A stirring Civil War drama with real emotional force, strong performances, and memorable battle staging. It does lean into uplift and sentiment, and its perspective is shaped by a late-80s mainstream approach, but the film’s sincerity, scale, and central performances make it enduringly effective.
73% ★★★★☆ (238,317)
Glory
Where to watch: fuboTV
Movie · Drama · History · R
1989 · 2h 2m · ★ 73% (238.3K)
Their innocence. Their heritage. Their lives.
Director: Edward Zwick
Starring: Matthew Broderick, Denzel Washington, Cary Elwes
Overview
Robert Gould Shaw leads the US Civil War's first all-black volunteer company, fighting prejudices of both his own Union army and the Confederates.
Director
Edward Zwick
Production
Freddie Fields Productions, TriStar Pictures
Cast
Matthew Broderick, Denzel Washington, Cary Elwes, Morgan Freeman, Jihmi Kennedy, Andre Braugher, John Finn, Donovan Leitch, JD Cullum, Bob Gunton, Cliff DeYoung, Christian Baskous, RonReaco Lee, Jay O. Sanders, Alan North, Richard Riehle, Peter Michael Goetz, Mark Margolis, Jane Alexander, Paul Desmond
Where to watch
fuboTV, MGM Plus, Philo
Curator Review
Verdict
A stirring Civil War drama with real emotional force, strong performances, and memorable battle staging. It does lean into uplift and sentiment, and its perspective is shaped by a late-80s mainstream approach, but the film’s sincerity, scale, and central performances make it enduringly effective.
Best for
Viewers who like classical war dramas with strong emotional payoff
Fans of historical epics and battlefield spectacle
Audiences interested in Civil War stories and American history
People who appreciate powerful ensemble acting and rousing scores
Skip if
You want a modern, more explicitly Black-centered historical perspective
You dislike sentimental, inspirational war movies
You prefer restrained realism over sweeping melodrama
You’re sensitive to older prestige-film framing that can feel dated
Overview
Glory is one of those prestige war dramas that knows exactly how to make an audience feel the weight of history. It builds its emotional power through discipline, camaraderie, and the gradual hardening of men who are asked to fight for a country that barely recognizes them. The performances are a major reason it works: the film gives the 54th Massachusetts real presence, and the battlefield scenes have a scale and clarity that still land hard.
Worth noting
What keeps Glory from feeling like a museum piece is the tension between its rousing form and its harsher subject. It is undeniably sentimental, and its point of view is shaped by the conventions of late-80s Hollywood, but that doesn’t erase the conviction behind it. The movie wants to honor sacrifice without pretending sacrifice was clean or simple.
Bottom line
Seen now, it can feel both moving and somewhat of its era. Even so, it remains a powerful entry in the Civil War canon: emotionally direct, technically assured, and anchored by performances that give the story weight beyond its familiar inspirational framework.
Top Letterboxd reviews
Will Menaker (4★) · 955 likes
Not going to lie, I don't think any movie makes me tear up as much this one. It wrings it out of me with it's big, cornball sentimentality and sweeping, swelling music, but I'll be damned if it isn't appropriate and I won't hear any slander of this movie from the baby-brained that it's some kind of simple "white savior" narrative. I watched this after 'The Battle of Algiers' because I'm interested in the idea that this movie is not… more
matt lynch (4★) · 599 likes
This is a fascinating work that of course probably couldn't live up to contemporary representational semiotics but for 1989 it's incredibly complicated and thorny without sacrificing simple melodrama. It's also packed with truly elaborate spectacle and tremendous performances. Good movie, quite Ford-ian in its way.
Sally Jane Black · 465 likes
Even Roger Ebert knew this was racist, apparently. There's arguments that anti-white supremacist arguments should pander to white sensibilities, that white people listen better when we have it sugarcoated for us. Maybe this is true. Maybe I've only ever learned when being coddled, but it has never felt that way. Every epiphany I've had about my own privilege or about racism has felt painful. This film is not painful to watch. This film is not excoriating of whiteness. This film
Matt! (4★) · 371 likes
My favorite thing about movies that depict this era of warfare? Guys giving inspirational speeches to seas of hundreds and hundreds of men which in real life occurred next to battlefields filled with cannon fire and thus would’ve ended up sounding more like the adults from the Peanuts cartoons. A super sappy drama and one of the biggest ever culprits of overly sentimental music manipulation also happens to be one of the most powerful war films of the last