War dramas and thrillers are plenty, but what about films based on the people who harvest the stories of war so that one day they might be told on the silver screen? What about journalists?
Arguably just as interesting, journalists risk their lives traveling to war zones to ensure the world is made aware of conflicts happening in the most austere corners of the globe, and what motivates them to dedicate themselves to truth is often fascinating. Here are some of the best movies about war correspondents and what makes them so effective.
A Private War (2018)
Based on the life of Sunday Times reporter Marie Colvin, A Private War follows Marie (Rosamund Pike) throughout her career and explores how her time in the field makes it increasingly difficult to exist in her everyday life, a London life unexpectedly filled with luxury and La Perla lingerie. Beginning with a trip to Sri Lanka that results in the loss of her eye, the film explores the intersection of Marie’s addiction to the adrenaline of the front lines and her PTSD, which she’s diagnosed with after her injury—her private war. And it’s this war, this obsession with pushing as far as possible, that ultimately encompasses her life.
Like most of the movies on this list, A Private War is a psychological study on the paradoxical minds of foreign correspondents. In Marie’s case, despite the absolute horrors she witnesses while reporting, she struggles with alcoholism that only seems to flare up when she’s furthest from the shelling and gunfire and blood.
A quip in the film captures it perfectly: “There are old journalists, and there are bold journalists, but there are no old, bold journalists.” And the entirety of this film serves as proof that Marie sided with the bold. It’s moving to witness the way this kind of work can unravel even the most seemingly composed.
The Bang Bang Club (2010)
The Bang Bang Club carries a similar tone to A Private War. However, this film takes a look at what war reporting does to a group of friends.
Following famous war journalists and photographers Greg Marinovich (Ryan Phillippe), Kevin Carter (Taylor Kitsch), Ken Oosterbroek (Frank Rautenbach), and João Silva (Neels Van Jaarsveld) as they cover the apartheid period in South Africa, The Bang Bang Club is based on a book written by the two surviving members of the club. The self-given nickname comes from the fact that the young men were always chasing “bang bang” or gunfire, of which there is plenty in the film, and it haunts them for the rest of their lives.
What’s great about The Bang Bang Club is seeing the different ways the effects of war reporting play out among a group. We witness death in the field, but in this film, we also get to see the consequences years after the initial events of apartheid. We get to watch the surviving members play their odds and weigh the weight of their mortality.
Despite each man being marked with that same paradoxical thought process as Marie Colvin—feeling alive when most proximate to death—time begins to separate the old and the bold. The survivors are left measuring the impact of their work against the loss of their friends.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (2016)
Based on The Taliban Shuffle, the 2010 memoir written by U.S. journalist Kim Barker, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot examines the experience of reporting in Afghanistan through the lens of levity.
It follows Kim (Tina Fey), a young woman bored with the mundanity of her life, as she accepts a temporary assignment in Kabul covering Operation Enduring Freedom, much to the chagrin of her boyfriend Chris, just to shake things up. While abroad her relationship unravels when Chris has an affair, and by the time Kim stops to come up for air, she’s been in the Middle East for years.
Much of the film chronicles Kim’s clumsy baptism by fire into the world of war reporting, including living with reporters from all around the world in a designated housing compound that might as well be a frat house. It’s an intoxicating world that pulls you in as the viewer just as much as it does Kim, but beneath that, the same thematic underpinnings found in A Private War and The Bang Bang Club are still present.
Kim’s fixer, a young local man who serves as the driver and translator helping her navigate Kabul safely, tells her that he used to work treating people who were addicted to opiates before the war. He tells Kim that he sees them in her—danger is equally addicting. When one of her closest friends narrowly survives a kidnapping and her reporting inadvertently results in a marine losing both of his legs to an IED, Kim returns home for safer domestic assignments. As it seems to go in this field, the lifestyle cannot last if she wants to live.
Which leads to the last film worth mentioning, Alex Garland and A24’s most recent collaboration: Civil War. Perhaps incorrectly marketed as a blockbusting take on what the near future of the politically fractured United States might hold, Civil War is really not about a civil war at all—it’s a love letter to war reporters. And while it’s not based on a true story like any of the preceding films, it’s an absolutely guttural depiction of conflict reporting that also examines the morality of the art form.
Civil War (2024)
Civil War follows battled-tested photographer Lee (Kirsten Dunst) and journalist Joel (Wagner Moura) as they plan to sneak into Washington, D.C. to cover the fall of the capital to the Western Forces, an alliance between Texas and California, intentionally created by Garland to ensure the war at hand has nothing to do with the real politics of today. However, their careful plans are thrown to the wayside when Lee agrees to give a ride to Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), a veteran journalist on what’s likely his last reporting trip, and Joel to Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), an aspiring photographer who’s never seen any real action.
Jessie insists there is nothing in life she wants more than this, while Lee, jaded from how no one has heeded the violent warnings of all the foreign wars she’s covered before, tries to show the girl how there isn’t life in this line of work. Sammy and Joel strive to be voices of reason, reminding Lee that Jessie is so similar to who she was when she was young and green. What follows is a brutal yet beautiful education for Jessie at the reluctant hands of Lee.
No matter which you choose, each of these films sinks into the morality of what it means to document violence. They examine the impact of media coverage, if there is any, and the reasons the world demands to be kept abreast of war. As much as they are a reflection of war reporters, these movies are also mirrors. Mirrors that force us to look at ourselves, the very individuals who create the demand for more reporting.
