War film
It broke the record takings for a Japanese live action film, and won the Golden Mulberry at the Udine Far East Film Festival, but was criticised for its nationalistic sympathy with kamikaze pilots.

Subgenres: 

Documentary: The wartime authorities in both Britain and America produced a wide variety of documentary films. Their purposes included military training, advice to civilians, and encouragement to maintain security. Since these films often carried messages, they grade into propaganda. Similarly, commercially produced films often combined information, support for the war effort, and a degree of propaganda. Newsreels, ostensibly simply for information, were made in both Allied and Axis countries, and were often dramatised. More recently, in the Iran–Iraq War, Morteza Avini's Ravayat-e Fath (Chronicles of Victory) television series combined front-line footage with commentary.

Propaganda: Sergei Eisenstein's 1938 historical drama Alexander Nevsky depicts Prince Alexander's defeat of the attempted invasion of the Russian city of Novgorod by the Teutonic Knights. By April 1939 the film had been seen by 23,000,000 people. In 1941 the director and three others were awarded the Stalin Prize for their contributions. The film features a musical score by the classical composer Sergei Prokofiev, considered by artists such as the composer André Previn the best ever written for cinema. Russell Merritt, writing in Film Quarterly, describes it as a "war propaganda film". A 1978 Mondadori poll placed Alexander Nevsky among the world's 100 best motion pictures.

During the Second World War, film propaganda was widely used. Kenneth Clark advised the British government that "If we renounced interest in entertainment as such, we might be deprived of a valuable weapon for getting across our propaganda"; he suggested using documentaries about the war and the war effort; celebrations of Britishness; and films about British life and character. Michael Powell and Clark agreed on a story about survivors of a U-boat crew, imbued with brutal Nazi ideology, travelling across Canada and meeting various kind, tolerant and intelligent Canadians, to encourage America into the war. The resulting film, 49th Parallel (1941), became the top film at British offices that year. Entertaining films could carry messages about the need for vigilance, too, as in Went the Day Well? (1942) or the avoidance of "careless talk", as in The Next of Kin (1942).

In America, Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940) clearly satirised fascism. Michael Curtiz's Casablanca (1943) was not simply a romance between the characters played by Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, but vilified the Nazis and glorified resistance to them. Frank Capra's Why We Fight series (1942–1945) won the 1942 Academy Award for best documentary, though it was designed to "influence opinion in the U.S. military".
During the Cold War, "propaganda played as much of a role in the United States' struggle with the Soviet Union as did the billions of dollars spent on weaponry." Face to Face with Communism (1951) dramatised an imagined invasion of the United States; other films portrayed threats such as communist indoctrination.

Submarine: Submarine films have their own particular meanings and conventions, concerned specifically with giving the effect of submarine warfare. A distinctive element in this subgenre is the soundtrack, which attempts to bring home the emotional and dramatic nature of conflict under the sea. For example, in Wolfgang Petersen's 1981 Das Boot, the sound design works together with the hours-long film format to depict lengthy pursuit with depth charges, the ping of sonar, and threatening sounds such as of the propellers of enemy destroyers and torpedoes. Classic films in the genre include The Enemy Below (1957) and Run Silent, Run Deep (1958), both based on novels by naval commanders. Run Silent, Run Deep is a movie full of tension, both with the enemy and between the contrasting personalities of the submarine Commander and his Lieutenant, played by Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster.

Prisoner of war: A popular subgenre of war films in the 1950s and 1960s was the prisoner of war film. The genre was popularised in Britain with major films like Guy Hamilton's The Colditz Story (1955) and John Sturges's American film The Great Escape (1963). They told stories of real escapes from German prisoner of war camps such as Stalag Luft III in the Second World War. Despite episodes of danger and human tragedy, these films delight in a continual boyish game of escape and ingenuity, celebrating the courage and the defiant spirit of the prisoners of war, and treating war as fun. David Lean's Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) was judged best picture at the Oscars; it took the genre from chilly German prisons to the heat of a camp in Thailand. It was the first, too, to use lush colour to bring out the British stiff upper lip of the colonel, played by Alec Guinness in an Oscar-winning performance. The "definitive" Oscar-winning prisoner of war film was Billy Wilder's Stalag 17 (1953), while the brief but powerful prison camp scenes of The Deer Hunter (1978) lend an air of tragedy to the whole of that film.

Comedy: Charlie Chaplin's Shoulder Arms (1918) set a style for war films to come, and was the first comedy about war in film history.
British cinema in the Second World War marked the evacuation of children from London with social comedies such as Those Kids from Town (1942) where the evacuees go to stay with an earl, while in Cottage to Let (1941) and Went the Day Well? (1942) the English countryside is thick with spies. Gasbags (1941) offered "zany, irreverent, knockabout" comedy making fun of everything from barrage balloons to concentration camps. Abbott and Costello's Buck Privates (1941) was successful in America, leading to many further wartime comedies.

Animated: Winsor McCay's The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918) was a silent First World War film. At 12 minutes long, it was the longest animated film made at that time. It was probably the first animated propaganda film to be made; it remains the earliest serious animated drama that has survived. Through World War II, animated propaganda shorts remained influential in American cinema. The Walt Disney Company, working with the American armed forces, produced 400,000 feet of war propaganda films between 1942 and 1945, including Der Fuehrer's Face (1943) and Education for Death (1943).
Japanese anime films from the 1960s onwards addressed national memories of war. Akira (1988) moves from the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to apocalyptic visions of global conflict; Grave of the Fireflies (1988) is elegiac on the effect of war on children. Barefoot Gen (1983) portrays the bombing of Hiroshima through the eyes of a child, but reviewers consider it a less well made film than Grave of the Fireflies with "stomach-churning detail" bizarrely paired with crude artwork, giving it the look of a "Saturday morning Warner Brothers cartoon".

Anti-war: The anti-war genre began with films about the First World War. Films in the genre are typically revisionist, reflecting on past events and often generically blended. Lewis Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) was unquestionably powerful, and an early anti-war film, portraying a German point of view; it was the first film (in any genre) to win two Oscars, best picture and best director. Andrew Kelly, analysing All Quiet on the Western Front, defined the genre as showing: the brutality of war; the amount of human suffering; the betrayal of men's trust by incompetent officers. War and anti-war films often prove difficult to categorize as they contain many generic ambiguities. While many anti-war films criticize war directly through depictions of grisly combat in past wars, some films such as Penn's Alice's Restaurant criticized war obliquely by poking fun at such things as the draft board. The number of anti-war films produced in America dipped sharply during the 1950s because of McCarthyism and the Hollywood blacklist. The end of the blacklist and the introduction of the MPAA rating system marked a time of resurgence for films of all type including anti-war films in the States. Robert Eberwein names two films as anti-war classics. The first is Jean Renoir's  prisoner of war masterpiece La Grande Illusion (The Grand Illusion, 1937). Renoir's critique of contemporary politics and ideology celebrates the universal humanity that transcends national and racial boundaries and radical nationalism, suggesting that mankind's common experiences should prevail above political division, and its extension: war. The second is Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory (1957). The critic David Ehrenstein writes that Paths of Glory established Kubrick as the "leading commercial filmmaker of his generation" and a world-class talent. Ehrenstein describes the film as an "outwardly cool/inwardly passionate protest drama about a disastrous French army maneuver and the court-martial held in its wake", contrasting it with the "classic" All Quiet on the Western Front's story of an innocent "unstrung by the horrors of war".