Best movies like Boris Godunov
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Plot Summary:
Praised for its fine photography and production design if not its narrative, Sergei Bondarchuk directed this adaptation of the tale by Alexander Pushkin. Boris Godunov came to the Czarist throne at the end of the 16th century, after the original heir to Ivan the Terrible had died. At first, things went well for Godunov (played by Bondarchuk), but when the Russian people began to believe he had killed Ivan the Terrible's son in order to gain the throne, an alliance sprang up against the new Czar. Events continued to spin out of control as a young monk was presented as the son Godunov had supposedly killed. Now he was openly accused of failing an assassination attempt, which seems to be even worse than succeeding. In addition to these woes, Boris Godunov began to suffer serious health problems. So much for the joys of kingship.
IMDB Rating: 6.6
IMDB Votes: 279
Genere: Drama, History
Country: Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, West Germany, Poland
Duration: 141 min
Plot tags: spiritual
Best tv shows and movies like Boris Godunov (1986):
Similar in 87%
Boris Godounov (1989)
Plot Summary:
Zulawski tackles Modest Mussorgsky’s famous opera about the bloody battle for ascendancy to the throne of Russia in the 17th-century! With a score conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich, Zulawski adds extra layers of devilish meta-textual embellishment by composing the film’s imagery as though we are watching a theater piece of a film crew making a movie about the opera of “Boris Godounov”! As well, the picture is full of delightful anachronisms that mock the then-contemporary Russian government, alongside jabs at other 20th-century dictatorships. So incensed was Rostropovich by Zulawski’s juiced final product — one that took liberties with the narrative’s sexual thrust, amongst other things — that he (unsucessfully) took Zulawski to court for “the violation of the Russian soul”! “Impressive in its use of whirling camera movements as well as mega close-ups of the contracted faces of its singers, ‘Boris Godounov’ is one of the most original opera movies ever made”.
IMDB Rating: 7.2
IMDB Votes: 369
Genere: Musical, Drama
Country: France, Spain, Yugoslavia
Duration: 118 min
Plot tags: visual, experimental, avant garde
Similar in 85%
Honor and Glory (1969)
Plot Summary:
This historical film by Hynek Bočan touches upon the indecisiveness of the Czech nation, ready to bend the backbone in face of foreign rule. Situating the story at the close of the Thirty Year War enabled the depiction of the misery of the people that affects even an impoverished aristocratic milieu. Rudolf Hrušínský appears here in the role of an indecisive knight, persuaded for a long time and in vain to join the anti-Habsburg movement. The story does not only captivate through the depiction of manifold human characters, intrigues and sycophancy, but also through the circumstances ruling over the devastated farmstead, sunk in mud and crudeness. One of the best films with an updating tendency has come into being here, rightly being named along the such greats as Kladivo na čarodějnice (Witches' Hammer).
IMDB Rating: 7.2
IMDB Votes: 111
Genere: Drama, History
Country: Czechoslovakia
Duration: 87 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 87%
Lenin in Poland (1966)
Plot Summary:
The life of the great Bolshevik leader before the Russian revolution is chronicled in this bio-pic. Much of the tale centers on his exile in Poland where Lenin becomes friends with two peasants. The little girl has a strong belief in the nationalist cause. Later Lenin hears she was killed for withholding information about him.
IMDB Rating: 6.6
IMDB Votes: 100
Genere: Drama, History
Country: Soviet Union, Poland
Duration: 98 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 82%
The Massacre of Glencoe (1972)
Plot Summary:
The true story of the events leading up to the infamous massacre of the Macdonalds by the Campbells in February of 1692.
IMDB Rating: 7.7
IMDB Votes: 44
Genere: Drama, History
Country: UK
Duration: 58 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 83%
Uncle Vanya (1970)
Plot Summary:
Andrei Konchalovsky’s Uncle Vanya surely has the greatest claim as the best screen adaptation of a Chekhov play. Featuring brooding and articulate performances, especially from Sergei Bondarchuk as Doctor Astrov and gorgeous cinematography that shifts from sepia to autumnal colours, the film has an elegaic and bittersweet atmosphere. The setting is a crumbling country estate which supports the chic urban lifestyle of the elderly Professor Serebryakov who visits with his young and glamorous new wife, Elena.
IMDB Rating: 7.3
IMDB Votes: 799
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 104 min
Plot tags: spiritual, art house, tension, suspense
Similar in 78%
Slave Queen of Babylon (1963)
Plot Summary:
General Onnos returns from a successful military campaign to the Assyrian capital of Nineveh. He presents King Minurte with a number of newly-captured slaves including Kir, defeated king of the Dardanians. Kir attracts the attention of Semiramis, a beautiful young woman who's a member of Minurte's court and who has imperial ambitions. She persuades Minurte to give her a province and then uses slave labor, including Kir, to build herself a city which becomes Babylon. All this time she schemes to overthrow Minurte using shifting alliances with both Kir and General Onnos.
IMDB Rating: 5.4
IMDB Votes: 158
Genere: Drama, History
Country: Italy
Duration: 101 min
Plot tags: campy
Similar in 78%
Mother (1990)
Plot Summary:
The social ferment in late 19th century Russia which led to the 1917 Russian Revolution is movingly portrayed in this lengthy historical drama, which is very faithful to the 1907 novel The Mother by the celebrated Marxist writer Maxim Gorky (1868-1936). In the story, "the mother" (Inna Tchourikova) has no other recourse than to watch her decent, kindly husband turn into an animalistic, drunken brute as a result of working in the inhuman conditions of a steel mill in the town of Sormovo. When he begins to express his suppressed rage by beating her, she is defended by her teenaged son Pavel (depicted Viktor Rakov as an adult, Sacha Chichonok as a boy). After his father's death, Pavel is forced to go to work in the same factory. However, Pavel and his friends begin investigating Marxism and socialist thought, and work to organize their fellow workers.
IMDB Rating: 7.5
IMDB Votes: 186
Genere: Drama, History
Country: Soviet Union, Italy
Duration: 200 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 79%
At the Beginning of Glorious Days (1980)
Plot Summary:
Late 17th century. With no access to the sea, Russia suffers great losses in foreign trade. Peter tries to capture the Turkish fortress of Azov, but with no success: he can win only if he has a fleet. Peter’s ukases provoke the Boyars’ indignation. Europe looks in amazement: the Russian tsar begins to work at a Dutch shipyard learning the subtleties of shipbuilding?! But his training is cut short. Peter has to return to Russia in order to brutally suppress the Streltsy rebellion organized by his sister Sophia.
IMDB Rating: 7.5
IMDB Votes: 175
Genere: Drama, History
Country: East Germany, Soviet Union
Duration: 134 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 88%
Assassin of the Tsar (1991)
Plot Summary:
A new doctor from Moscow arrives at a provincial mental institution. His interest is the peculiarities of the psyche of a patient who believes that he is Yakov Yurovsky, the man who assassinated the last Russian tsar. In the course of their conversations it transpires that the patient is a kind of philosopher, not without a gift for suggestion. In a while the doctor himself falls under his patient’s influence: he tends to relive that fatal night of June 16-17, 1918 when, without any investigation or trial, Tsar Nicholas II, who had recently abdicated, was murdered, together with his wife, daughters and incurably ill heir. Soon the doctor realizes that the tragedy of the last Russian tsar is in part his own tragedy, too.
IMDB Rating: 6.8
IMDB Votes: 936
Genere: Drama, History
Country: Soviet Union, UK
Duration: 104 min
Plot tags: psychological, mind bending, serious, realistic, suspenseful, disturbing, psychotronic
Similar in 76%
War and Peace: Part I (1965)
Plot Summary:
The first film of a four-part adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s 1869 novel . In St. Petersburg of 1805, Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a rich nobleman, is introduced to high society. His friend, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, joins the Imperial Russian Army as aide-de-camp of General Mikhail Kutuzov in the War of the Third Coalition against Napoleon.
IMDB Rating: 8.2
IMDB Votes: 2000
Genere: Drama, War
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 147 min
Plot tags: historical drama, period drama
Similar in 81%
War and Peace: Part III (1967)
Plot Summary:
In 1812, Napoleon's Army invades Russia. Kutuzov asks Bolkonsky to join him as a staff officer, yet the prince requests a command in the field. Pierre sets out to watch the upcoming confrontation between the armies. During the Battle of Borodino, he volunteers to assist in an artillery battery. Bolkonsky's unit waits in the reserve, but he is hit by a shell. Both Anatol and Bolkosnky suffer severe wounds. The French Army is victorious and advances on Moscow.
IMDB Rating: 8.3
IMDB Votes: 2000
Genere: Drama, History, War
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 81 min
Plot tags: historical drama, period drama
Similar in 88%
Vlad the Impaler: The True Life of Dracula (1979)
Plot Summary:
Vlad Tepes, otherwise known as Vlad the Impaler and Dracula, fights the Ottoman Turks on the battlefield and the Hungarian Boyars in his court.
IMDB Rating: 7.5
IMDB Votes: 1000
Genere: Drama, History
Country: Romania
Duration: 114 min
Plot tags: gothic, political
Similar in 78%
Valley of the Bees (1968)
Plot Summary:
Ondrej, a young boy who loves bees and bats, is introduced to his new mother, a woman much younger than his father. Her brings her a bowl of flower petals which she starts to throw in the air and then gives out a shriek, as she discovers several bats in the bottom of the bowl. In a rage, Ondrej's father picks the boy up and hurls him against a wall. Then as the boy lays in a stupor the father promises the Holy Virgin to dedicate the boy to her if she will spare his life. The boy lives and Ondrej is raised in a strict monastic order, where he is mentored by a very pious warrior monk, Armin. One day after being chastised for no good reason, he escapes and returns home. Armin heads out to bring him back. With his father dead, Ondrej becomes lord of the castle and becomes engaged to his father's widow. Near the end, Armin shows up and attempts to get Ondrej to come back to the order.
IMDB Rating: 7.8
IMDB Votes: 2000
Genere: Drama, History
Country: Czechoslovakia
Duration: 97 min
Plot tags: philosophical, spiritual, black and white, cerebral, epic, serious, captivating, realistic, thought provoking
Similar in 86%
Days of Eclipse (1988)
Plot Summary:
This bleak late soviet-era drama follows the career of Malyanov, a young medical school graduate who has been sent to work in Turkmenia. Here he runs into a hodge-podge of people of differing ethnicities, all of them victims of the government's earlier mania for relocating and eliminating whole ethnic groups and classes of people. These desperately unhappy people are unable to find any pleasure in this diverse companionship, but instead are antagonistic to it, and often resort to desperate measures in their doomed attempts to ease their pain.
IMDB Rating: 7.0
IMDB Votes: 1000
Genere: Drama, Sci-Fi
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 139 min
Plot tags: spiritual, poetic, avant garde
Similar in 83%
War and Peace: Part II (1965)
Plot Summary:
In the end of 1809, Natasha attends her first ball. Andrei falls in love with her and intends to marry her, but her father demands they wait. The prince travels abroad, and Natasha desperately longs for him. But she then meets Anatol Kuragin and forgets of Andrei. At the last minute, she regrets and abandons her plans to elope with Anatol. Bolkonsky hears of this and declares their betrothal is over. Pierre, trying to calm her down, suddenly announces he loves her.
IMDB Rating: 8.0
IMDB Votes: 2000
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 98 min
Plot tags: historical drama, period drama
Similar in 82%
My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1985)
Plot Summary:
Russian provincial town in the middle of the 1930s Stalin's Great Purge. Ivan Lapshin, the head of the local police, does what he has to do. And he does it well.
IMDB Rating: 7.5
IMDB Votes: 3000
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 100 min
Plot tags: slow cinema, spiritual, aesthetic
Similar in 76%
The Lonely Voice of Man (1987)
Plot Summary:
The film is Sokurov's feature film debut and is based on the novel The River Potudan by Andrei Platonov. It's a story about the lives of people in the Russian countryside in the beginning of the 20th century. The film was completed in 1979 as a graduation film, but was banned by the Soviet state and didn't premiere until 1987.
IMDB Rating: 6.9
IMDB Votes: 716
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 87 min
Plot tags: poetic, spiritual, contemplative, avant garde
Similar in 76%
The Second Circle (1990)
Plot Summary:
A man tries to come to terms with his father's death and to deal with the mundane details of his burial in a society cut off from spirituality.
IMDB Rating: 7.1
IMDB Votes: 767
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 92 min
Plot tags: spiritual, avant garde
Similar in 87%
The Asthenic Syndrome (1989)
Plot Summary:
In the old days it was called hypochrondria, or black melancholia. Now, apparently, it's termed the Asthenic Syndrome. Whatever it is, Nikolai, a teacher of epicly indifferent pupils, has got it, and it's not much fun.
IMDB Rating: 6.6
IMDB Votes: 1000
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 153 min
Plot tags: spiritual
Similar in 75%
War and Peace: Part IV (1967)
Plot Summary:
As Moscow is set ablaze by the retreating Russians, the Rostovs flee their estate, taking wounded soldiers with them, and unbeknownst to them, also Andrei. Pierre, dressed as a peasant, tries to assassinate Napoleon but is taken prisoner. As the French are forced to retreat, he is marched for months with the Grande Armée, until being freed by a raiding party. The French are defeated by Kutuzov in the Battle of Krasnoi. Andrei is recognized and is brought to his estate. He forgives Natasha on his deathbed. She reunites with Pierre and they marry as Moscow is being rebuilt.
IMDB Rating: 8.2
IMDB Votes: 2000
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 100 min
Plot tags: period drama
Similar in 85%
Nine Days of One Year (1962)
Plot Summary:
Two young scientists are exploring new fields of nuclear physics. Dmitry Gusev and Ilya Kulikov are good friends, but rivals in love. Dmitry marries Lyolya and they live happily together. Luck has it that he makes an important discovery. Unfortunately he exposes himself to radioactivity during the experiments. As a result he falls seriously ill. However Dmitry has a strong spirit. His will to live, the deep passion for his work and his strong love for mankind makes it possible for him to recover.
IMDB Rating: 7.5
IMDB Votes: 1000
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 111 min
Plot tags: spiritual
Similar in 76%
The Column (1968)
Plot Summary:
The Roman Emperor Trajan has just murdered all the local men of Dacia and holds a military stronghold in what will later become Rumania. He places a Roman centurion in his place to occupy his latest conquest. After lopping off the head of the Dacian warlord, the soldier uses his blood-stained hands to dine on cheese and bread, unable to suppress his laughter. The centurion has a change of heart when he is put in charge of the region, freely dispensing justice and forgiveness to the conquered inhabitants. When the peace is threatened by marauding barbarians in masks of fur, the locals help the Romans fend off the invasion.
IMDB Rating: 7.7
IMDB Votes: 748
Genere: Drama, History
Country: Romania, West Germany
Duration: 133 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 79%
Silence (1971)
Plot Summary:
Two Jesuit priests encounter persecution when they travel to Japan in the 17th century to spread Christianity and search for their mentor.
IMDB Rating: 7.2
IMDB Votes: 1000
Genere: Drama, History
Country: Japan
Duration: 129 min
Plot tags: spiritual, existential, atmospheric, bleak, serious, captivating, realistic, contemplative, stylized
Similar in 85%
Rasputin (1981)
Plot Summary:
Details the life of the Russian monk Rasputin. The film shows his rise to power and how it corrupted him. His sexual perversions and madness ultimatly leads to his gruesome assasination.
IMDB Rating: 7.0
IMDB Votes: 2000
Genere: Biography, Drama, History
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 151 min
Plot tags: serious, realistic, disturbing, atmospheric, spiritual, rough, bleak, captivating, epic, thought provoking
Similar in 83%
Pirosmani (1969)
Plot Summary:
A dedicated artist from Russian Georgia struggles to get recognition.
IMDB Rating: 7.7
IMDB Votes: 1000
Genere: Biography, Drama, History
Country: Soviet Union, Georgia
Duration: 86 min
Plot tags: psychedelic, spiritual, heartbreaking
Similar in 89%
They Fought for Their Country (1975)
Plot Summary:
In July 1942, in the Second World War, the rearguard of the Russian army protects the bridgehead of the Don River against the German army while the retreating Russian troops cross the bridge. While they move back to the Russian territory through the countryside, the soldiers show their companionship, sentiments, fears and heroism to defend their motherland.
IMDB Rating: 7.7
IMDB Votes: 3000
Genere: Drama, War
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 158 min
Plot tags: heroic, tense, sentimental, rough, suspenseful, philosophical, political, suspense
Similar in 89%
Proud Heritage (1989)
Plot Summary:
Following the 1394 Battle of Rovine between the Wallachian and Ottoman armies Wallachian ruler Mircea the Elder consolidates his reign.In a small civil war he manages to oust his brother Dan from Wallachia.Dan's dream of usurping the Wallachian throne is destroyed and he is banished from the kingdom.After this confrontation Prince Mircea the Elder ruler of Wallachia receives envoys from the Polish king and from the Ottoman sultan.In their attempt to conquer Europe the Ottoman Turks are seeking European allies.Their envoys to Wallachia want to persuade Prince Mircea to join them but the Polish envoys also are hoping to sway Wallachia to their side.Prince Mircea of Wallachia hesitates.An alliance with fellow Christian Poles seems logical but their conditions are harsh.The conditions of a possible military alliance with the Ottoman Turks are more attractive.However,the Ottoman Turks are Muslim and they also are the traditional enemies of the small Christian kingdom of Wallachia.Caught.
IMDB Rating: 7.7
IMDB Votes: 832
Genere: Action, Drama, History, War
Country: Romania
Duration: 136 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 88%
Stephen the Great - Vaslui 1475 (1975)
Plot Summary:
In 1475 when Stephen the Great, ruler of Moldavia is facing an invading Ottoman army of 120 000 men, the fate of Christian Europe largely depends on the battle's outcome.
IMDB Rating: 8.0
IMDB Votes: 730
Genere: Biography, Drama, History, War
Country: Romania
Duration: 137 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 80%
Gunpowder, Treason & Plot (2004)
Plot Summary:
A BBC miniseries based loosely on the lives of Mary, Queen of Scots, and her son James I of England.
IMDB Rating: 7.0
IMDB Votes: 2000
Genere: Drama, History
Country: UK
Duration: 205 min
Plot tags: historical drama, serious, captivating, realistic, political, period piece, costume drama, period drama, baroque, weird
Similar in 75%
Macbeth (1971)
Plot Summary:
A ruthlessly ambitious Scottish lord siezes the throne with the help of his scheming wife and a trio of witches.
IMDB Rating: 7.4
IMDB Votes: 15000
Genere: Drama, History
Country: UK, USA
Duration: 140 min
Plot tags: disturbing, visual, atmospheric, bleak, spiritual, existential, fairy tale, emotional, political thriller, controversial