Kubrick still speaks to war's stupidity and waste more effectively.

Rating: Null/10 (3 July 2005)

In my opinion, Catch-22 (and in their own ways, even movies like M*A*S*H and Platoon) are excellent movies and valiant attempts to speak to the stupidity and waste of war. Even so, my experience has been that Kubrick's three anti-war films (and one of them, an anti anti-war film)--Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, and FMJ--are all superior in this respect. We shouldn't too quickly dismiss Coppolla's efforts or even more recent depictions of various forms of wartime disillusionment such as The Killing Fields, Black Hawk Down, or Hotel Rwanda. But Kubrick's three attempts are formidable classics which, in their cinematic evolution, have set the prototypical bar high for all filmmakers to discern what is most important to express concerning the problems with war and exactly how to express it most effectively.