Kenny Broyles teaches English for food at a number of institutions of higher education in Northern Virginia. He has an abiding interest and some book learning in how stories work. He also plays guitar and board games and played ultimate frisbee relatively competitively when he was far younger. His father served in the 103 Infantry Division during the Second World War, which may have something to do with his interest in World War II movies.

About the Site

A few things happened that made me want to start a site reviewing World War II movies. I moved, and part of the moving process is packing and moving (or discarding) all your DVDs. Maybe that’s not part of your process, but it was part of mine. I have a great many Blu Rays and DVDs, though not so many that people think I’m a hoarder—just perhaps an enthusiast or, you know, old.

One of the sections in my new disc organization system is war movies, though there are subcategories inside that system. They’re organized by which war, and they also have a clear two-tier system—ones I really like and other ones I happen to own. Many of these other ones may be fine movies, but I haven’t watched all of them all the way through, for whatever reason—or I can’t remember if I have.

I also have a collection called Combat Classics that claims to be a fifty-movie pack with twelve remastered DVDs. The only claim I have reason to doubt is that these movies are in fact “classics.” This collection lists for between twenty-four and fifty dollars on Amazon as I write, and I’m confident I paid far less than that.

This collection includes Gung Ho!, Go for Broke! and . . . other movies; those two are the only ones I’m sure I’d heard of when I bought the set. So forty-eight classics to discover, except I hadn’t watched any of them. And now in a new home, would I watch them, or am I carting this thing around with me for the rest of my life as evidence of a lack of commitment?

There was another thing that spurred me to start this endeavor. I watched a top ten World War II movies thing on YouTube. I’m sure there’s more than one and which one doesn’t matter. What matters is the 2016 movie Anthropoid was very high on the list, so I rented a copy. Two interesting things about this movie: I enjoyed it, though it’s not in my top ten World War II movies and maybe not in my top five Cillian Murphy vehicles and certainly not my favorite Cillian Murphy World War II movie, but a good movie that I recommend.

The second thing was that I realized I had already seen the start of the movie, on some streaming service sometime earlier, but had stopped watching it for some reason—a reason that is lost to me.

So I started watching a war movie that is tense, realistic and entertaining and stopped; perhaps I got a phone call and didn’t get back to it.

What, you are certainly asking by now, is the point? The point is, I like war movies, but I don’t know which ones are actually good, and that list lead me to a movie I may well purchase (the Blu Ray is available on Amazon). I hope to create a reasonably comprehensive site where you can better decide which WWII movies you should invest your time and money in.

I’d also like to explore the genre some, so maybe we can start a dialogue on how these movies work.

I’m an Amazon Associate

I’ve entered into an agreement with Amazon, where if you buy something by following a link from this site, I may be compensated. This compensation will not be substantial, so I’m going to try to enjoy the process and only make recommendations I would make to someone I liked.

Recommendation

Anthropoid is a really good movie but not my favorite Cillian Murphy World War II movie.

Dunkirk is my favorite Cillian Murphy World War II movie, but not my favorite Michael Caine World War II movie. I don’t yet know what my favorite Michael Caine World War II movie is.