13 War Movies Better Than 'Saving Private Ryan'

War movies have a way of sneaking up on you: you expect strategy or survival, and then you’re confronted with the human cost. Saving Private Ryan earned its reputation by making that cost impossible to ignore—loud, disorienting and physical—but treating it as the final word does war cinema a disservice.

Some of the most devastating films reveal brutality not through spectacle but in the quiet stretches when fear settles in and people must pick from bad options. Gripping from the first frame, Warfare is a recent addition that leans into that intimacy. Directed by Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland, it follows a platoon of Navy SEALs on a Ramadi mission in 2006, retold through fractured memories and played in real time by D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Will Poulter and Cosmo Jarvis.

The film is less a sweeping epic than an overstimulating, boots-on-the-ground account—sound design and performances that capture claustrophobic tension, and a focus on brotherhood, fear and disorientation rather than political context.