Best movies like '38 - Vienna Before the Fall
Last updated March 2024
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Plot Summary:
The film presents the political events surrounding the Anschluss in March of 1938 through the lives of Carola Hell, a popular young actress at the prestigious Theater in der Josefstadt, and Martin Hofmann, the Jewish journalist she plans to marry. When we encounter the couple in the lovely springtime weather their future is full of promise. They are determined to stay clear of politics. Yet in the climate of the time, nobody of her prominence or his religion can remain apolitical. Although Martin's journalist friend, Drechsler, calls to inform them that the Nazis plan to take over Austria soon, they concentrate on their work and their private happiness and dismiss the warnings.
IMDB Rating: 6.2
IMDB Votes: 184
Genere: Drama
Country: Austria, West Germany
Duration: 97 min
Plot tags:
Best tv shows and movies like '38 - Vienna Before the Fall (1986):
Similar in 85%
Welcome in Vienna (1986)
Plot Summary:
In the conclusion of Axel Corti's trilogy (following God Does Not Believe In Us Anymore and Santa Fe) Freddy, a Viennese Jew who emigrated to New York after Hitler's invasion, and Adler, a left-wing intellectual originally from Berlin, return to Austria in 1944 as soldiers in the U.S. Army. Freddy falls in love with the daughter of a Nazi, and Adler attempts to go over to the Communist Zone. But with the advent of the Cold War and continuing anti-semitism, the idealism of both characters is shattered as they find themselves surrounded by cynicism, opportunism, and universal self-deception. This acclaimed, brilliant work is one of the great films of all time.
IMDB Rating: 7.4
IMDB Votes: 182
Genere: Drama
Country: Austria, West Germany, Switzerland
Duration: 127 min
Plot tags: bilingual
Similar in 80%
The Beheaded Rooster (2007)
Plot Summary:
A moving coming of age story in a time of extreme change: on August 23, 1944 in a small city in Romanian Transylvania, the 16 year old Felix Goldschmidt awaits his classmates for their traditional Exitus Party (school graduation). However, this very day the kingdom of Romania takes leave of its ally of many years - Nazi Germany - thus ending the 800 year old, highly successful story of ethnic German immigration at the feet of the Carpathian Mountains. It is a great story of young people's blindness to the rise of Fascism, the destruction of bourgeois values, a first love and shattered friendships.
IMDB Rating: 6.4
IMDB Votes: 311
Genere: Drama
Country: Austria, Germany, Hungary, Romania
Duration: 98 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 75%
Flight of a Bird (1988)
Plot Summary:
Polyot Ptitsy has been given the gift of seeing his deceased brother, but when a new love interest is in trouble he must choose between saving a life or continuing to see his brother everyday.
IMDB Rating: 6.9
IMDB Votes: 33
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 137 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 86%
After Midnight (1981)
Plot Summary:
The Political drama shows the denunciation and persecution of the 19-year-old Sanne in the Nazi state. After she falls in love with her cousin, Sanne is betrayed by her jealous aunt to the Gestapo.
IMDB Rating: 6.1
IMDB Votes: 55
Genere: Drama
Country: West Germany
Duration: 110 min
Plot tags: political
Similar in 90%
Fabian (1980)
Plot Summary:
Fabian is a 1980 West German film directed by Wolf Gremm. It is based on the novel Fabian, the Story of a Moralist (1931) by German author Erich Kästner. The film was chosen as West Germany's official submission to the 53rd Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film receive a nomination.
IMDB Rating: 5.6
IMDB Votes: 151
Genere: Drama
Country: West Germany
Duration: 110 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 75%
Time of Indifference (1964)
Plot Summary:
A penniless countess falls in love with a cad, unaware that he is also involved on the side with her beautiful daughter.
IMDB Rating: 6.7
IMDB Votes: 433
Genere: Drama
Country: Italy, France
Duration: 89 min
Plot tags: dread
Similar in 78%
Terezín (2023)
Plot Summary:
The story of Antonio, an Italian clarinetist, and Martina, a Czech violinist, who fall in love with each other during the World War II, in Prague.
IMDB Rating: 5.1
IMDB Votes: 28
Genere: Drama
Country: Italy, Czech Republic, Slovakia
Duration: 110 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 81%
Fontamara (1980)
Plot Summary:
Fontamara is a village in the Marsica, forgotten by all but God and its inhabitants are called 'cafoni' (boors). Berardo Viola wants to marry Elvira but only after gaining enough money to buy some land and in order to reach his aim he has the idea of going to a great city. When Maria Grazia is raped by the fascists, Berardo and Antonio decide to leave Fontamara and go to Rome. Here they are swindled by a lawyer and afterwards they are invited by an antifascist to a restaurant where they are arrested by the police because of some subversive papers they had.
IMDB Rating: 7.0
IMDB Votes: 69
Genere: Drama
Country: Italy
Duration: 139 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 84%
The Last Letter (2002)
Plot Summary:
Locked away in the Jewish ghetto of an occupied Ukrainian town in 1941, a mother revisits her life in a last letter to her son.
IMDB Rating: 6.8
IMDB Votes: 179
Genere: Drama
Country: France, USA
Duration: 61 min
Plot tags: minimal cast
Similar in 81%
The Chosen Ones (1983)
Plot Summary:
A man wants to flee wartime Germany and the detested Nazis to Columbia, where his brother lives. In order to achieve his goal he agrees to become an informer for the Reich.
IMDB Rating: 6.8
IMDB Votes: 99
Genere: Drama
Country: Colombia, Soviet Union
Duration: 140 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 78%
God Does Not Believe in Us Anymore (1982)
Plot Summary:
After his father is murdered by the Nazis in 1938, a young Viennese Jew named Ferry Tobler flees to Prague, where he joins forces with another expatriate and a sympathetic Czech relief worker. Together with other Jewish refugees, the three make their way to Paris, and, after spending time in a French prison camp, eventually escape to Marseille, from where they hope to sail to a safe port.
IMDB Rating: 7.7
IMDB Votes: 151
Genere: Drama
Country: Austria, Switzerland, West Germany
Duration: 110 min
Plot tags: pre war
Similar in 90%
Liten Ida (1981)
Plot Summary:
Little Ida's mother is working for the Germans during WW2, and she is also having a relationship with a German SS-officer. Ida is experiencing the problems of having a mother who is involved with the enemy, without being old enough to understand what is actually going on.
IMDB Rating: 6.6
IMDB Votes: 135
Genere: Drama
Country: Norway, Sweden
Duration: 78 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 80%
Hungarians (1978)
Plot Summary:
A group of landless Hungarian peasants accept work as migrant-laborers on a farm in northern Germany where the wages are good, and the wives and family are allowed to accompany them. Though it is in the midst of World War II, they are relatively well-off. However, they glimpse the treatment accorded to POWs and others who are not so gently treated, and at the conclusion of the year's harvest, they choose to return to Hungary and are quickly swept up in the tides of war. This film is part of a series of films by award-winning, well-respected director Zoltan Fabri who devoted much time and effort chronicling the struggle against fascism.
IMDB Rating: 7.0
IMDB Votes: 353
Genere: Drama
Country: Hungary
Duration: 107 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 76%
The Path (2022)
Plot Summary:
Fleeing from the Nazis, two children, a journalist father, and a dog must make their way through the hazardous Pyrenees mountain range.
IMDB Rating: 6.3
IMDB Votes: 230
Genere: Drama
Country: Germany, Spain
Duration: 99 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 84%
Evening Bells (1986)
Plot Summary:
Trials and tribulations of a Croatian Communist intellectual in the turbulent years before, during and after WW2.
IMDB Rating: 7.2
IMDB Votes: 189
Genere: Drama, War
Country: Yugoslavia
Duration: 120 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 88%
Everyone Dies Alone (1976)
Plot Summary:
When they start losing family members and neighbors due to WWII and the Nazi government's policies, a quiet married couple becomes disillusioned and begins spreading leaflets against the government - a crime punishable by death.
IMDB Rating: 6.8
IMDB Votes: 262
Genere: Drama
Country: West Germany
Duration: 106 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 89%
The Berlin Affair (1985)
Plot Summary:
In 1938 Berlin, Gudrun Landgrebe, wife of Nazi functionary Kevin McNally, begins taking art lessons. She makes the acquaintance of another student, Japanese ambassador's daughter Mio Takaki. Soon afterwards, the two women begin a passionate lesbian affair. This leads to a chain reaction of disaster and tragedy, culminating with the inevitable intervention of the Gestapo. Despite the film's galloping sexual passions, The Berlin Affair is an exercise in aloofness, keeping the characters at arm's length-surprising, considering that the director was Liliana Cavani, auteur of the erotic classic The Night Porter (1974). The film was based on The Buddhist Cross, a novel by Junichiro Tanizaki.
IMDB Rating: 5.4
IMDB Votes: 647
Genere: Drama
Country: Italy, West Germany
Duration: 121 min
Plot tags: erotic, grindhouse, sensual, queer cinema
Similar in 84%
Flight North (1986)
Plot Summary:
Johanna (Katharina Thalbach) has fled Nazi Germany to visit a friend in Finland, and from there she continues on to her friend's family's estate. Once at the estate, Johanna passionately argues with her friend's pro-Nazi brother and at the same time, falls for the second, good-looking brother who shares her own anti-fascist feelings. The two are soon engaged in an active sexual relationship that continues as they travel north to an Arctic port.
IMDB Rating: 5.7
IMDB Votes: 110
Genere: Drama
Country: West Germany, Finland
Duration: 117 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 80%
The Sea and Poison (1986)
Plot Summary:
Downed American fliers in WW II are vivisected by Japanese surgeons in medical experiments.
IMDB Rating: 7.5
IMDB Votes: 309
Genere: Drama
Country: Japan
Duration: 123 min
Plot tags: retro
Similar in 76%
Jonah Who Lived in the Whale (1993)
Plot Summary:
The story of the Holocaust, seen as Jonah, a young jewish boy living in Amsterdam at the onset of WW II, who with his family is taken by the Nazis to a concentration camp. (Based on the book 'Childhood' by Jona Oberski.).
IMDB Rating: 6.6
IMDB Votes: 457
Genere: Drama
Country: Italy, France, Hungary
Duration: 100 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 83%
Neger, Neger, Schornsteinfeger (2006)
Plot Summary:
This drama is based on the childhood memories of Hans Jürgen Massaquoi, who was one of the few black native Germans in Nazi Germany. In 1935 at the age of nine, he lives with his German mother in a small flat in Hamburg's working class district Barmbek, while his father and grandfather had left the country. Although the boy is not persecuted by the Nazis and dreams of joining the Hitler Youth, his skin color makes him a target for racist abuse.
IMDB Rating: 6.6
IMDB Votes: 383
Genere: Drama
Country: Germany
Duration: 180 min
Plot tags: psychological, emotional, atmospheric, captivating
Similar in 81%
Gruber's Journey (2008)
Plot Summary:
On 22 June 1941, Germany and Romania attack Soviet Russia. Several days later, Curzio Malaparte, the Italian writer who would one day pen the novel « Kaputt », a war correspondent for « Corriere de la Sera », arrives in Iasi, in the north of Moldova, on his way to the front, which is nearby. He is incapacitated by a severe allergy and his only chance of recovery is to find a Jewish doctor, an allergologist who had studied in Florence, called Josef Gruber. All his attempts to find him are unsuccessful. While looking for him, Curzio discovers that in Iasi, several days prior to his arrival, a violent anti-Semitic pogrom took place and that a large number of the Jewish citizens of Iasi were deported by train and that Dr Gruber may be among them. In order to find him, Curzio, aided by Guido Sartori, the Italian consul in Iasi, tries to obtain an official warrant to bring Josef Gruber back. He confronts indifference, rudeness and the desire by the Romanian authorities to hide something.
IMDB Rating: 7.1
IMDB Votes: 200
Genere: Drama
Country: Hungary, Romania
Duration: 100 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 80%
Cefalonia (2005)
Plot Summary:
Cefalonia tells the real story about what happened in September 1943 on the Greek island of Kefalonia (Cefalonia in Italian), when the 12,000 men in the Italian 33rd Acqui Infantry Division, following Italy's surrender to the Allied, refused to put themselves under German command and also refused to surrender their weapons. The local German force, supported by Stuka dive-bombers and additional troops, attacked the Italians and after several days of combat the Italians surrendered, having lost 1,300 men. As punishment, the German High Command ordered that all surviving Italians should be executed. Some 5,000 were executed during a week of killings. A handful were rescued by locals and the Greek guerrilla, while the rest were shipped off as prisoners, whereof 3,000 drowned when their ships hit mines. The film "Captain Corelli's Mandolin" is based on a novel about the Italian occupation of Cefalonia, but the massacre was much toned down in the Hollywood version.
IMDB Rating: 6.5
IMDB Votes: 134
Genere: Drama
Country: Italy
Duration: 210 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 80%
A Special Day (1977)
Plot Summary:
The film is set during the late 1930s: the occasion is the first meeting between Mussolini and Hitler. Left alone in her tenement home when her fascist husband runs off to attend the historic event, Sophia Loren strikes up a friendship with her homosexual neighbor Mastroianni. As the day segues into night, Loren and Mastroianni develop a very special relationship that will radically alter both of their outlooks on life.
IMDB Rating: 8.1
IMDB Votes: 15000
Genere: Drama
Country: Italy, Canada
Duration: 106 min
Plot tags: psychological, philosophical, minimal cast, cerebral, poetic, touching, emotional, realistic, talky, semi serious
Similar in 86%
Julia (1977)
Plot Summary:
At the behest of an old and dear friend, playwright Lillian Hellman undertakes a dangerous mission to smuggle funds into Nazi Germany.
IMDB Rating: 7.1
IMDB Votes: 10000
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 117 min
Plot tags: factual, atmospheric, captivating, realistic, political, touching, visually stunning, historical drama, serious, contemplative
Similar in 75%
The Ogre (1996)
Plot Summary:
Frenchman Abel Tiffauges likes children, and wants to protect them against the grown-ups. Falsely suspected as child molester, he's recruited as a soldier in the 2nd World War, but very soon he is taken prisoner of war.
IMDB Rating: 6.8
IMDB Votes: 3000
Genere: Drama
Country: Germany, France, UK, Poland
Duration: 118 min
Plot tags: realistic, disturbing, sad, psychological, sincere, touching, serious, emotional, contemplative, erotic
Similar in 81%
Jew-Boy Levi (1999)
Plot Summary:
Benjamin Levi (Bruno Cathomas) is a Bavarian cattle dealer traveling to pre-World War II Germany on his annual trip to a remote farming village. Levi hopes to do some business and, more importantly, win the hand of the lovely Lisbeth (Caroline Ebner). But Nazi propaganda has gripped the small community and poisoned it forever. Now, Levi and Lisbeth are targets of hate in this provocative and shocking drama.
IMDB Rating: 7.1
IMDB Votes: 199
Genere: Drama
Country: Germany, Switzerland, Austria
Duration: 95 min
Plot tags: thought provoking, touching, bleak, serious, emotional, realistic, disturbing, biting, suspense
Similar in 77%
Inside the Third Reich (1982)
Plot Summary:
A dramatization of the life of Albert Speer, Hitler's young architect and onetime confidant, and his meteoric rise into the Nazi hierarchy. Based upon Speer's own monograph of the same title.
IMDB Rating: 7.3
IMDB Votes: 678
Genere: Biography, Drama, History, War
Country: USA
Duration: 240 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 84%
Mephisto (1981)
Plot Summary:
A German stage actor finds unexpected success and mixed blessings in the popularity of his performance in a Faustian play as the Nazis take power in pre-WWII Germany. As his associates and friends flee or are ground under by the Nazi terror, the popularity of his character supercedes his own existence until he finds that his best performance is keeping up appearances for his Nazi patrons.
IMDB Rating: 7.7
IMDB Votes: 11000
Genere: Drama
Country: Hungary, West Germany, Austria
Duration: 146 min
Plot tags: political, art film, mind twisting, horror musical, tense, serious, realistic, disturbing, biting, expressionism
Similar in 87%
The Glass Room (2019)
Plot Summary:
Liesel Landauer and her friend Hana are linked by a lifelong relationship and an exceptional house built by the architect Von Abt for Liesel and her husband Viktor in Czechoslovakia in the early 1930s.
IMDB Rating: 5.5
IMDB Votes: 1000
Genere: Drama
Country: Czech Republic, Slovakia
Duration: 104 min
Plot tags: psychological, romantic, touching, emotional, talky, erotic, period piece, deep, queer cinema