Best movies like Cefalonia
Last updated March 2024
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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:
Best tv shows and movies like Cefalonia (2005):
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The Hunters (1977)
Plot Summary:
During a hunting party on New Year's Eve 1976, five representatives of the bourgeoisie encounter with their companion the body of a partisan from the Civil War of the late forties. What they are most confused about is the fact that the corpse that lies at their feet is still bleeding….
IMDB Rating: 7.5
IMDB Votes: 1000
Genere: Drama
Country: Greece, France, West Germany
Duration: 168 min
Plot tags: slow cinema, aesthetic
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The Camp Followers (1965)
Plot Summary:
In WWII, Lieut. Martino and his men are assigned to lead a group of prostitutes through the mountainous ways to serve in brothels for Italian soldiers in Albania.
IMDB Rating: 7.5
IMDB Votes: 642
Genere: Drama, War
Country: Italy, France, West Germany, Yugoslavia
Duration: 119 min
Plot tags: road movie
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A Christmas Truce (2015)
Plot Summary:
During a shaky 24-hour holiday truce amid the Battle of the Bulge, American Captain John Myers and a Belgian farm girl, Alina, fall in love. Forced to separate when fighting resumes, the couple vows to reunite, under a bell tower, the first Christmas Eve after the war ends, if each is alive and eager.
IMDB Rating: 5.6
IMDB Votes: 503
Genere: Drama
Country: Canada
Duration: 88 min
Plot tags: romantic, sincere, touching, captivating, suspenseful, disturbing, scenic
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Happy Day (1976)
Plot Summary:
A concentration camp on a barren island is hell for the exiled prisoners. The everyday life of the people who live there consists of interrogations, psychological and physical violence, arbitrary punishments and other torments. One of the prisoners who refuses to yield is subjected to torture. Trying to escape, he falls into the sea. When the Queen visits the island, the prison guards find the runaway and murder him without a second thought, since he is already assumed dead.
IMDB Rating: 6.4
IMDB Votes: 290
Genere: Drama
Country: Greece
Duration: 100 min
Plot tags: absurd, allegory
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The Invisible Wall (1991)
Plot Summary:
June 27, 1980, an Italian DC 9 flying from Bologna to Palermo falls in the sea close to the Ustica island. 81 people die. The official version is "structure failure" of the airplane, but a number of clues lead the journalist Rocco Ferrante toward a different truth. Thanks to his perseverance against the invisible wall erected by air force officers, politicians, judges, secret agents, we come to know that, with all probability, the DC 9 has been mistakenly shot by a missile during a sort of air fight among U.S., French and Libyan top guns.
IMDB Rating: 7.2
IMDB Votes: 444
Genere: Drama
Country: Italy
Duration: 120 min
Plot tags:
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The Hasty Heart (1983)
Plot Summary:
In Burma on the penultimate day of World War II, Cameron Highlander Lachlan 'Lachie' MacLachlan is seriously wounded and transported to a local military hospital. He seems to have recovered from his wounds but appearances can be deceiving. The hospital commander asks nursing Sister Margaret Parker and the five remaining soldiers in her ward to befriend Lachie as he is dying and has only a few weeks to live. Lachie, who is not aware of his prognosis, is a proud man who wants no help from anyone. Slowly however, relationships are formed and Lachie begins to appreciate friendship, something he has never had with anyone.
IMDB Rating: 8.4
IMDB Votes: 60
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 100 min
Plot tags:
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Echoes of the Past (2021)
Plot Summary:
A lawyer, who represents the German government against the Greek reparation claims for Nazi crimes in World War II, travels to Greece and meets one of the remaining survivors of the Kalavryta massacre that took place in 1943.
IMDB Rating: 6.4
IMDB Votes: 1000
Genere: Drama
Country: Greece
Duration: 99 min
Plot tags: tense, captivating, suspenseful, thrilling, political, social
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Triangle (1967)
Plot Summary:
The movie tells the life story and friendship of five blacksmiths in town of Leninakan during the war and the years preceding it - as told by the son of one of the blacksmiths.
IMDB Rating: 7.7
IMDB Votes: 135
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 84 min
Plot tags:
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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:
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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:
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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:
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A Day for Lionhearts (1961)
Plot Summary:
September the 8th 1943, Rome, that crucial day, the armistice, in the town many life change their way. Danilo escapes the fascist enlist, while Michele succeeded to leave his administration moving from Rome. On the way to come back Rome the two meets Gino and all together will try to pass trough the Gothic Line (separating Nazi occupied Italy by Allied liberated Italy). They are intercepted by the Germans and find a temporary refugee in an abandoned cellar full of Italian soldier escaping the Germans. Now also an Italian partisan, Edoardo and Orlando are part of the group. Their goal is to bomb an important bridge. But Edoardo is captured and sentenced to death. The three and Orlando decide to bomb the bridge anyway. They will succeed thanks to the sacrifice of Danilo, and Germans will attribute the commando action to American Parachutists, ignoring the bravery of 4 normal Italian citizens.
IMDB Rating: 7.4
IMDB Votes: 117
Genere: Drama, War
Country: Italy
Duration: 118 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 90%
The Four Days of Naples (1962)
Plot Summary:
The film shows the history of the Neapolitan popular revolt against the invading Germans, during the second world war. During the four days in Naples the revolt turns over in just few hours. Neapolitans slinged on rifles and guns, and they armed themselves with stones, house-objects, gasoline-bottles and everything, anonymous and silent. Gennarino Capuozzo, a ten year old child killed on a barricade while he was fighting against the invasors, is remembered by people as a hero.
IMDB Rating: 7.6
IMDB Votes: 985
Genere: Drama, War
Country: Italy
Duration: 120 min
Plot tags: historical drama, political drama
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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:
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Sour Grape (1974)
Plot Summary:
Two years after receiving news of his father’s death in WWII a young boy continues to wait for trains from the front. The boy lives with his crippled uncle rather than with his mother, who has remarried and has another child. Then one day the father returns.
IMDB Rating: 7.1
IMDB Votes: 89
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 76 min
Plot tags:
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Glory Sky (1962)
Plot Summary:
Two stories set in northern Greece during World War II.
IMDB Rating: 7.5
IMDB Votes: 256
Genere: Drama, War
Country: Greece
Duration: 87 min
Plot tags:
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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
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I'm Alive and I Love You (1998)
Plot Summary:
Drama - During World War II, a woman aboard a railroad car full of deportees slips French railway worker Julien (Jérôme Deschamps) a note with an address and a simple message: "I am alive, and I love you," and he decides to track down the intended recipients. When he finds the woman's Jewish family, he is inspired to do what he can to protect them from the Nazi atrocities. This compelling drama from director Roger Kahane co-stars Dorian Lambert. - Jérôme Deschamps, Dorian Lambert, Agnès Soral.
IMDB Rating: 5.7
IMDB Votes: 81
Genere: Drama
Country: France, Belgium
Duration: 95 min
Plot tags:
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From the Clouds to the Resistance (1979)
Plot Summary:
'Dalla nube alla resistenza (From the Cloud to the Resistance ) (1978), based on two works by Cesare Pavese, falls into the category of History Lessons and Too Early, Too Late as well. It, too, has two parts—a twentieth-century text and a text regarding the myths of antiquity, each set in the appropriate landscape. Pavese's The Moon and the Bonfires looks back on the violent deaths of Italian anti-Fascist resistance fighters; Dialogues with Leucò is a series of dialogues between heroes and gods, connecting myth and history and returning to an ambiguous stage in the creation of distinctions, such as that between animal and human, which are fundamental to grammar and language itself. Such a juxtaposition of political engagement with profoundly contemplative issues such as myth, nature, and meaning points to the characters of Empedocles and Antigone in the Hölderlin films.' (From "Landscapes of resistance. The German Films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub" by Barton Byg).
IMDB Rating: 6.5
IMDB Votes: 471
Genere: Drama
Country: Italy, West Germany, UK, France
Duration: 104 min
Plot tags: experimental
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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 88%
La grande quercia (1997)
Plot Summary:
In 1943, Vincenzio and Maria take their children to his father's Tuscan farm. Vincenzio commutes to Rome where he's a physician and, in the hospital basement, prints an anti-Fascist paper. His brother is in the Resistance; his father supplies food to a local monastery where 12 fugitives hide. All is seen through the eyes of the oldest child, Paulo, who's about 7 and the only lad at school who doesn't wear a Fascist Youth uniform. For Paulo and his siblings, it's great fun playing with their nonno, finding herbs in the fields, watching a maid's tryst with a soldier, teasing a silent monk. Then the war reaches the farm when Italy surrenders and the Germans exact revenge.
IMDB Rating: 7.6
IMDB Votes: 24
Genere: Drama, War
Country: Italy
Duration: 92 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 76%
Signs of Life (1968)
Plot Summary:
During World War II, three German soldiers are withdrawn from combat when one of them, Stroszek, is wounded. They are assigned to a small coastal community on the Greek island of Kos while Stroszek recuperates. The men become increasingly stir crazy in their uneventful new assignment. Stroszek eventually goes mad.
IMDB Rating: 7.0
IMDB Votes: 2000
Genere: Drama
Country: West Germany
Duration: 90 min
Plot tags: psychological, tense, atmospheric, serious, realistic, black and white, avant garde
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Hidden in Silence (1996)
Plot Summary:
Poland 1939, shortly before invasion of the German troops. To save their belongings from the Nazis, the Jewish family Diamant transfers them to their 17-year-old catholic maid Fusia. In return Fusia provides them with food until the ghetto is dissolved, and then hides 13 people in her loft for over two years. However, as the front approaches and two German nurses take quarter in Fusias apartment everything seems to be in vain.
IMDB Rating: 7.3
IMDB Votes: 531
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 90 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 89%
Attack and Retreat (1964)
Plot Summary:
Beautifully photographed and lyrically written, this largely factual account of Mussolini's disastrous invasion of Russia during World War II tells the story of an Italian regiment through the eyes of a farmer from Emilia, a plumber from Rome, a miner from Puglia and a colonel.
IMDB Rating: 7.1
IMDB Votes: 396
Genere: Drama, History, War
Country: Italy, Soviet Union
Duration: 137 min
Plot tags: macaroni combat
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'38 - Vienna Before the Fall (1986)
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:
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Mediterraneo (1991)
Plot Summary:
Greek Sea, World War II. An Italian ship leaves a handful of soldiers in a little island; their mission is to spot enemy ships and to hold the island in case of attack. The village of the island seems abandoned and there isn't a single enemy in sight, so the soldiers begin to relax a little. Things change when their ship is hit and destroyed by the enemy, and the soldiers find themselves abandoned there. Actually, the island isn't deserted and when the Greeks understand that those Italians are harmless, they came out of their hiding places in the mountains and continue their peaceful lives. Soon the soldiers discover that being left behind in a God-forgotten Greek island isn't such a bad thing, after all.
IMDB Rating: 7.4
IMDB Votes: 16000
Genere: Comedy, Drama, War
Country: Italy
Duration: 96 min
Plot tags: touching, sincere, sad, art house, humorous, captivating, realistic, semi serious, intercultural, sentimental
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Johnny the Partisan (2000)
Plot Summary:
After the 8th September 1943 north of Italy is occupied by Germans. Italian army collapsed and the soldiers are escaped to the mountains trying to set up a resistance. Many civilians did the same and Johnny, an English literature student, is among them. Johnny avoids to band together the red partisans (communists) and tries to be part of the azure bands (former regular soldiers). But in both cases he is deluded by the partisan bands and discovers that the partisan war is less poetic and genuine that he thought. At one point anyway the partisans free Alba from Germans. When the city falls again in German hands Johnny escape with Ettore and Pierre. But, one after another, German army and Italian fascists captures the partisans and Johnny will pass the winter alone and isolated. He then finds the way to participate to one of the last attack to occupants, in fact the war will be over two months later.
IMDB Rating: 6.4
IMDB Votes: 324
Genere: Drama, War
Country: Italy
Duration: 135 min
Plot tags: suspense, disturbing, exciting, bleak
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Resistance (2003)
Plot Summary:
The epic tale of an American reconnaissance pilot downed in occupied Belgium at the height of World War II. Hidden by resistance fighters, the pilot falls in love with the wife of the man who will save him. When their affair is exposed, an act of betrayal threatens their lives and the entire resistance movement, forcing the pilot to make a powerful choice that could change the course of the war.
IMDB Rating: 5.4
IMDB Votes: 702
Genere: Drama
Country: USA, Netherlands
Duration: 92 min
Plot tags: serious, realistic, captivating, suspense
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Hotel Meina (2007)
Plot Summary:
How will the Germans react to the armistice of the 8th of September 1943, due to which Italy betrays them and sides with the allied forces? This is the distressing questions that a group of 16 Italian - Greek Jews evacuated at The Meina Hotel ask themselves.
IMDB Rating: 6.2
IMDB Votes: 124
Genere: Drama, History
Country: Italy, France, Serbia
Duration: 115 min
Plot tags:
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Perlasca: The Courage of a Just Man (2002)
Plot Summary:
It is the real story of Giorgio Perlasca (Luca Zingaretti). During the 1920s he was an Italian Fascist supporter, fighting in Africa an in the Spanish civil war where he deserved a safe conduct for Spanish embassies. After some years, disillusioned by fascism, he is a fresh supplier for the Italian army. In the war years he is in Budapest for his business. He lives an easy life there, well introduced into the Hungarian high society, without any problem coming from the war situation. When the Nazi occupied Hungary, in 1944, instead to leave (Italy had already surrendered to the Allies) he escaped to the Spanish embassy in Budapest using his old safe conduct and becoming a Spanish citizen, changing name into Jorge Perlasca. He starts working as a diplomat here. When Sanz Briz (Geza Tordy), the Spanish consul, is removed, Perlasca immediately substitutes him, like if he was officially appointed from Spanish authorities... Written by 1felco.
IMDB Rating: 7.2
IMDB Votes: 540
Genere: Biography, Drama, History, War
Country: Italy, France, Sweden, Hungary
Duration: 197 min
Plot tags: disturbing, uplifting, serious, emotional, captivating, realistic, epic