Best movies like City of Pirates
Last updated March 2024
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Plot Summary:
A surreal odyssey in which a melancholic maidservant crosses paths with a homicidal little boy, travels to a tiny island of pirates and encounters a man with multiple personalities.
IMDB Rating: 7.3
IMDB Votes: 904
Genere: Adventure, Drama, Fantasy
Country: France, Portugal
Duration: 111 min
Plot tags: surreal, rough, suspenseful, disturbing
Best tv shows and movies like City of Pirates (1983):
Similar in 81%
Life Is a Dream (1986)
Plot Summary:
A baroque mix of revolutionary politics, pop culture and semiotics loosely based on the play by Pedro Calderón de la Barca. A young prince learns that life is just a dream from which we wake when we die. And that dreams may be as real as life.
IMDB Rating: 7.1
IMDB Votes: 123
Genere: Drama, Fantasy
Country: France
Duration: 103 min
Plot tags: spiritual, baroque
Similar in 79%
Fado, Major and Minor (1994)
Plot Summary:
Pierre, a middle-aged tourist guide, is the victim of a sudden failure : he does not recognize anything about him any longer. He goes back home and in his apartment he finds a mysterious young man who tells him he is here to avenge a young woman who has taken her own life. What share of responsibility does Pierre hold in this situation?.
IMDB Rating: 6.4
IMDB Votes: 55
Genere: Drama
Country: France, Portugal
Duration: 110 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 81%
Regime Without Bread (1985)
Plot Summary:
Régime sans pain, influenced by (Ruiz's) friend Jean Baudrillard (and calling) to mind grade-Z SF, grew out of a commission to direct a music video (featuring French cult rock duo of Angèle/Maimone). Ruiz offered a counterproposal that he direct several music videos rather than one; once this deal was made, he shot enough material to interconnect the various videos until he arrived at a feature.
IMDB Rating: 6.9
IMDB Votes: 38
Genere: Fantasy, Music, Musical
Country: France
Duration: 75 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 87%
The Golden Boat (1990)
Plot Summary:
Inspired in form by American police TV shows and soap operas, The Golden Boat is a madcap, surreal dash through the streets of New York city, telling the mysterious and often hilarious story of an aged street-person named Austin, a comically compulsive assassin, as he joins up with a young rock critic and philosophy student named Israel Williams. In the course of their adventures, Austin pursues his object of desire - a Mexican soap opera star - and along the way engages a host of TV characters and bit players, whose repartee range from gangsterish insults to the question of God's existence.
IMDB Rating: 6.2
IMDB Votes: 144
Genere: Adventure, Comedy, Crime, Fantasy
Country: USA, Belgium, Luxembourg, Hong Kong
Duration: 83 min
Plot tags: black comedy, parody, independent film, telenovela
Similar in 84%
Days in the Country (2004)
Plot Summary:
In a bar in Santiago, two old men talk over their past. This is a strange discussion. In fact, they talk of themselves as if they were dead. We don't know what is true or false, what is dream or reality.
IMDB Rating: 6.9
IMDB Votes: 154
Genere: Drama
Country: Chile, France
Duration: 89 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 87%
The Blind Owl (1987)
Plot Summary:
H., 35, an Arabian immigrant, works as projectionist in an old cinema. One day, drawn by the music, he looks through the window of the booth and is fascinated: the dancer he sees on the screen seems to be looking straight into his eyes. He falls in love with her, but the vision last only a moment. Shortly afterwards, an elderly man storms into the projection booth and claims he is his uncle. H. wants to prepare a meal for him and reaches for the oil bottle: he sees the same dancer on the label…. H begins to find echoes of his own life in the images he projects. Everything changes when fiction and reality merge.
IMDB Rating: 7.1
IMDB Votes: 140
Genere: Drama, Fantasy
Country: Switzerland, France
Duration: 105 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 90%
Lost and Beautiful (2015)
Plot Summary:
Pulcinella, a foolish servant, is sent to present-day Campania to grant the last wish of Tommaso, a simple shepherd.
IMDB Rating: 6.7
IMDB Votes: 630
Genere: Adventure, Drama, Fantasy
Country: Italy, France
Duration: 87 min
Plot tags: road movie, surreal, semi documentary, experimental
Similar in 79%
Black Stone (2015)
Plot Summary:
While his parents are toiling away in a food processing plant in Seoul, Shon Sun is drafted in the army. But being prey to abuse, he deserts. Back in Seoul he finds out his parents have disappeared. Intent on finding them, he embarks on a journey through the contaminated jungle his father was born in.
IMDB Rating: 6.1
IMDB Votes: 91
Genere: Drama
Country: South Korea, France
Duration: 93 min
Plot tags: surreal, rough, suspense, suspenseful, crying
Similar in 89%
Genealogies of a Crime (1997)
Plot Summary:
At her son's funeral, Solange, a lawyer famous for losing hopeless cases, agrees to defend René, her son's age, accused of murdering his wealthy aunt, Jeanne, who's part of the Franco-Belgian Psychoanalytic Society, known for odd views and methods. She reads Jeanne's journal, documenting René's criminal tendencies. Solange believes him innocent, manipulated into the murder or framed. Odd psychiatrists turn up, including Georges Didier, who runs FBPS, and his rival, Christian, who believes crime originates in a story's taking hold of a person. After the verdict, René and Solange's relationship changes, Georges and his society commit a bizarre act, and the police record Solange's story.
IMDB Rating: 6.4
IMDB Votes: 934
Genere: Crime, Drama, Thriller
Country: France, Portugal
Duration: 114 min
Plot tags: psychological, atmospheric, mind bending, serious, realistic, suspenseful, non-linear
Similar in 76%
Love Torn in a Dream (2000)
Plot Summary:
Raul Ruiz's Love Torn in a Dream is introduced with a fake newsreel, taking place in postwar France, in which the cast of the film meet with the producer, who explains the film's complex weave of nine narratives. A diagram in which each story is represented by a letter of the alphabet explicates the intertwining of the nine tales. As the producer explains each actor's role, the film begins. The stories, rooted in folklore, bump up against each other as the film leaps back and forth in time.
IMDB Rating: 7.1
IMDB Votes: 370
Genere: Drama, Fantasy
Country: France, Portugal, Chile
Duration: 120 min
Plot tags: semi serious, enigmatic, offbeat, humorous, avant garde, art house, baroque
Similar in 86%
9 Fingers (2017)
Plot Summary:
In the middle of the night, Magloire is smoking a cigarette in an abandoned train station when the police shows up for an ID check. He starts running with no luggage, no future until he meets a dying man from whom he inherits a fortune. Magloire is now pursued by a gang. He becomes their hostage, but accomplice too. As he doesn’t anything to lose. Like someone who gets away with everything, someone with no expectations….
IMDB Rating: 5.2
IMDB Votes: 381
Genere: Adventure, Drama
Country: France, Portugal
Duration: 99 min
Plot tags: tense, captivating, suspense, suspenseful, disturbing, surreal
Similar in 75%
Treasure Island (1986)
Plot Summary:
Take a son and make sure he dreams; wake him up and start telling him a story. Rock him with your most beautiful voice, lower and lower, until he goes back to sleep but still listening, subliminally. Now, he must be dreaming, but completing the story you were whispering. When the son wakes up, he must feel like the story chose him and not the opposite. Immortal story, was the title of an Orson Welles' film (who also acted in a previous version of Stevenson's Treaure Island); but every story is immortal, is what any Raoul Ruiz's film tells us.
IMDB Rating: 6.2
IMDB Votes: 251
Genere: Adventure, Fantasy
Country: UK, France, USA
Duration: 115 min
Plot tags: surreal, independent film
Similar in 86%
Les gloutonnes (1975)
Plot Summary:
According to legend, a group of women escaped from Atlantis just before the destruction of the continent. They took refuge on a mysterious island, and founded a kingdom. Men who dared approach the island, were devoured by these sexually voracious Atlanteans, and thus they were called "gobblers".
IMDB Rating: 4.1
IMDB Votes: 232
Genere: Adventure, Drama, Fantasy, Horror
Country: France
Duration: 87 min
Plot tags: erotic, sexploitation film
Similar in 84%
Big Bang Love, Juvenile A (2006)
Plot Summary:
Big Bang Love tells the story of two young prisoners from different backgrounds whose bond transcends their pasts. This stunning, imaginative film has been adapted from Masaki Ato's homoerotic graphic novel. Two beautiful young men become lovers in jail until one kills again. As they open their hearts to each other, life around them dissolves between the real world with a murder mystery and a surreal journey filled with images of a primitive past and an ambiguous future.
IMDB Rating: 6.7
IMDB Votes: 2000
Genere: Drama, Fantasy
Country: Japan
Duration: 85 min
Plot tags: rough, serious, disturbing, realistic, suspenseful, psychological, surreal, art house, suspense thriller, avant garde
Similar in 79%
Three Crowns of the Sailor (1983)
Plot Summary:
In this classically surreal fantasy, a sailor, known for telling tales, sees a student killing his teacher and decides to spin a few yarns for him. He tells the boy of his many adventures in exotic South American ports where he visited opium dens and stayed in cathouses. In such dark, dreamlike places, the sailor meets many strange, mystical characters.
IMDB Rating: 7.1
IMDB Votes: 1000
Genere: Adventure, Drama, Fantasy
Country: France
Duration: 117 min
Plot tags: psychedelic, atmospheric, mind bending, offbeat, serious, experimental, surreal, contemplative, stylized, postmodern
Similar in 80%
Night Across the Street (2012)
Plot Summary:
A drama centered on an office worker on the verge of retirement who begins to relive both real and imagined memories.
IMDB Rating: 6.1
IMDB Votes: 519
Genere: Comedy, Drama, Fantasy
Country: Chile, France
Duration: 110 min
Plot tags: atmospheric, serious, realistic, surreal, contemplative, crying
Similar in 83%
The Last of Us (2016)
Plot Summary:
N is coming from the desert to reach the north of Africa and make an illegal crossing to Europe. Alone in Tunisia, he decides to cross the solitary sea. He steals a boat and begins his journey, but it soon sinks into the water. From that moment, N embarks in a special and unique voyage: he discovers different and infinite spaces, makes intense and fleeting encounters, and meets another altered image of himself.
IMDB Rating: 6.3
IMDB Votes: 199
Genere: Adventure, Drama, Fantasy
Country: Tunisia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Lebanon
Duration: 95 min
Plot tags: psychological, captivating, surreal, disturbing
Similar in 81%
The Adventures of God (2000)
Plot Summary:
It tells the story of a man and a woman trapped inside what appears to be a dream set in the labyrinthine hallways, mysterious rooms of a large hotel in the 30's, facing the sea.
IMDB Rating: 6.0
IMDB Votes: 158
Genere: Drama, Fantasy
Country: Argentina
Duration: 84 min
Plot tags: art house, captivating, surreal, absurd, experimental
Similar in 76%
They Came Back (2004)
Plot Summary:
The lives of the residents of a small French town are changed when thousands of the recently dead inexplicably come back to life and try to integrate themselves into society that has changed for them.
IMDB Rating: 5.8
IMDB Votes: 3000
Genere: Drama, Fantasy
Country: France
Duration: 102 min
Plot tags: psychological, serious, suspenseful, psychedelic, surreal, scary, contemplative, spooky, weird
Similar in 83%
Northfork (2003)
Plot Summary:
"We are all angels. It is what we do with our wings that separates us." In the next two days, the town of Northfork will cease to exist. The year is 1955 and Northfork is literally about to be "dammed," flooded to make way for a new hydroelectric project.
IMDB Rating: 6.2
IMDB Votes: 6000
Genere: Drama, Fantasy
Country: USA
Duration: 103 min
Plot tags: bleak, surreal, psychological, melancholic, touching, disturbing, mindfuck, visually stunning, independent film, spiritual
Similar in 79%
Pastoral Hide and Seek (1974)
Plot Summary:
A young boys' coming of age tale set in a strange, carnivalesque village becomes the recreation of a memory that the director has twenty years later.
IMDB Rating: 7.7
IMDB Votes: 2000
Genere: Drama, Fantasy
Country: Japan
Duration: 104 min
Plot tags: surreal, experimental, psychedelic, mind bending, disturbing, avant garde, weird, cult film
Similar in 75%
The Iron Rose (1973)
Plot Summary:
A young couple out for a walk decide to take a stroll through a large cemetery. As darkness begins to fall they realize they can't find their way out, and soon their fears begin to overtake them.
IMDB Rating: 6.0
IMDB Votes: 2000
Genere: Drama, Fantasy, Horror, Romance
Country: France
Duration: 86 min
Plot tags: surreal, atmospheric, gothic, grindhouse, sad, existential, creepy, cult classic, psychological thriller, scary
Similar in 90%
Fellini Satyricon (1969)
Plot Summary:
A series of disjointed mythical tales set in first century Rome.
IMDB Rating: 6.8
IMDB Votes: 17000
Genere: Drama, Fantasy
Country: Italy, France
Duration: 129 min
Plot tags: surreal, psychedelic, art house, sexual, cult classic, erotic, philosophical, absurd, disturbing, controversial
Similar in 85%
The Green Knight (2021)
Plot Summary:
A fantasy re-telling of the medieval tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
IMDB Rating: 6.6
IMDB Votes: 112000
Genere: Adventure, Drama, Fantasy
Country: USA, Canada, Ireland
Duration: 130 min
Plot tags: cerebral, bleak, fairy tale, surreal, costume drama, scary, captivating, suspense, heroic, suspenseful
Similar in 80%
Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle (2018)
Plot Summary:
A human child raised by wolves, must face off against a menacing tiger named Shere Khan, as well as his own origins.
IMDB Rating: 6.5
IMDB Votes: 65000
Genere: Adventure, Drama, Fantasy
Country: UK, USA
Duration: 104 min
Plot tags: fairy tale, atmospheric, exciting, sentimental, disturbing, epic, mystic, cult classic, dark drama, action adventure
Similar in 87%
Holy Motors (2012)
Plot Summary:
We follow 24 hours in the life of a being moving from life to life like a cold and solitary assassin moving from hit to hit. In each of these interwoven lives, the being possesses an entirely distinct identity: sometimes a man, sometimes a woman, sometimes youthful, sometimes old. By turns murderer, beggar, company chairman, monstrous creature, worker, family man.
IMDB Rating: 7.0
IMDB Votes: 48000
Genere: Drama, Fantasy
Country: France, Germany, Belgium
Duration: 115 min
Plot tags: surreal, art house, psychedelic, cerebral, mindfuck, enigmatic, disturbing, atmospheric, experimental, artsy
Similar in 82%
Paperhouse (1988)
Plot Summary:
Anna is becoming lost in the loneliness of her own world when she discovers she can visit another, a house she has drawn herself and occupied by a young disabled boy. But as she discovers more of the links between her fantasy world and the mundane present, she is drawn only deeper into a dream turning into a nightmare.
IMDB Rating: 6.6
IMDB Votes: 6000
Genere: Drama, Fantasy
Country: UK
Duration: 92 min
Plot tags: scary, disturbing, psychological, atmospheric, suspenseful, surreal, tense, intense, serious, creepy
Similar in 88%
The Fall (2006)
Plot Summary:
In a hospital on the outskirts of 1920s Los Angeles, an injured stuntman begins to tell a fellow patient, a little girl with a broken arm, a fantastic story about 5 mythical heroes. Thanks to his fractured state of mind and her vivid imagination, the line between fiction and reality starts to blur as the tale advances.
IMDB Rating: 7.8
IMDB Votes: 116000
Genere: Adventure, Drama, Fantasy
Country: USA, South Africa, India
Duration: 117 min
Plot tags: surreal, offbeat, fairy tale, visual, visually stunning, touching, visually appealing, mind bending, light, psychological
Similar in 83%
The Holy Mountain (1973)
Plot Summary:
A Mexican master leads a Christ figure and other disciples to a mountain of immortal wise men. The scandal of the 1973 Cannes Film Festival, writer/director Alejandro Jodorowsky's flood of sacrilegious imagery and existential symbolism in The Holy Mountain is a spiritual quest for enlightenment pitting illusion against truth. The Alchemist (Jodorowsky) assembles together a group of people from all walks of life to represent the planets in the solar system. The occult adept's intention is to put his recruits through strange mystical rites and divest them of their worldly baggage before embarking on a trip to Lotus Island. There they ascend the Holy Mountain to displace the immortal gods who secretly rule the universe.
IMDB Rating: 7.8
IMDB Votes: 47000
Genere: Adventure, Drama, Fantasy
Country: Mexico
Duration: 114 min
Plot tags: surreal, psychedelic, avant garde, disturbing, art house, mindfuck, mind bending, experimental, atmospheric, stylized
Similar in 87%
The City of Lost Children (1995)
Plot Summary:
A scientist in a surrealist society kidnaps children to steal their dreams, hoping that they slow his aging process.
IMDB Rating: 7.5
IMDB Votes: 71000
Genere: Adventure, Drama, Fantasy, Sci-Fi
Country: France, Germany, Spain, Belgium, USA
Duration: 112 min
Plot tags: surreal, atmospheric, art house, stylized, gothic, disturbing, mindfuck, visual, visually stunning, mind bending