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Jeremy Urquhart
Published 2 hours ago
Jeremy has more than 2200 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows.
His favorite directors include Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, John Woo, Bob Fosse, Fritz Lang, Guillermo del Toro, and Yoji Yamada. He's also very proud of the fact that he's seen every single Nicolas Cage movie released before 2022, even though doing so often felt like a tremendous waste of time. He's plagued by the question of whether or not The Room is genuinely terrible or some kind of accidental masterpiece, and has been for more than 12 years (and a similar number of viewings).
When he's not writing lists - and the occasional feature article - for Collider, he also likes to upload film reviews to his Letterboxd profile (username: Jeremy Urquhart) and Instagram account.
He has achieved his 2025 goal of reading all 13,467 novels written by Stephen King, and plans to spend the next year or two getting through the author's 82,756 short stories and 105,433 novellas.
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Since World War II was such a massive and globe-spanning conflict (they weren’t kidding with the “world” part in its title), it’s perhaps understandable that it’s the most frequently explored in cinema. This goes for feature films (see Saving Private Ryan, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and Come and See), and also for documentaries, the latter likely because it was a war that was actually able to be filmed quite a lot, in contrast to the less-filmed World War I… and then if you go back far enough before World War I, filming anything in any quality just wasn’t an option.
So, it’s worth covering some compelling war documentaries that aren’t about the Second World War, with the ones below being some of the more powerful and memorable. If you're after perspectives or information on World War I, the Vietnam War, or even some 21st century conflicts, then some of the documentaries below might well prove helpful.
8 'Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam' (1987)
Image via HBO
It’s strange to say this about a documentary, but Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam has an unusually good cast, in a way, seeing as so many well-known actors provided voice-over work for this one. Said voice-over work was needed, since this documentary is made up of footage played alongside readings of letters that were – as the title suggests – sent back to the U.S. from soldiers serving in the Vietnam War.
You're inevitably reminded about the human cost of such a conflict, and of sending soldiers overseas to something they might not have fully understood prior to deployment.
It's obviously just about the American perspective, but as a look at that perspective as it relates to this particular war, Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam is understandably personal, intimate, and sometimes quite moving. You're inevitably reminded about the human cost of such a conflict, and of sending soldiers overseas to something they might not have fully understood prior to deployment, and the anti-war sentiment most certainly comes across from the overall (and effective) approach taken.
7 'Lessons of Darkness' (1992)
Image via Werner Herzog Filmproduktion
In one way, Lessons of Darkness is kind of about the Gulf War of the early 1990s, but in a very abstract and almost arthouse sort of way. It’s probably more accurate to say it’s about the aftermath of said conflict, looking at various images of destruction that are post-apocalyptic, almost, in nature, mostly of oil fields in Kuwait that were on fire. You need that context to properly understand what the documentary is going for and trying to say, but it’s certainly unnerving once it clicks.
Werner Herzog is probably too singular and unusual a director to make a straightforward Gulf War-related documentary, perhaps inevitably, but what he did here is undeniably striking. Herzog directed some superior documentaries and feature films to Lessons of Darkness, yet this one does still stand out, to some extent, because of how effortlessly scary and troubling it is, as a war documentary, all without showing much by way of typical/expected war documentary footage.
6 'Waltz with Bashir' (2008)
Waltz with Bashir is a difficult documentary to talk about for various reasons, but without wading into that too much (it would require more than a paragraph or two), here are the basics. It’s about its director, Ari Folman, looking back on his involvement in the invasion of Lebanon, which happened about a quarter of a century earlier, and his attempts to remember parts of the conflict his mind has suppressed.
It explores memory, trauma, and conflict in a pretty unapologetic way, all the while having a unique style of presentation for a documentary, too, seeing as most of Waltz with Bashir is animated, which serves to make the memories recollected even hazier, sometimes more surreal, and often nightmarish. It ends up in an especially traumatic place, thematically and narratively, and there are other reasons why Waltz with Bashir is challenging, too. But in many ways, it’s a bold piece of art and documentary filmmaking, and it does stand out against most other war documentaries out there.
5 'Restrepo' (2010)
Image via National Geographic Entertainment
There’s an attempt to tell things like they are in Restrepo that’s very striking and confronting, but not in a manner that ever runs the risk of feeling exploitative or like it’s all a bit too much. It depicts fighting during the War in Afghanistan, released right at what ended up being the mid-point of that conflict, though “fighting” isn't what happens all the time, necessarily, since Restrepo wants to showcase the downtime that comes with deployment as a soldier, too.
It's all fairly neutral and expectedly grounded, and just how realistic it feels (even compared to other war documentaries that utilize real-life footage) does make it a fairly intense and disturbing watch, at times. Restrepo would make for a thematically/stylistically appropriate double feature with 2025’s Warfare, which was a filmed recreation of a real-life event, but done in a way that felt about as close to documentary-like as a non-documentary could possibly get.
4 '20 Days in Mariupol' (2023)
Image via PBS Distribution
The emotional weight of 20 Days in Mariupol comes about because of how intimate the war-related footage is, but also because the conflict depicted – the Russian invasion of Ukraine – was still ongoing when the film came out (and, as of 2026, is continuing to be fought). It takes place during the early days of the invasion/war, with journalists covering the cost of the invasion on people living in the titular city of Mariupol.
It probably goes without saying, but 20 Days in Mariupol is a difficult watch, yet it has to be, especially because of the immediacy and ongoing relevance of the conflict it depicts… a conflict that, owing to so many other dramatic world events, isn't covered nearly as much these days as it was back in 2022. So, 20 Days in Mariupol also serves as a reminder of the entire ordeal, and it’s sobering to think that it’s only focused on the first few weeks of the war, and that so much more death and destruction has occurred since. Similarly vital was 2024's No Other Land, which wasn't included here because it was less of a war documentary, and more about events that preceded an eventual (and also still ongoing) war.
3 'For Sama' (2019)
A woman recording a war zone with a camera in For Sama.Image via PBS Distribution
One more war documentary about a 21st-century conflict, For Sama looks at the Syrian civil war, with footage shot over several years. It documents things mostly from the point of view of a young woman who gets married and has a child (the titular Sama) while the conflict grows in intensity around her, with time also spent on her husband’s experiences as a doctor, treating the huge numbers of people hurt during fighting in the city of Aleppo.
It's very challenging, but also powerful in how it really gets you in the shoes of someone who has to try and live life in and around a warzone. In that sense, For Sama is particularly effective as a documentary about the cost of war on people who aren’t fighting in it necessarily, and so it’s hard not to get behind the anti-war sentiment here, when it’s presented in so striking a fashion.
2 'Hearts and Minds' (1974)
Image via Warner Bros.
As a documentary about the Vietnam War, Hearts and Minds immediately jumps out because of its year of release. In 1974, the war was technically still ongoing, and wasn’t officially over until 1975 (though the U.S. did withdraw in 1973), so Hearts and Minds certainly wasn’t worried about touching any raw nerves, so to speak, being topical and provocative for its time.
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1 'They Shall Not Grow Old' (2018)
Image via Warner Bros. Pictures
Peter Jackson will always be best known for his epic movies, and some also recognize him for his low-budget horror films, yet in more recent years, he’s seemed most interested in documentary filmmaking. It’s a chance to explore new technology, in terms of remastering old footage, not to mention assembling/editing footage rather than filming new stuff, exemplified most recently by The Beatles: Get Back.
A few years before that one, there was also They Shall Not Grow Old, which was all about the experience of fighting in World War I, so the remastering and touching up of all the 100+ year-old footage was a more substantial undertaking. Audio and sometimes strikingly clear images of such an old conflict are woven together very powerfully here, making They Shall Not Grow Old about as grounded and unnervingly immersive as a documentary about World War I can probably ever be.
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They Shall Not Grow Old
R
Documentary
History
War
Release Date
November 9, 2018
Runtime
99 minutes
Director
Peter Jackson
Writers
Peter Jackson
Cast
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William Argent
Self - Royal Naval Air Service (voice)
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Thomas Adlam
Self - Bedfordshire Regiment (voice)
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John Ashby
Self - The Duke of Cambridge's Own (Middlesex Regiment) (voice)
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