Broadly speaking, Hollywood makes war movies for two reasons that aren't profit-related (which we take as a given): to give the audience the slightest inkling of what actual battle is like (the closest most of us come is our biannual paintball game), and to commemorate the sacrifices our fighting men and women make, both on the battlefield and at home.

But every "best of" list of war movies inevitably includes a rotating group for the 20 or so everybody has already seen. I'd be a fool to argue against including Apocalypse Now or The Great Escape in any overall ranking, but there are thousands of war movies out there, many unknown to a wider audience.

So consider these an alternative to your annual AMC Midway - Saving Private Ryan - Platoon marathon.

The Boys in Company C (1978) Lost amidst the late '70s punch of The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now and predating Full Metal Jacket by almost ten years (with a plot similar to both the Kubrick film and Victory, which came out three years later). It also stars a pre-Night Eyes Andrew Stevens, for those fond of Shannon Tweed movies.

Year at Danger (2008) Steve Metze, then a major in the National Guard, created this documentary about his deployment at Forward Operating Base "Danger" in Tikrit, Iraq, in 2005. It offers unfiltered, uncensored coverage of the day-to-day life of a combat soldier, from the often excruciating boredom to the terror of frequent mortar and rocket attacks. In this day of sanitized media coverage and "pool" journalism, you're probably never going to see a chronicle this raw and uncensored.

Come and See (Idi i smotri) (1985) I won't lie and say you'll come away from this feeling warm and fuzzy about mankind. It is, nonetheless, a "plea for peace," as described by writer (and former Byelorussian partisan) Ales Adamovich.