Closely Watched Trains (1966)

Proof that a war film can be funny, sexy and devastating all at once. Jiří Menzel adapts Bohumil Hrabal's novella about Miloš, a shy apprentice train dispatcher at a sleepy station in German-occupied Czechoslovakia, more worried about his love life than the resistance going on around him. It is one of the best-known films of the Czechoslovak New Wave, and its deadpan humor about small-town officials and bureaucratic absurdity says as much about life under occupation as any battle scene. The ending lands like a slap.