10 Most Important War Films Ever Made

Released at the height of its tensions, 2001: A Space Odyssey director Stanley Kubrick's brutal black comedy Dr Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb satirised the Cold War in mercilessly bleak and unsparing terms.

No one, from bombastic generals to uncaring, philandering politicians and public officials, was let off the hook in this 1964 masterpiece.

Treating the nuclear annihilation of life on earth as one big joke, the film took the public's devastation in the wake of World War II, the Korean war, and the then-ongoing Vietnam invasion and Cold War and used it to fuel a jet black satire which took aim at the military industrial complex, the amoral establishment, and the international elites who cause these wars without ever facing the human cost of them.

As dark a satire as Hollywood ever released, the film refused to treat the concept of war with an of the self-seriousness that even the most critical film depictions of conflict offer, and as a result the pointlessness of its folly was never made clearer.

In Dr Strangelove, as in history, war is one big joke, played on ordinary people by the rich and powerful string-pullers who fill the war rooms of the world.