10 Most Important War Films Ever Made

Directed by The Godfather helmer Francis Ford Coppola, the famously troubled production of 1979's Apocalypse Now occurred alongside the release of both Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter and Hal Ashby's comic drama Coming Home, both of which followed veterans of the conflict as they tried and failed to return to "normal" life after the horrors of their role in America's occupation of Vietnam.

This psychedelic epic, meanwhile, took an entirely different tack.

Loosely adapted from Joseph Conrad's nightmarish adventure novella Heart of Darkness, the film followed Martin Sheen's troubled soldier into the depths of an unrecognizable Vietnam as he ignored the amoral slaughter surrounding him in his obsessive search for Marlon Brando's elusive Kurtz.

Dark, disturbing, and entirely unattached to realism, Apocalypse Now's blackly comic fever dream version of Vietnam changed how cinema represented war, paving the way for more expressionistic views of its horrors ranging from Adrian Lyne's mysterious horror Jacob's Ladder to the animated strangeness of 2008's dreamlike Waltz With Bashir.