One month after celebrating moms around the world, it’s time for dads to get their due.
Father’s Day is this Sunday, June 21, and Watch With Us wants to celebrate by recommending a movie genre near and dear to all dads’ hearts – war films.
Streamers like Netflix, Prime Video and Tubi have tons of action-packed movies to watch, which is why we narrowed down our selections that cover a specific historical event – World War II.
From Tom Cruise trying to kill Adolf Hitler in the thriller Valkyrie to Clark Gable battling Japanese submarines in Run Silent, Run Deep, these WWII films are guaranteed to make pops happy on his special day of the year.
In the middle of World War II, everyone needs a hero, including the Soviets. They get one with Vassili Zaitsev (Jude Law), a Red Army sniper who is renowned for his incredible marksmanship, which has taken out many of the invading German army. He becomes friends with his supervising officer, Danilov (Joseph Fiennes), but the two men soon face a bump in their bromance – they both love Tania (Rachel Weisz), a private with a knack for translating German. They’ll have to set aside their rivalry when the Germans send Erwin König (Ed Harris), a sniper who is even better than Vassili, to take out his rival and any Soviet soldier who crosses his path.
While the love triangle at the center of Enemy at the Gates is a bit unbelievable, the film makes up for it with its outstanding battle scenes and the climactic sniper-on-sniper duel between Vassili and Erwin. Hollywood doesn’t make many WWII movies with Russian and German protagonists, and the film’s depiction of the Battle of Stalingrad is truly impressive.
If you want a war movie that doesn’t take itself too seriously, watch The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. Based on the nonfiction book Churchill’s Secret Warriors by Damien Lewis, the movie stars Henry Cavill as real-life war hero Gus March-Phillipps, who led a covert mission to destroy an Italian supply ship near a Spanish-controlled island. Gus can’t do it alone, so he assembles a dirty half-dozen of rogue officers like Anders Lassen (Alan Ritchson) and Marjorie Stewart (Eíza Gonzalez) to help him.
Director Guy Ritchie plays fast and loose with some of the facts, including adding several gunfights and explosions that never actually happened. Still, if watching former Superman Cavill gun down some Nazis and Reacher star Ritchson break some Axis Power heads, then hang out with The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.
With World War II still raging, submarine commander P.J. Richardson (Clark Gable) only has one thing on his mind – revenge. The Japanese destroyer Akikaze has sunk four American subs, including P.J.’s last ship, and he wants to stop it from doing it again. He gets his chance when he is assigned to command the USS Nerka, but the Navy forbids him to go after the Akikaze. P.J. ignores their orders and trains his crew to hunt and destroy his Japanese enemy, but he encounters resistance from one man on board – Lieutenant Jim Bledsoe (Burt Lancaster), who thinks P.J.’s obsession will doom them all to a watery grave.
Two dudes battling it out on a submarine? If Run Silent, Run Deep sounds a little like the 1995 Cold War thriller Crimson Tide with Gene Hackman and Denzel Washington, you’re right. Both movies feature two stars locked in a battle of wills while torpedoes are being shot at them thousands of feet underwater. But Run Silent, Run Deep is even more intense, with crisp back and white cinematography lending a patina of realism to its purely fictional story. At the tail end of his career, Gable gives one of his best performances ever as an officer who is no gentleman. His obsession with getting even jeopardizes his colleagues, and Gable is surprisingly convincing at showing P.J.’s growing desperation.
What happens after war ends and the enemy needs to be punished? That’s the question Nuremberg grapples with as it depicts the beginning of the Nuremberg trials in 1945. Hitler’s second-in-command, Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe), is accused of mass murder, and the prosecution needs to determine if he’s mentally fit to stand trial. After U.S. Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek) examines him, he doesn’t quite believe a man so civil to him – and caring for his family – could commit such atrocities. But as the trial proceeds and evidence is shown to the public, Kelley grapples with Göring’s true nature.
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Unlike classic WWII movies like Saving Private Ryan and Das Boot, Nuremberg focuses on the aftermath of war and the battles waged in the courtroom and in public opinion. The Nuremberg trials were, for many, the first real look at what the Germans had done to their Jewish prisoners, and the film convincingly conveys this dawning horror through Kelley’s perspective. Crow gives his best performance in years as a monster cosplaying as a family man who thinks that by denying what he did, he can make it go away. Nuremberg shows how wrong he was and the need for public accountability for private misdeeds.
Tom Cruise as a Nazi? Yeah, it happened – kinda – in 2008’s Valkyrie, which sees the Top Gun star play a German soldier, Claus von Stauffenberg, who is fed up with Hitler (David Bamber) and his cronies. He decides to do something about it by leading a resistance effort to assassinate the German leader so he can take over the military and end the war. That sounds simple, but to get close enough to Hitler, Claus has to make sure everything goes right – and nobody finds out what his real intentions are.
Directed by Bryan Singer, Valkyrie is an excellent thriller that retells a moment in history few people know about. There really was a Claus von Stauffenberg, and he almost pulled off an act that would have saved millions of lives. (It shouldn’t be a spoiler to reveal that Claus was not successful in assassinating Hitler.) Cruise is miscast as an eye-patch-wearing German officer, but he’s also oddly right at home spying on others and staging daring acts of subterfuge. He’s surrounded by a top-notch cast of British character actors, like Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy and Terence Stamp, and they’re all terrific as Claus’ fellow soldiers who want to off their big boss.
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