Das Boot

Wolfgang Petersen's Das Boot opened in West Germany in 1981 and played at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, after a six-year production on what was then the most expensive German film ever made. It received six Academy Award nominations, including Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay, a record for a non-English-language film at the time. The 209-minute director's cut is now the standard release; a 293-minute television version exists for the truly committed.

1941. A German U-boat under the command of a war-weary captain (Jürgen Prochnow) leaves La Rochelle for an Atlantic patrol that will bring it within metres of destruction more than once. Petersen and cinematographer Jost Vacano shot inside a full-scale U-boat replica with a hand-held Arriflex bolted to a custom mount, and the result is the cramped, propulsive interiority that defines the film. Klaus Doldinger's electronic score is an earworm that has never gone away.

It is unusual in German cinema for centring Wehrmacht combatants without either condemning or celebrating them; the U-boat war it shows is unwinnable as a system and destructive to every individual caught up in it. Decades later a Sky/UFA series revived the story, but the 1981 original is the definitive submarine film, alongside Run Silent, Run Deep and The Hunt for Red October.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The greatest submarine film ever made, and one of the most morally honest German engagements with World War II. The long stretches of waiting and listening on patrol contain some of the most sustained suspense in any war film.