Where do our ideas about war come from?

Films of course. Books and lectures can explain the reasons, the victories and the defeats, and they can even the list the names of the dead, but it's films that provide the images that linger; it's films that help us decide whether a war was just or right or a terrible waste because it is only films that can show war as if it were real.

The First World war is a good example. This year, there have been events to mark the centenary of the beginning of the conflict, but will they ever be as strong in the popular imagination as the images from the greatest First World War films? The buffoonish officers in Oh! What A Lovely War; the sight of the broken soldiers in Regeneration, which is set at Craiglockhart hospital in Edinburgh; the shot of the butterfly landing on the skull in All Quiet On The Western Front.

This month, to mark the centenary, the Kirkcaldy Film Festival is showing a short selection of First World War films, including Stanley Kubrick's Paths Of Glory and Le Grande Illusion, Jean Renoir's call for an end to the national barriers that cause war. Ahead of the screenings, I've chosen what I consider the 10 greatest First World War films. Some are in black in white, some are in colour, some use sound, some are silent. But they all have the same message: they all speak out against war in the most powerful way imaginable.

Paths Of Glory (1957)

The most extraordinary scene in this film (one of the first directed by Stanley Kubrick) is the opening one. We move up through a trench; the men, mud on their faces, part to let us through and we see Kirk Douglas, a French officer who has been ordered to select three privates for court martial. It was a true story because every country shot their own men as well as the enemy; in Britain's case, 3000 men were sentenced to death in courts martial between 1914 and 1920. Paths Of Glory is about what happens when men fight for their country but their country turns against them.

All Quiet On The Western Front (1930)

A group of German soldiers rest beside a lake before moving up to the front. They start talking about why wars start and one of the soldiers, Albert Kropp, tells the others what he thinks. "I think it's a kind of fever," he says. "Nobody wants it in particular, and then all at once, there it is. We didn't want it. The English didn't want it. And here we are fighting." Historians still argue about why the First World War started, but Private Kropp's theory is as good as any.

Regeneration (1997)

The First World War was the first in which doctors began to understand what fighting can do to the human body, and one of the great pioneers in the field was the psychiatrist WHR Rivers, who did much of his work at Craiglockhart in Edinburgh. Regeneration, based on the novel by Pat Barker, is the story of Rivers but it's also the story of a young soldier called Billy Prior and other men like him who were shredded, shaken and broken by the fighting.

Shoulder Arms (1918)

The first ever First World War film, and it's a comedy. That might surprise you, but it shouldn't because black humour has always helped soldiers cope, then as it does now. The film stars Charlie Chaplin, a controversial figure at the time because of claims that he avoided joining up, but it's a marvellous send-up of military formality and convention. And because it's Chaplin, there's pathos too, especially in the scene in which he watches a soldier read a letter from home.

La Grande Illusion (1937)

The Nazis banned this film in the 1930s because they were scared of it: they knew its anti-war message was powerful and that audiences might realise the truth of its final words: "frontiers were invented by men, not by nature". It's the story of the friendships between several French prisoners of war and their German captors and their gradual realisation of how much they have in common with each other: the same appeal to common manhood that Kier Hardie made at an anti-war rally in 1914. "You have no quarrel with Germany," said Hardie. "The quarrel is between the ruling classes of Europe."

Oh! What A Lovely War (1969)

More than any other, this was the film that changed our view of the war and cemented the idea of lions led by donkeys. That view is itself now being reappraised, but we can still enjoy the songs of the First World War: the songs sung to inspire and to reassure and the songs sung to recruit and remind the soldiers of home. Fledgling director Richard Attenborough ensured that almost every big star of the 1960s is present, including Laurence Olivier, John Mills, Maggie Smith and John Gielgud.

Johnny Got His Gun (1971)

The story of a young American soldier who is terribly injured in the trenches: he loses his arms, his legs and, most awful of all, he loses his ears, eyes, mouth and nose. The mind is still there though and it wanders back to the time before the war. "I don't know whether I'm alive and dreaming," he says, "or dead and remembering." Not an easy film to watch, but then films about war shouldn't be.

A Very Long Engagement (2004)

The French lost 1,357,000 men in the First World War, and this is a film about their mothers and fathers, brothers and lovers and the effect of conflict and death on them. Audrey Tautou plays a woman whose fiancé appears to have been killed in the Battle of the Somme, but she refuses to accept it and goes on searching for him long after others start believing she should face the truth.

The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp (1943)

An unusual war film because it tackles the Boer War, the First World War and the Second, and one man who sees action in them all: Major-General Clive Wynne-Candy, played by Roger Livesey. Wynne-Candy is a blustering old fool but he's likeable and, in portraying his relationship with his German best friend, the film also makes the Germans likeable too. This was so unthinkable at the time that Winston Churchill tried to have the film scrapped before it was even made. Fortunately, he failed, which leaves us with a great war movie that is not so much an anti-war film as a pro-human one.

Journey's End (1930)

This version of the great stage play was directed by the master of horror James Whale (Frankenstein, The Invisible Man) but it is not ghoulish or bloody; in fact, it is the one of the most subtle war films ever made. The story of a small group of British officers also feels authentic, probably because it was written by someone who was there: RC Sherriff, who was wounded at Passchendaele. Sherriff wanted to write about the relationship between men who serve together. "I love that fellow," says one of the soldiers of another. "I'd go to hell with him."

Paths Of Glory is showing at the Adam Smith Theatre as part of the Kirkcaldy Film Festival on Friday at 10am; La Grande Illusion next Sunday at 1pm; and Regeneration next Sunday at 4pm. Mark Smith will discuss First World War films with Sunday Herald arts editor Alan Morrison immediately after the screening of La Grande Illusion. For more information on Kirkcaldy Film Festival, visit www.onfife.com/creation/kirkcaldy-film-festival-2014