September is the last full month to stream some great war movies, military dramas and veteran stories before they disappear from major streaming services.
The month’s departing titles range from a recent Afghanistan war movie and a road trip involving an Army Ranger and military working dog to World War II classics, resistance stories and a few military-adjacent action movies. Most remain available through Sept. 30, so there is still time to catch them before October reshuffles the streaming libraries again.
1. ‘Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant’ (2023)
Streaming on: Hulu
Watch by: Sept. 14.
Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant arrived two years after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan with a story built around one of the war’s lingering promises. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Army Special Forces Master Sgt. John Kinley, whose unit is ambushed while searching for Taliban weapons. Kinley is badly wounded, leaving his Afghan interpreter, Ahmed, played by Dar Salim, to drag him across miles of hostile territory while Taliban fighters hunt them.
The movie is fictional, but the predicament behind it isn’t. Thousands of Afghan interpreters and other partners who worked alongside American troops sought Special Immigrant Visas and other pathways to the United States following the war.
That real history gives Ritchie’s movie considerably more weight than the standard behind-enemy-lines rescue thriller.
Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant leaves Hulu on Sept. 15.
2. ‘Dog’ (2022)
Streaming on: Hulu
Watch by: Sept. 14.
Channing Tatum’s Dog starts with a mission that sounds simple enough: Get a military working dog to her handler’s funeral.
Tatum plays Jackson Briggs, a former Army Ranger desperate to return to duty despite the lingering effects of a traumatic brain injury. His former commander agrees to help him get back into the fight if Briggs first drives Lulu, a Belgian Malinois who served with the Rangers, from Washington state to Arizona.
Lulu isn’t exactly thrilled about the arrangement. The resulting road trip has plenty of broad comedy, but Dog gradually turns its attention toward two veterans of war who are having trouble figuring out what comes next. Briggs is dealing with his injuries and the loss of fellow soldiers. Lulu has her own trauma after years of military service.
Tatum co-directed the movie with Reid Carolin, and the pair managed to make a military working dog movie without turning Lulu into a furry action-movie sidekick.
Dog leaves Hulu on Sept. 15.
3. ‘The Equalizer’ (2014)
Streaming on: Max
Watch by: Sept. 30.
Robert McCall would really like to be left alone. Unfortunately for a substantial number of criminals, that rarely happens.
Denzel Washington stars as McCall, a former Marine and Defense Intelligence Agency operative who has attempted to disappear into a quiet civilian life in Boston. When a young woman he befriends is brutalized by Russian gangsters, McCall decides retirement can wait.
Director Antoine Fuqua turns the premise into an old-fashioned vigilante thriller, but McCall’s military and intelligence background separates him from the typical action hero. He watches, calculates and dismantles a room before everyone else has figured out they’re in danger.
The movie also began an unusual chapter in Washington’s career. Despite decades as one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, he had never made a sequel before returning to McCall.
Max is scheduled to lose both of Washington’s first two Equalizer movies at the end of September.
4. ‘The Equalizer 2’ (2018)
Streaming on: Max
Watch by: Sept. 30.
If the first Equalizer is about Robert McCall trying to escape his old life, the sequel makes that increasingly impossible. McCall is now driving for Lyft and quietly helping people who cross his path. Then Susan Plummer, his longtime friend and former DIA colleague, is murdered while investigating a suspicious death in Brussels.
The trail leads McCall back into the intelligence world and toward people who know exactly what he is capable of because they were trained in the same world. Washington again teamed with Antoine Fuqua, making The Equalizer 2 the first sequel of his career. Their McCall would eventually return for a third movie in 2023.
For anyone who hasn’t watched the first two, September offers a convenient double feature before both disappear from Max.
The Equalizer 2 leaves Max on Oct. 1, making Sept. 30 the final day to stream it there.
5. ‘Europa Europa’ (1990)
Streaming on: Max
Watch by: Sept. 30.
Agnieszka Holland’s Europa Europa is based on the life of Solomon Perel, a German Jewish teenager who survived the Holocaust by concealing his identity. His extraordinary journey eventually placed him inside a Hitler Youth school while the Nazi regime was systematically murdering Europe’s Jewish population.
Marco Hofschneider plays Perel, whose survival increasingly depends on maintaining a lie that could get him killed the moment it is exposed. The movie won the Golden Globe for best foreign-language film and earned Holland an Academy Award nomination for adapted screenplay.
For viewers who have exhausted the usual rotation of World War II combat movies, Europa Europa approaches the war from a radically different perspective. It is scheduled to leave Max after Sept. 30.
6. ‘Rome, Open City’ (1945)
Streaming on: Max
Watch by: Sept. 30.
Roberto Rossellini didn’t have to look far for the ruins in Rome, Open City. Production began shortly after Allied forces liberated Rome in 1944, while World War II was still being fought. Rossellini used the battered city itself as the setting for a story about resistance members living under German occupation.
The movie follows several Romans connected to the underground resistance as Nazi authorities attempt to break the network. Aldo Fabrizi plays a Catholic priest aiding the resistance, while Anna Magnani gives the film its most famous performance.
Rome, Open City became one of the foundational works of Italian neorealism and remains an unusual cinematic document of the war because the world it depicts had barely become history when cameras started rolling.
Eighty years later, it remains one of the most important World War II movies ever made. Rome, Open City is scheduled to leave Max after Sept. 30.
7. ‘Seven Samurai’ (1954)
Streaming on: Max
Watch by: Sept. 30.
There are no American troops, World War II battlefields or modern military hardware in Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. There is, however, a mission, a defensive plan, a recruited fighting force and a village preparing for an attack.
The setup has been copied so many times that even viewers who have never watched Seven Samurai probably know it.
A farming village threatened by bandits recruits seven masterless samurai to defend it. The warriors train the villagers, construct defenses, study the terrain and prepare for an enemy they know is coming.
Kurosawa turned that simple premise into one of cinema’s great combat movies. Its DNA can be found everywhere from The Magnificent Seven, which transplanted the story into the American West, to decades of movies about assembling a team for an impossible mission.
It is long, running well over three hours, so don’t save this one for 10 p.m. on Sept. 30.
Seven Samurai is scheduled to leave Max at the end of September.
8. ‘Night and Fog’ (1956)
Streaming on: Max
Watch by: Sept. 30.
At just over 30 minutes, Night and Fog is by far the shortest movie on this list. It may also be the hardest to watch.
Director Alain Resnais made the documentary only about a decade after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. He combined contemporary footage of the abandoned camps with wartime images and film documenting the Holocaust.
The result remains one of cinema’s earliest and most influential attempts to confront the machinery of Nazi mass murder. There is no fictional battlefield here and no action-movie distance between the viewer and what happened. Night and Fog belongs on a military and war viewing list because understanding World War II means understanding what Allied forces discovered as they advanced into Nazi-controlled Europe.
It is scheduled to leave Max after Sept. 30.
9. ‘Santa Fe Trail’ (1940)
Streaming on: Max
Watch by: Sept. 30.
Errol Flynn as J.E.B. Stuart. Ronald Reagan as George Armstrong Custer. Raymond Massey as abolitionist John Brown.
Historically accurate, Santa Fe Trail is not. Interesting as a piece of Hollywood’s version of American military history, however, it certainly is.
The movie follows fictionalized versions of West Point graduates Stuart and Custer as they become entangled in the conflict surrounding Brown in the years before the Civil War. Olivia de Havilland also stars.
Released in 1940, Santa Fe Trail says at least as much about how Hollywood once portrayed the antebellum United States as it does about the historical figures whose names it borrowed. Modern viewers should expect major distortions of Brown, slavery and the political crisis leading toward the Civil War.
For military movie fans, it is a fascinating artifact from an era when Hollywood had very different ideas about how American history should look on screen.
Santa Fe Trail is scheduled to leave Max after Sept. 30.
Streaming on: Hulu
Watch by: Sept. 8.
Every list deserves one movie whose title does most of the work. Sam Elliott plays Calvin Barr, an aging World War II veteran who has lived quietly for decades despite supposedly carrying out one of history’s most consequential secret missions: killing Adolf Hitler.
Apparently retirement isn’t going to stick. The government tracks Barr down because Bigfoot is real, living in the Canadian wilderness and carrying a disease that threatens humanity. Barr happens to be one of the few people capable of hunting it.
Writer-director Robert D. Krzykowski somehow takes that premise and makes a melancholy movie about memory, regret and an old veteran looking back at the life he sacrificed. Elliott is perfectly suited to it. He can sell the idea that this tired old man once killed Hitler and might still be capable of hunting Sasquatch without turning the entire thing into a joke.
The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot leaves Hulu on Sept. 9.
11. ‘The Chronicles of Riddick’ (2004)
Streaming on: Hulu
Watch by: Sept. 30.
Vin Diesel’s Riddick has never been particularly enthusiastic about following orders. That becomes useful when an army of religious conquerors called the Necromongers begins swallowing entire worlds.
The Chronicles of Riddick dramatically expanded the universe introduced in Pitch Black, turning its escaped convict protagonist into the center of a sprawling science-fiction war. Diesel is joined by Karl Urban, Thandiwe Newton, Colm Feore and Judi Dench. This is firmly the science-fiction entry on the list, but the movie is packed with armies, invasions, military hierarchies and a campaign of planetary conquest. It also belongs to the long tradition of science fiction borrowing the language and structure of military history to build wars on a much larger canvas.
The Chronicles of Riddick is scheduled to leave Hulu at the end of September.
12. ‘Conspiracy Theory’ (1997)
Streaming on: Hulu
Watch by: Sept. 30.
Mel Gibson spends much of Conspiracy Theory playing a man convinced that secret government operations are everywhere.
The problem is that he is right about at least one of them. Gibson plays New York cab driver Jerry Fletcher, whose obsessive conspiracy theories attract the attention of people connected to a covert intelligence program. Julia Roberts plays Justice Department attorney Alice Sutton, while Patrick Stewart appears as Dr. Jonas, a former CIA psychiatrist with an unsettling connection to Fletcher’s past.
Richard Donner directed the thriller, which arrived during the 1990s boom in movies about shadowy government agencies, secret experiments and intelligence operations operating outside public view. It isn’t a military movie in the traditional sense, but its CIA connections and covert-government storyline put it comfortably on the intelligence side of this list.
Conspiracy Theory is scheduled to leave Hulu after Sept. 30.
13. ‘The Professional’ (1994)
Streaming on: Hulu
Watch by: Sept. 30.
Jean Reno’s Léon isn’t a soldier. He is something considerably harder to put on a résumé. The professional assassin lives alone in New York City until a corrupt DEA agent, played with spectacular menace by Gary Oldman, murders the family living next door. Twelve-year-old Mathilda, played by Natalie Portman in her film debut, survives and turns to Léon for protection.
Luc Besson’s thriller isn’t a conventional military movie, which makes this the most military-adjacent selection here. But its weapons training, tactical action and professional-killer protagonist have helped make it a durable favorite among action audiences for more than 30 years. It is also worth watching simply to see Portman, Reno and Oldman collide long before two of them became fixtures of much larger Hollywood franchises.
The Professional is scheduled to leave Hulu after Sept. 30.
September gives viewers plenty of time for most of these movies, but not all of them. Anyone interested in Sam Elliott’s secret history as the man who killed Hitler and hunted Bigfoot should start there before Sept. 9. The Covenant and Dog follow on Sept. 15.
After that, the clock gets considerably more lax as the remaining movies stick around until the end of the month, making September a good excuse to revisit an old favorite, discover a war classic or finally find out how Denzel Washington manages to turn an ordinary hardware store into the worst possible place to pick a fight.
Just don’t wait until October.
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