small boy who is teased because he thinks he can fly. When a family myth about his war veteran grandfather comes to light, he discovers the strength to stand up to the bullies in a very unusual way.

'The Hurt Locker' meets 'An Inconvenient Truth', THE AGE OF CONSEQUENCES investigates the impacts of irreversible climate change, resource scarcity, mass migration, and pandemic conflict through the lens of US national security and global instability.

An intense thriller from the frontlines of World War II. As Operation Valkyrie prepares to assassinate Adolph Hitler, an Allied special ops team prepares to extract the man destined to lead post-war Germany. But after Valkyrie fails, everything changes. Now, unlikely allies must work together to stop a group of Nazi Officers from fleeing to Argentina and establishing the Fourth Reich.

Medieval art treasures seized by the Nazis go missing at the end of World War II. Were they destroyed in the chaos of the final battles? Or were these thousand-year-old masterpieces stolen by advancing American troops? For over forty years, the mystery remained unsolved. A true detective story, "The Liberators" follows a dogged German art detective through the New York art world and military archives to the unlikeliest of destinations: a small town on the Texas prairie. Featuring interviews with Willi Korte (Portrait of Wally) and Texas attorney Dick DeGuerin, the film raises intriguing questions as to the motivations of the art thief and the whereabouts of the items that, to this day,

Historical biographical religious drama film based on the memoirs of Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order who was also canonized as a saint in Roman Catholicism.

Deep in the woods of Maine, a broken promise made after the September 11th attacks forces two friends to confront the teenagers they were and the men they've become.

There have been many evil men in the history of the world including serial killers, rapists and mass murderers – but none of them as extreme and as monstrous as Adolf Hitler.

An unassuming young lawyer leads a fight against the Nazis near the end of the Second World War.

A former war journalist now writing for a paper in Northern California is drawn into conflict at home.

A rescue attempt of a German traitor during World War I has unexpected consequences and sets off an adventure across the Arabian desert.

An American Marine returns home to his dying father bringing not only the hope to mend their broken relationship but his memories of the war.

A Special Ops military Force, led by expert sniper Sergeant Jake Chandler, are sent to a remote Afghan village to extract an American congressman being held by the Taliban.

A young woman decides to find her house that she has been deprived of at the age of 4 due to the war. The only chance to get to the occupied area is to cross the border secretly. The border barrier, the natural dividing line, the river Enguri, all add up to the artificially-created wire line by Russian Soldiers. In search of her house, the protagonist explores lives of internally displaced persons for 24 years after the war and sinks into the art of existence that seems to be war, rather than peace. In the process, she meets with so-called 'connectors', who help her get to the occupied territory. The story portrays everlasting estranging damage occupation can bring: how it can eradicate the concept of ' home' and the comforting feeling of safety.

Set on the eve of World War 2, Jimmy and Evelyn meet and fall in love. As time passes Jimmy and best friend Rupert are conscripted to fight. Leaving their partners (Evelyn and best friend Lizzie) on the Home Front. As the years pass Evelyn joins the Land Army and tries to carry on, wondering if Jimmy and Rupert will return home. Jimmy is deeply affected by his experiences and is traumatised, struggling to return to normality. Will Evelyn and Jimmy fall apart or pull together in an uncertain and changing world?

VICE presents this authoritative look at how the Islamic State was made, and what its future holds as the world's Superpowers struggle to find a common strategy in the global war on terror. Journalist Ben Anderson embeds with Iraqi fighters battling ISIS, visits Russian military forces in Syria and meets captured ISIS fighters in Kurdistan.

In February 1945, Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal captured the image of five U.S. Marines and one U.S. Navy Corpsman hoisting the American flag atop a mountain in Iwo Jima.

In midst of an existential threat to the indigenous Assyrians by ISIS, the filmmaker travels back to his ancestral homeland, Syria, on a journey of nostalgia and discovery.

A mining operation in Cerrejon, Northern Colombia revealed a treasure trove of fossils from animals that lived ten million years after the KT extinction that killed the dinosaurs. Surprisingly, enormous reptiles were dominate. Scientists investigate who was the apex predator of the era - Titanoboa, a quarter ton giant snake five times bigger than the largest anaconda, or a similarly giant crocodilian with an incredibly deadly bite force. —David Foss