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The fearless American war correspondent Martha Gelhorn once said that of all the wars a reporter covers, you only 'love' one. Bosnia was my 'love'. The film is based on the true story of British TV journalist Michael Nicholson, who adopted a Bosnian child when covering the conflict there. The brilliant Stephen Dillane plays a reporter who questions news values when his stories about a besieged orphanage are overtaken by the Duke of York's divorce. All I did was bitch a lot and meditate on ways of barracking then UK Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd for facilitating the Bosnian genocide (Constant Reader: I grew up eventually). Nicholson/Dillane did something more constructive and adopted a young Bosnian girl with no future. It's pretty much spot on, filmed in the ruins of the real Sarajevo. Watch out for Emily Lloyd playing a thinly disguised version of Guardian correspondent Maggie O'Kane, the reporter, who along with Newsday's Roy Gutman, set the standards (moral and journalistic) for the coverage of that war. But I was still annoyed by the filmmakers' careless failure to cut the grass that grew thickly around the rubble in the five years between the actual war and the actual filming. It looked all wrong against how I remembered it. Silly but there it is.

For a different take on that war, try one of Emir Kustorica's memoirs, Zivot je cudo, or the excellent BBC TV film Warriors.

There's just not enough pure and shameless propaganda out there, so here's a perfect example. The attack on Pearl Harbor brought the US into the war and made national heroes out of the real-life Flying Tigers and their commander Claire Chennault, who as paid warriors in the Chinese air force were the only Americans already fighting the Japanese on 7 December 1941. John Wayne was swiftly hired to play the pilot mercenary leader in a propaganda movie a year later. I once tried to sum up the movie for the Daily Mirror's TV listings as a film "about a real man whose real name was Claire, played by a real man whose real name was Marion". The chief sub cut and replaced it with the words: "Standard John Wayne war movie" instead. Which is what it is, and none the worse for it.

If you want the opinion of someone who has worked nine conflicts, in its own way this might be the most truthful war film ever made, just as the book may be the most truthful war novel ever written. Don't laugh! "All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and when they catch you, they will kill you... but first they must catch you." That's war, really. You don't just fight, you escape death, and if you escape in the right direction, you get to be a hero and win the day. Naturalists mock the conceit of rabbit bucks forced to fight as one unit. (Rabbits work in male-female pairs.) But war is an unnatural world. No? Consider the book and film's concept of 'going tharn' – the fear that paralyses you in the face of death. Conquering that fear, leading the weaker through hell, it's what leadership in combat is all about. I read once that Watership Down's author Richard Adams, a veteran himself, based the character of the rabbit leader Hazel on his own platoon commander in Normandy in 1944. Someone else once told me it was on the 'additional reading' list of the British Army officer training school at Sandhurst. I can well believe it.

Dr Strangelove deserves its place in the pantheon, but there were scores of brilliant but serious movies made about World War III. The Bedford Incident featured Sidney Poitier in the first film he made where his race was not an issue (and why should it, in the face of a bigger one?) Or Henry Fonda and Larry Hagman in Fail Safe. Possibly the under-rated US TV movie The Day After, or the tougher British version, Threads, perhaps. But the best is the BBC's 1966 banned drama-documentary, The War Game, which details the likely effects of a nuclear strike on south east England. The government objected to a film that took the unilateral nuclear disarmers' view that if the H-bomb failed as a deterrent, as they then thought it would - the survivors wouldn't care if the RAF retaliated. It was dutifully pulled by the BBC, and shelved for years. Not that this stopped BBC grandees from tripping off to the US to collect the best documentary Oscar that the film deservedly won that year. Director Peter Watkins was so p****d off his career never recovered. A terrible loss.

Pressburger and Powell's greatest movie. David Niven plays the RAF bomber pilot who misses his own death but is granted a second chance at life when heaven notices that he is AWOL and dispatches an angel to investigate. The scene when the young soldiers, men and women, black and white, all killed in action, arrive in heaven to be processed for eternal life is unbearably poignant. Watch out too for Roger Livesey, a deeply under appreciated actor, and Kim Hunter as the love interest (later, of course, Zira in Planet of the Apes). Incidentally, Steven Spielberg cast the actress who played the chief angel (Kathleen Byron) as the elderly wife of the eponymous private in Saving Private Ryan half a century later, an act that speaks volumes for his cinematic literacy.

Like The Bridge at Remagen, The Deerhunter and Saving Private Ryan, Attack! marked a major change in the sensibilities of Hollywood recreations of war. Jack Palance plays the hard-bitten lieutenant forced into a suicide attack by the cowardice of his commanding officer, played by Eddie Albert (in real life a decorated war hero). The standard outcome of such standard B-movies was then to have the unit's coward redeem himself at the last minute and usually die in the process. Albert's character stayed a coward and didn't die either. The US Army didn't like the script and withdrew technical support, which is why the film is so short of tanks, planes and artillery. The director was Robert Aldrich, later to go on to make two of the most frank and cynical war movies ever made, The Dirty Dozen & Ulzana's Raid.

Famous for its Apocalypse Now-style production problems. Filmed in then-Czechoslovakia where the then Communist government offered up a whole town (due to be cleared to make way for a strip mine) for cinematic destruction. But halfway through shooting the Russian army invaded to remove reformist president Alexander Dubcek. George Segal and Robert Vaughn give career best performances, but it also marks the moment when US war films moved beyond action-adventure and into a darker realm. The capture of the Remagen Bridge in 1945 was a magnificent feat of arms by the US Army. But in the film account the troops are slovenly, often fearful thugs, slanging and striking their officers, robbing corpses and killing children. It's not really about World War II at all, but about how many Americans saw the Vietnam War. The Bridge at Remagen is out of time, set in 1945 but made in 1968, the year of the Tet Offensive, when the US realised that Vietnam was a lost war. It shows.

A useful corrective to the cinematic stereotype of the traumatised war veteran. Rambo: First Blood, is a straight down the line remake of the 1946 classic The Courage of Lassie. Sylvester Stallone takes over the role of Lassie, traumatised by war service in the Pacific, who returns home and seeks refuge in the mountainous north-western US only to fall foul of a cruel local policeman. Lassie uses all her combat skills to evade the pursuing cops, but it takes the intervention of the soldier who trained her to save her from unjust punishment at the hands of the bad sheriff. The key difference between Rambo: First Blood and The Courage of Lassie, is the hero's not a dog (um…); the war he returns from is Vietnam, not World War II; Elizabeth Taylor. Courage of Lassie's writer Lionel Houser truly deserves a Screenwriters Guild 'original story by' credit for this epic. Not that he'd probably want it.