The 6 Best War Films of the 2020s So Far, Ranked

Image via Netflix Published Sep 20, 2026, 4:56 PM EDT Sign in to your Collider account Making one powerful war movie is difficult. Making one that actually understands war beyond explosions, uniforms, and battlefield chaos is even harder. Plenty of war films use combat as spectacle, but the great ones know that war is also waiting, fear, confusion, guilt, exhaustion, and the awful feeling of being trapped inside decisions made by people far away from the danger. Today, we’re looking at the recent war films that understand that pressure best. You might not have heard about them but that’s mainly because they’re not The Odyssey-level fame. On the contrary, some of them might even seem slow-paced and boring to the wrong people. But they’re that way because they have substance, perhaps just like Dunkirk was. Here’s a list of 6 best war films fo 2020s so far and we’ve ranked them carefully. 6 'The Outpost' (2020) Image via Screen Media Films Most military bases are designed to project strength, but Combat Outpost Keating was practically built to be a target. The Outpost wastes no time making this valley location feel like a complete death trap. The base sits at the bottom of a steep Afghan valley, surrounded by mountains that give the enemy every possible advantage. Living under that constant threat, Staff Sergeant Clint Romesha (Scott Eastwood) and Specialist Ty Carter (Caleb Landry Jones) can never truly relax. Peace here is always temporary. Every ridge above them looks like a firing position waiting to wake up. When the attack comes, the geography becomes pure horror. Bullets crack against rock walls. Gunfire rains down from every side. Soldiers are hiding, sprinting, ducking, dragging the wounded, and shouting through a noise so constant it feels impossible to think. The usual daily skirmishes turn into a massive coordinated assault, and the film barely lets anyone breathe after that. What makes it hit so hard is how clearly the battle is stacked against them, a reality that makes survival feel less like heroism and more like sheer panic. It is frantic. It is deafening. It is entirely unreasonable. 5 'Da 5 Bloods' (2020) Image via Netflix Da 5 Bloods starts like a reunion, then quickly turns into something much heavier. The film follows four aging Black Vietnam veterans, who return to modern-day Vietnam to find Norman (Chadwick Boseman), the squad leader they still speak about like a saint, and the buried CIA gold they left behind. But the nostalgia does not last. Paul (Delroy Lindo) is the one who makes the trip feel dangerous from the beginning. He is sweating, defensive, angry, and carrying the past like it is still loaded. Once the gold comes out of the ground, everything breaks fast. A landmine tears through the group’s fragile trust, and the jungle becomes a pressure cooker of fear, greed, guilt, and old wounds. Paul’s red MAGA hat cuts through the green brush like a warning sign, half armor and half open wound. He wanders, rages, hallucinates, and argues with ghosts until the movie feels trapped inside his panic. The war ended decades ago, but for Paul, it never stopped firing. That messy, honest look at PTSD is exactly what makes it one of the best in recent times. 4 'Warfare' (2025) Image via A24 Warfare drops viewers straight into a house where every room feels too small for the panic about to hit it. Ray Mendoza (D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai) and Elliott Miller (Cosmo Jarvis) are part of a Navy SEAL platoon running a night surveillance mission near Ramadi, packed inside a two-story home with terrified Iraqi families trapped in the same space. The setup is already tense because everyone is breathing too close, waiting too quietly, and depending on a plan that can collapse in seconds. Then it does collapse. Darkness flashes open with gunfire. Radios crackle with static. Air support disappears. Enemy movement spikes outside, and the mission turns into shouting, barricading, bleeding, dragging, and guessing through chaos. The film moves with brutal urgency because the soldiers barely have time to understand the next problem before it becomes life-or-death. Every hallway feels exposed, every room feels occupied by fear, and every remaining inch of the house feels like a trap waiting to spring. It is pure, suffocating panic. Collider Exclusive · Action Franchise Quiz What Action Series Would You Thrive In? Wick · Fast · Mission · Die Hard Four franchises. Four completely different ideas of what a hero is: the assassin with a code, the family that never leaves anyone behind, the man who does his own stunts, and the guy who simply refuses to die. Only one of them runs on your particular brand of trouble. Eight questions will tell you which one you would survive. 🐕Wick 🏁Fast 🧨Mission 🎄Die Hard FIND YOUR FRANCHISE → 01 How does a room know you've walked into it? Every action hero arrives differently. Some of them arrive before they arrive. ASomeone recognises me, and the temperature in the room drops without a single word being said. BLoudly and warmly. I arrive with my people, and we're already laughing about something. CI'm the one who told everybody where to stand. I walked this room twice before anyone else arrived. DBy accident. I wasn't supposed to be here, and now I'm the only one who can do anything about it. NEXT QUESTION → 02 It turns physical. What does your fighting actually look like? Choreography is character. Yours says something about you. AEconomical and devastating. Trained technique, no wasted motion, finished before most people notice it started. BLoud, heavy and weirdly joyful. I'm not elegant, I hit like a truck, and I always have backup. CTo plan, until the plan breaks. Then I improvise at full sprint and refuse to stop moving. DBadly, honestly, and with a lot of swearing. I take more damage than I deal and I still don't go down. NEXT QUESTION → 03 Who is standing beside you when it starts? Some franchises are built on a team. Others are built on one person walking in alone. ANobody. I have contacts, favours and people who owe me, but when it begins I work alone. BEveryone. My people are the entire point, and I'd trade the whole mission for any one of them. CA small hand-picked team I trust completely, and I'd still take the worst part of the job myself. DA voice on the other end of a radio and a building full of people who don't know I exist. NEXT QUESTION → 04 It has gone badly wrong. What keeps you upright? Act two exists to find out what you're actually made of. AFocus, commitment and sheer will. Grief is fuel if you point it in the right direction. BThe people counting on me. I don't appear to have a limit when it's family on the line. CRefusing to accept the odds. Somebody has to do the impossible part, and it's going to be me. DSpite, mostly. And a growing sense that these people picked the wrong building. NEXT QUESTION → 05 There's a vehicle. What are you driving, and how? No action franchise has ever survived without a car chase. This one is yours. AA black muscle car I am unreasonably attached to, and I will dismantle an entire empire over it. BSomething impossibly modified, at impossible speed, off an impossible ramp. Physics is a suggestion. CA motorbike at full throttle through a city I memorised last night. And then off a cliff. DA borrowed car, badly, while somebody in the passenger seat politely asks me to slow down. NEXT QUESTION → 06 How do you feel about the people giving the orders? There is always an institution. There is rarely a good one. AThere are rules and I respect them absolutely, right up until somebody breaks one against me. BI don't take orders. I take care of people, and everything else tends to sort itself out. CI serve the mission, not the memo. If my people are in danger, the orders come second. DThey're in a van outside telling me what I'm doing wrong while I'm the one bleeding on broken glass. NEXT QUESTION → 07 Underneath all of it, what are you actually doing this for? The stunts are the reason people come. This is the reason they stay. ASomething was taken from me that can't be replaced, and I've been settling that account ever since. BBelonging. I built a family out of people who had nowhere else, and I'll defend it with everything. CThe conviction that if I stop, people die. I don't know how to hand that to anyone else. DI just wanted to get through the holidays with my family. Everything after that was self-defence. NEXT QUESTION → 08 When the credits roll, what do people say about you? Every franchise is really an argument about what makes someone worth watching. AThat I was a myth people warned each other about in whispers, and that they were right to. BThat I never left anyone behind, the door was always open, and there was always a place at the table. CThat I did the impossible part myself, every single time, and never asked anyone to risk it for me. DThat I was just a guy in the wrong place at the wrong time, who turned out to be very hard to kill. REVEAL MY FRANCHISE → Casting Has Been Completed Your Franchise Is…Four action series. One of them is built around exactly the way you handle pressure, people, and a room that has just gone very quiet. Here is where you would survive the trilogy, and probably headline it. John WickYou are precision with a grudge. You don't posture, you don't escalate, and you don't warn anybody twice. That is exactly why the people who know you are so careful never to be the reason you start. The Wick films run on discipline: an underworld with actual etiquette, a hero who honours every rule of it, and a world that unravels the instant someone breaks one against him. You share that quality. You are extraordinarily reasonable right up to the line, and then completely immovable past it. Focus, commitment and sheer will. You'd be the one carrying grief through three sequels and turning it into technique rather than noise. People wouldn't call you dangerous. They'd say your name quietly and let that do the work. Fast & FuriousYou understand the thing the whole franchise is secretly about: the cars are spectacular, but the crew is the point. You collect people, you keep them, and you'd drive through a building for any one of them. This series went from street racing to orbit without ever changing its actual subject, because loyalty scales and plot doesn't have to. You have the same instinct. You build a family out of whoever turns up, and then you defend it past the point of reason. You'd thrive here because the franchise rewards exactly your strengths: warmth, nerve, an absolute refusal to leave anyone behind, and a relaxed relationship with physics. The mission can wait. The barbecue cannot. Mission: ImpossibleYou over-prepare and then take the dangerous part yourself anyway. It looks like control, but it's really responsibility. You have never worked out how to ask somebody else to carry the risk. This is the franchise of the plan that collapses on schedule: the team, the mask, the rooftop, and the one person sprinting flat out because sprinting is all that's left. You share that refusal to accept an outcome. Told the odds, you treat them as an administrative error. You'd thrive here because these films reward competence and loyalty in equal measure. The mission matters, but nobody on the team gets left on the wrong side of a door. Some people delegate the cliff. You have never once been that person. Die HardYou are not the most trained person in the building, the best equipped, or the one anybody would have picked. You are simply the one still standing at the end, which turns out to be the only qualification that matters. Die Hard invented the modern action hero by making him mortal: outgunned, out-planned, bleeding, and extremely funny about it. You share that stubbornness. Adversity doesn't make you noble, it makes you sarcastic, and then it makes you unstoppable. You'd thrive here because these films reward improvisation and nerve over preparation, and you've never had the luxury of preparing anyway. You didn't want any of this. You just declined to be the person who let it happen. ↻ RETAKE THE QUIZ 3 'The Zone of Interest' (2023) Image via A24 The Zone of Interest is one of the most chilling war films because it understands that some horrors become even more unbearable when people refuse to react to them. The plot kicks off with Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller), who live in a clean, comfortable house with children running around, servants moving through rooms, garden plans, birthday conversations, career concerns, and all the ordinary little routines that usually make a home feel alive. Then the truth settles in. Their wall borders Auschwitz. Everything they are building, protecting, and enjoying exists beside mass murder, and the sickest part is how completely they have trained themselves to live with that fact. The film hurts because it keeps asking the viewer to sit inside that normality. You have to watch them go about their afternoon chores while screams, gunshots, barking dogs, and the low industrial hum of death provide the background soundtrack. The ash falling into the garden is one of those details that makes the whole body go cold. Hedwig can look at the soil and still think about beauty. That is the nightmare. The daily routine acts as a complete confession. It shows how quickly unimaginable evil becomes just background noise for the people living next door. 2 'Quo Vadis, Aida?' (2020) Image via Super LTD Quo Vadis, Aida? is the kind of war film that makes paperwork feel like a weapon. Aida Selmanagić (Jasna Đuričić) is inside the UN base at Srebrenica, wearing the badge that lets her move through rooms other people cannot enter. And, that small privilege becomes the only thing she has left. Outside and around her, refugees are crushed together in the heat, waiting for protection that keeps turning into delay, excuse, and empty language. Aida is translating for the same officers who keep hiding behind procedure, so every sentence she repeats feels like it is stealing time from her husband and sons. Yet despite the bureaucratic fog, her own vision remains sharp. Aida knows the Serbian army’s arrival changes everything. She knows the evacuation lists matter more than any speech. She pushes through sweltering crowds with her hair stuck to her forehead, pleads with men who will not look the truth in the face, barters with whatever authority her job still gives her, and keeps trying to smuggle her family into the tiny space where survival might still be possible. The cruelty is that she does almost everything right. Yet, the base keeps turning into a trap with official language painted over it. That helplessness is genuinely unbearable. 1 'All Quiet on the Western Front' (2022) Image via Netflix This masterpiece takes a boy’s idea of glory and grinds it into mud before he can fully understand what has happened to him. All Quiet on the Western Front tracks Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer), who enlists with his school friends, thrilled by uniforms, speeches, and the promise of adventure. Then he reaches the Western Front and discovers a world of flooded trenches, shredded bodies, artillery barrages, and uniforms recycled from dead soldiers whose name tags are mechanically torn out before the next child wears them. That detail alone is enough to explain the film’s brutality. Paul has entered a system that consumes boys so quickly. His face becomes caked in gray mud, his eyes go blank, and each new attack feels less like battle than industrial processing. Men drown in craters, gasp in gas, crawl through wire, and die for yards of land that will be traded back again. It ranks first because the disillusionment is absolute. Complete. Physical. Unbearable. All Quiet on the Western Front Release Date October 7, 2022 Runtime 147 minutes Cast Felix Kammerer Paul Bäumer Albrecht Schuch Stanislaus 'Kat' Katczinsky