Stephen Daisley

The 20th century told in 10 films

  • From Spectator Life
Image: 1917, Shutterstock

Cinema came of age in the 20th century and documented that epoch in all its trials and tribulations. Movies are for the most part escapist confections but they can also reflect our world back to us. To learn about the major events of the last century, it is sometimes as useful to turn to a film as to pick up a book. The following are ten movies that tell key chapters of the 20th century.

The Great War, 1917 (Sam Mendes, 2019) 


World War I is the harder of the two world wars to make a movie about. It was not a good war, easily rendered into a Hollywood morality play about monstrous Germans, cruel Japanese, plucky Brits and heroic Americans. It was an ethically messy conflict of intersecting national and strategic interests rooted in dominion and the divine power of a fading world. 

The notion of dying for king and country is alien to modern sensibilities and the outcome of the Great War — a temporary expansion of the British Empire — is not something many filmmakers want to romanticise.

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