A lot of the obvious ones have been hit, Full Metal Jacket, Das Boot, Downfall, Dr Stangelove, Patton which is easily the funniest film about the end of the world that could ever be made, so a couple that haven't been mentioned so far that at least deserve to be watched.
The Battle of Algiers is a French film from 1966, with a Morricone composed soundtrack, all about the atrocities performed by both sides in the struggle for Algerian independence from the French Republic in the '50s. It's an ugly film dealing with an ugly topic, but it's really well made.
From the following year, the Soviet production of War & Peace...I haven't actually seen it but they recreated the Battle of Borodino using 120,000 extras. It's an 8 hour long film originally released in 4 parts, & the battle alone is an hour long. But it is meant to be a huge production that is on my "to see" list. But I want to read the book first.
Buffalo Soldiers isn't strictly a war movie, starring Joaquin Phoenix as a corrupt supply clerk in the US Army stationed in Germany in 1989, but it is a lot of fun.
Conspiracy is another film that's not strictly about the war, but has war as it's background. Instead it's about the banality of evil, it was a made-for-TV film, co-produced by the BBC & HBO & with a great cast of (mostly) British character actors, and it's about the Wannsee Conference, where a bunch of important Nazis met around a dinner table & at the end came up with The Final Solution to the Jewish Problem. Stanley Tucci is Adolf Eichmann & has a understated menace to him, while Kenneth Branagh is stunning as Reinhard Heydrich, basically Himmler's #2 in the SS. It's kind of mundane but really, really powerful & I deeply recommend it to everyone.
Land & Freedom is a Ken Loach film that basically copies George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. The main character is a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain in the '30s, who leaves Liverpool to fight in the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War. There he ends up in the POUM militia rather than the IBs, which leads to drama as the war goes on, as the Republican side falls more into the sphere of the Soviets & they start a purge against factions they disagree with, including the POUM & anarchists.
An honourable mention to the surreal 1969 musical Oh! What A Lovely War!, directed by nature documentary legend David Attenborough's brother Richard (who also directed Gandhi among other things), it's hard to describe really. It's generally about World War I but only in the loosest sense, rather than having a particularly tight narrative. The closing scene is a very powerful one though.
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