This is easy: there are none.

In 1991 there was "The War that Never Ends," which has Ben Kingsley as Perikles, a BBC television production. It's...ok. There are zero movies about Alexander the Great which are not godawful and wholly inaccurate. Same for the Persian Wars. Historically-accurate scripts do not get green lights, about any topic in any period. Accuracy is boring in Hollywood.

Are there any movies that deal with the Peloponnesian War? I don't think so. Would be a great setting for a TV series, I think, but sadly no one has done anything with the concept. (Assassin's Creed Odyssey, a video game, takes place during the Peloponnesian War; see my lengthy series here.)

Movies that deal with Alexander the Great tend to be rubbish to mediocre; Oliver Stone's big film on Alexander, released multiple times as different cuts, is a hot mess of a movie, but probably comes closest to at least giving some idea of the life of Alexander. A key problem is that Stone tries to do a character study of a man about whose character we actually know very little. Hence, we get Alexander's mummy and daddy issues and they sort of detract from what's actually interesting about Alexander, which is mostly his military successes. Robin Lane Fox, who wrote a terrible book on Alexander, served as the movie's consultant, but the end result leaves much to be desired.

The Graeco-Persian Wars have been the subject of a few movies, most notably 300 (2006) and its sequel. Frank Miller, who wrote the graphic novel that the movie is based on, was himself inspired by the movie The 300 Spartans (1962). The graphic novel is moderately better than the film, if only because the movie portrays the Persians as even more monstrous than the book. There's loads to dissect here -- fortunately, I've already done that in an extensive review, so I'll refrain from doing that again here. The best lines in 300 ("Tonight we dine in hell", etc.) all come from Herodotus, so it has that going for it, at least.

For the most part, though, movies set in the ancient world tend to be less than historically accurate. The ones that are tolerable or sometimes even good are the ones based on mythology. I have a fondness for Troy (we did a podcast about that one). I also think the TV miniseries from 1997 based on the Odyssey (IMDB page) is actually a pretty good take on the Homeric poem; quite accurate with respect to the plot and not afraid to include the gods and more fantastical elements, too.

If you're interested in the ancient world on screen, there's some books I can recommend:

• Alastair Blanshard & Kim Shahabudin, Classics on Screen. Ancient Greece and Rome on Film (2011).
• Jon Solomon, The Ancient World in the Cinema (2001).
• Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Designs on the Past. How Hollywood Created the Ancient World (2018).

Blanshard & Shahabudin's book has a chapter dedicated to The 300 Spartans. There's also a chapter that deals with Disney's Hercules, which is a fun romp that I've also written about. In Solomon's book, the second chapter is dedicated to Greek and Roman history: it's telling that more pages are devoted to movies that deal with Roman history than Greek. Llewellyn-Jones's book is written from a design point of view, but if you've ever wondered why movies set in the ancient world look the way they do, this is worth checking out. (And perhaps unsurprisingly, that, too, is a subject I've written about!)

There's little else to say except that we're still waiting for the first movie set in ancient Greece that comes even close to being historically accurate.

Hello: I disagree with some of the others here who say there aren’t any - I’d recommend Alexander by Oliver Stone. As a movie it’s not great, the acting is a bit cheesy and the theatrical release was messy. But the directors cut isn’t as bad.

In terms of accuracy I think it’s as authentic and accurate as you’ll get: almost all of the major events from the movie are based on real episodes from Alexander’s life as described mainly from Plutarch, Curtis Rufus and Arrian. The events from Alexander’s life are portrayed relatively faithfully based on the historical accounts, from his childhood all the way through to his death. And the battle of Gaugamela I think is portrayed excellently. You see historically accurate formations exactly as they are described by Arrian, the costumes and armour worn are generally authentic. As for the scenes, setting etc. Almost all of the places you see in the movie are authentic, I particularly like seeing Babylon come to life.

So yeh - watch Alexander! Definitely recommended for historical authenticity and an admirable degree of historical accuracy - but watch the director’s cut as it’s not the best movie-wise.

Hi there anyone interested in recommending things to OP! While you might have a title to share, this is still a thread on /r/AskHistorians, and we still want the replies here to be to an /r/AskHistorians standard - presumably OP would have asked at /r/history or /r/askreddit if they wanted non-specialist opinion. So give us some indication why the thing you're recommending is valuable, trustworthy, or applicable! Posts that provide no context for why you're recommending a particular podcast/book/novel/documentary/etc, and which aren't backed up by a historian-level knowledge on the accuracy and stance of the piece, will be removed.

Here's the thing. What do we mean by 'accurate'? Are we wanting it to follow archaeological records, or historical accounts? If the former, whose version of the history do we want? Are we looking for something from Thucydides or Herodotus, or any of the other, less famous Greek historians.

Each historian could write about the same thing, and have different versions of what happened. Plutarch's life of Alexander is not the same as, say, Curtius Rufus'. The problem when you want to set a gold standard of 'accuracy' in historical film-making is that you then have to identify the gold standard of often conflicting accounts. And we simply cannot do that. Every historian embellishes, archaeological record is open to interpretation.

Accuracy simply wasn't something that necessarily bothered ancient authors either. Tacitus might say that 'some sources say', or Suetonius might quote rumour (his biography of Caligula is famous for it). Herodotus' Histories are a selection of stories he has been told, that he is now collating. Aeschylus writes about the Persian wars through the lens of tragedy, and Thucydides puts exposition in the mouth of Pericles that was not necessarily in a speech made by Pericles.

The question of accuracy is one that I ended up dealing with in every seminar of every film class I ever taught. The fundamental answer is that it's not important, because we can never know the 'truth' of what happened. So let's enjoy the film on its artistic merits, see where it draws from ancient evidence, and not obsess over the not chronologically accurate shield patterning on Soldier #23.