Private Ryan was good, I think Band of Brothers was better: it lacked the pathos that Spielberg could not escape to throw in at the end, else was made with the same technical craftsmanship and is quite realistic, I assume, at least it is uncompromingly brutal. Also, their cast was a winner, very believably they borught their characters to life.
Completley different, more a meditation of the light and darkness in life, was The Thin Red Line by Terrence Malick. That one really went through and into me like a bullet.
The old black and white German movie Die Brücke, bei Bernhard Wicki. Looks today as if it fell out of time, but still gets its message across.
I think one should at least differentiate between movies on war, which necessarily cannot be any comfortable, and (often adventure) movies whose plot takes place in times of a war. What an anti-war movie should be, I never really understood, although it took me some time to realise that lacking understanding of mine.
When I was young I saw sometimes quite good blakc and white Sovjet movies on the big war, in West Berin we had good receiving possibilties for GDR TV that boradcasted the originals, mostly in Russian sound with German subtitles. Some of them really were very good and poetic, not the propaganda broadside that ioen woudl expect when heareing "Sovjet movies". The Russians and Czechs made quite some good movies that I remember. My pity is I do not remember the titles. - Of course, like in Hollywood there also was a lot of shallow, stereotypical propaganda stuff produced in the USSR. I often switched off or changed the channel as well. But some Russian war movies really were good, fragile, humane. If only I would know those titles. Three or four movies on my mind. I fear they are lost in time to me.