The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025
96. 1930 - All Quiet On The Western Front
Honourable Mentions: The Blue Angel, Hell's Angels, Morocco
The single-most authoritative anti-war treatise in film history, Lewis Milestone's adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front is also perhaps the most depressingly prophetic and urgent piece of cinema of the last 100 years, arriving under a decade before the world plunged itself into the most devastating conflict in its history.
Milestone's film is uncompromising in its approach and by extension totally distinct as a product of its time, deglamourising warfare while dwelling on the ideological and propagandistic influences that butt against the cold, simple reality of men killing other men.
Other adaptations of Erich Maria Remarque's World War I novel emerged in the decades after - including one as recently as 2022 - but none have managed to match both the contextual weight of Milestone's original nor its commitment to relaying the many nuances of Remarque's prose.