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From Platoon to Winter Soldier: 10 of the best Vietnam war films

Apocalypse Now

Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods, which is released on Netflix on 12 June, is the newest entry in cinema’s decades-long fascination with the trauma experienced by US soldiers during the Vietnam war. But this 1979 film from Francis Ford Coppola, adapted from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, is still the big one: a widescreen vision of chaos, a nightmare from which Martin Sheen’s Captain Willard is trying to awake.
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Little Girl of Hanoi

Not, perhaps, the most objective of perspectives – the intro reads: “Honouring the heroes of Hanoi who defeated the American imperialists” – but this is the North Vietnamese answer to Rome Open City, a 1974 study of life under bombardment (the mass “Christmas bombings” of 1972) filmed in the city where they happened.
Available on DVD

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Winter Soldier

This 1972 documentary focuses on a part of the war that its later fictional counterparts would try to finesse and explain away: the atrocities carried out by US forces against civilians in Vietnam. Based on the series of testimonies by former soldiers in the Winter Soldier Investigation (backed by Vietnam Veterans Against the War), this remains a radical film document.
Available on US DVD

Full Metal Jacket

Platoon (and to a lesser extent, 1985’s Rambo: First Blood Part II) unlocked a flood of Hollywood films about the war: Hamburger Hill, Good Morning Vietnam, In Country; the focus rarely deviating from the US servicemen’s traumatic experiences. Stanley Kubrick’s contribution from 1987 is probably the best of the bunch, a still-lacerating fable of desensitisation and sacrifice.
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When the Tenth Month Comes

Not a war movie as such (as there are only brief glimpses of combat), but this 1984 film is widely considered Vietnam’s own masterpiece on the war’s fallout. A lyrical drama of loss and longing directed by Dang Nhat Minh, this stars Lê Vân as a woman in North Vietnam who can’t accept her soldier husband’s death in the war.
YouTube

The Deer Hunter

A classic of the Hollywood new wave, just pre-dating Apocalypse Now but more incisive on the moral damage the war inflicted on American society. Defiantly antiheroic in tone, Michael Cimino’s 1978 film also indicated the future path of US cinema through casting the Vietnamese as an implacably brutal enemy.
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Hearts and Minds

The Vietnam war was, of course, the focus for much anti-government protest in the 60s and 70s, and this then-controversial documentary – which won an Oscar in 1975 – encapsulated the mood. The “hearts and minds” are those of the Vietnamese people; director Peter Davis’s focus is on the dehumanising racism of the US military and government as the conflict developed.
Amazon Prime Video

The Abandoned Field: Free Fire Zone

The Vietnamese cinematic voice has been largely drowned out by US movie bombast but there are a few to look out for, such as this 1979 film, set largely in a rice field where one family holds off US military assaults. Restricted in resources (the Americans are played by Vietnamese actors), this is nonetheless a fascinating watch.
YouTube

Platoon

Crystallising America’s inward-looking take on the war experience, as the fighting itself retreated into the past, Oliver Stone’s harrowing 1986 account of US soldiers under fire won best picture and director Oscars. By focusing so intensely on the moral quagmire, this set the tone for the self-pity that came to define the nation’s perceptions of the conflict.
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Little Dieter Needs to Fly

One of Werner Herzog’s great documentaries from the 90s: German-born airman Dieter Dengler recreates his trek through the jungle after getting shot down during the Vietnam war; he escaped after being tortured by the NVA. Herzog later remade the story as Rescue Dawn (2007), starring Christian Bale as Dieter, but this meditative doc is much better.
Mubi (£)