Paths of Glory (1957)

Watch it next for the camera. The long tracking shots that glide through the French trenches of 1916, first with a general inspecting his men and later alongside a doomed assault, are where Kubrick's moving camera becomes an argument in itself. Kirk Douglas plays the colonel defending three soldiers picked as scapegoats for a failed attack, and at 87 minutes the film is as lean as The Killing but far angrier. Its portrait of the French command was provocative enough that it was banned in France for more than fifteen years. Keep those trenches in mind: Full Metal Jacket answers them three decades later.