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The Most Exciting WWII Movie of 2026 Gets a Tense New Look Ahead of May 29 Release

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War movies often focus on the chaos of battle itself, but some of the most fascinating stories surrounding World War 2 happened long before soldiers ever reached the battlefield. Massive historical moments are usually remembered through explosions, invasions, and speeches, yet many of those decisions were shaped quietly behind closed doors by people forced to make impossible calls with incomplete information and enormous consequences.

That tension sits at the center of the upcoming historical drama Pressure. As part of Collider’s Summer Preview Event, we’re thrilled to exclusively reveal a new image from the movie featuring Damian Lewis as famed British military commander Bernard Montgomery. Set during the critical 72 hours leading up to D-Day, Pressure follows General Dwight D. Eisenhower and meteorologist Captain James Stagg as they grapple with whether to proceed with the largest seaborne invasion in history despite catastrophic weather conditions threatening the Allied operation.













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Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz
Which Oscar Best Picture
Is Your Perfect Movie?

Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
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Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.

🪜Parasite

🌀Everything Everywhere

☢️Oppenheimer

🐦Birdman

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🪙No Country for Old Men

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01

What kind of film experience do you actually want?
The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.





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02

Which idea grabs you most in a film?
Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?





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03

How do you like your story told?
Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.





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04

What makes a truly great antagonist?
The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?





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05

What do you want from a film’s ending?
The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?





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06

Which setting pulls you in most?
Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.





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07

What cinematic craft impresses you most?
Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.





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08

What kind of main character do you root for?
The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.





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09

How do you feel about a film that takes its time?
Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.





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10

What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema?
The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?





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The Academy Has Decided
Your Perfect Film Is…

Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.

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Parasite

You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.

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Everything Everywhere All at Once

You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.

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Oppenheimer

You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.

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Birdman

You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.

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No Country for Old Men

You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.

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‘Pressure’ Explores the Decision That Changed World War 2

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Directed by Hotel Mumbai filmmaker Anthony Maras, Pressure stars Andrew Scott as Captain James Stagg alongside Brendan Fraser as General Dwight D. Eisenhower, with Lewis portraying Bernard Montgomery. Kerry Condon, Chris Messina, and Con O’Neill round out the supporting cast. According to the movie’s official description, Eisenhower and Stagg are forced to decide whether to launch the invasion despite catastrophic weather risks or delay the operation and potentially change the course of the war entirely… and likely for the worse.

That setup immediately gives Pressure a compelling identity within the WW2 genre. Instead of centering its tension around combat itself, the movie is more interested in the agonizing uncertainty beforehand. Everything reportedly hinges on whether Stagg can accurately predict a narrow break in the weather before time runs out. A failed forecast could have devastated the invasion before troops ever reached Normandy, leaving military leadership trapped between two potentially catastrophic choices while the clock steadily moved toward D-Day. The material also feels especially well-suited to Maras as a filmmaker. Hotel Mumbai worked because of how effectively it sustained anxiety and momentum inside contained spaces, and Pressure appears positioned to channel that same sense of mounting dread into a very different historical setting.

Pressure arrives in theaters on May 29, 2026. Stay tuned to Collider throughout the week as our Summer Preview Event continues with exclusive looks at some of the biggest upcoming movies of the season.


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Release Date

May 29, 2026

Runtime
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90 Minutes

Director

Anthony Maras

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