A perfect example of Flickipedia's utility -- Memorial Day? Some actually honor the war dead, most of us just barbecue -- but wouldn't the right movie hit the balanced note between reverence and long-weekend recreation? But some war movies are tosh, and many are just jingoistic sensationalism. Here are a few selected recommendations:

All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) Erich Maria Remarque’s ubiquitous WWI novel gets an Oscar-winning, early-talkie treatment from director Lewis Milestone, and if the drama is clumsy, the trench-warfare battle scenes are horrifying and traumatic.

The Fighting Sullivans (1944) One of WWII’s saddest stories, dramatized in this low-budget propaganda piece: five stick-together Iowa brothers, Navy enlistees after Pearl Harbor, all go down in the Pacific together. Naturally teary beyond belief, and the tale that prompted the core story of Saving Private Ryan.

A Walk in the Sun (1946) Lewis Milestone returns to the battlefield, but with a difference: this stylized, grunt’s-eye-view follows a standard motley assortment of soldiers through Italy, from landing to nondescript farmhouse destination, their dialogue (and often monologues) a form of repetitious, singsong battle poetry. The enemy is never seen.

The Burmese Harp (1956) A haymaker of an anti-war film from Japanese moviemaker Kon Ichikawa, in which a soldier escapes death in Burma by masquerading as a Buddhist priest, and then finds himself transformed by the horrors of war into a holy man dedicated to burying the countless dead.

The Dawns Here Are Quiet (1972) This patient Soviet propaganda movie was nominated for a 1972 foreign-film Oscar and then summarily forgotten, but it might just be the only war film in which the beleaguered infantry is made up entirely of women. The horny male soldiers at a lonely outpost during WWII are replaced by ably trained female volunteers, all of them eager, fresh-faced comrades, each with her own fragile hopes for the future. Soon, a Nazi party presses them into armed conflict, with their avuncular C.O. torn between duty and guardian-guilt. For the Soviets, an inspiring ending meant martyrdom, not salvation.

Overlord (1975) A low-budget British film comprised of half archival WWII footage and half low-budget, low-key dramatics, Stuart Cooper’s all-but-forgotten film (a winner, nonetheless, at the Berlin Film Festival) echoes All Quiet on the Western Front in structure and tone, but the very real sequences of bombing raids and smoldering urban craters leave their own welts.

A Midnight Clear (1992) It’s Christmas, 1944, the Germans have nearly lost and everyone knows it. Six mostly inexperienced soldiers (Ethan Hawke, Frank Whalley, Gary Sinise, etc.) are selected for special assignment because of their high I.Q.s, so we know we’re in for a thoughtful movie – no kill-the-Kraut heroism here. After stumbling through the darkened snowy forest and holing up in an abandoned mansion wondering what to do; the Germans they meet feel likewise, and for a while, but not forever, it seems they won’t exchange fire more dangerous than snowballs. Unjustly overlooked, from a William Wharton novel.

The Thin Red Line (1998) The true WWII masterpiece from ‘98, Terrence Malick’s comeback film, after a 20 year silence, takes place during and around the battle of Guadalcanal but is in reality far more concentrated on the emotional experience of battle, and the impact, poetically invoked, of human warfare upon individuals and upon nature. Essentially a three-hour, non-narrative experiment, in which there are no main characters – just an ensemble of thirty or more figures – and no story, just impressions, experiences, feelings (the complex weft of narrational voices often do not synch up with on-screen personas) and astonishing images. Oh yeah, it’s based on James Jones’s 1962 novel, though you’d never know it.