Best movies like Class of '44
Last updated March 2024
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Plot Summary:
Sequel to "Summer of '42" reunites Hermie, Oscy and Benjie as they graduate from high school. Benjie departs shortly to war while Hermie and Oscy go on to college and experience fraternity hazings, cheating on exams, sex scandals and other unsavory college activities. Hermie grows apart from his childhood friend Oscy and begins a relationship with Julie that allows him to settle down into maturity.
IMDB Rating: 5.4
IMDB Votes: 571
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 95 min
Plot tags:
Best tv shows and movies like Class of '44 (1973):
Similar in 88%
Papa (2018)
Plot Summary:
A young man, Ben Freidman (Scott Wilson) raised by wealthy adoptive Jewish parents in Beverly Hills, decides that he is ready to finally meet his biological parents. He faces disappointment upon learning of the death of his biological mother. His biological father, meanwhile, resides in a psychiatric care unit.
IMDB Rating: 7.1
IMDB Votes: 80
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 107 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 75%
The Girls' Room (2000)
Plot Summary:
Two college roommates -- prim and proper Grace (Cat Taber) and wild and woolly Casey (Soleil Moon Frye) -- find themselves in a tense rivalry when Casey's conduct almost destroys Grace's engagement to preppie heartthrob Charlie (Wil Wheaton). Not too high-minded to seek revenge, Grace cozies up to Casey's pal Joey (Gary Wolf), setting off a cycle of envy and mistrust that may destroy both women's lives in director Irene Turner's well-paced indie.
IMDB Rating: 4.8
IMDB Votes: 220
Genere: Comedy, Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 101 min
Plot tags: independent film
Similar in 78%
Fraternity Row (1977)
Plot Summary:
Director Thomas J. Tobin's 1977 drama about college freshmen subjected to fraternity hazing stars Gregory Harrison, Peter Fox, Scott Newman, Nancy Morgan and Wendy Phillips.
IMDB Rating: 6.2
IMDB Votes: 216
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 100 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 90%
Facing the Truth (2002)
Plot Summary:
In his new film, an intriguing and delicately crafted drama, Malmros portrays the poignant story of a man, who grew up in very modest circumstances in the early years of the 20th century, but whose diligence, intelligence and willingness to endure hardship helped him to become a leading brain surgeon. A success story on the face of it, but a story about a man - who is none other than the director's father - a man of powerful emotions. The film explores the nature and origin of the guilt that repeatedly deprived him of happiness.
IMDB Rating: 7.4
IMDB Votes: 792
Genere: Drama
Country: Denmark
Duration: 98 min
Plot tags: touching, serious, captivating, disturbing
Similar in 77%
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 81%
Purple Haze (1982)
Plot Summary:
It's dynamite stuff.
IMDB Rating: 7.1
IMDB Votes: 172
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 97 min
Plot tags: independent film
Similar in 82%
The Long Island Four (1980)
Plot Summary:
Based on the true story of four Nazi saboteurs who infiltrated the US in 1942 and were quickly caught and executed, this 80-minute ode to America's irresistibly corruptive allure was the only underground feature by writer-director Anders Grafstrom. A Swedish art director who relocated to NYC, he created this grandiose No-Wave, Super-8 color-epic at the age of 23, only to die in a Mexican car accident a few months after completing the film.
IMDB Rating: 6.1
IMDB Votes: 23
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 80 min
Plot tags: avant garde
Similar in 83%
The Wizard of Loneliness (1988)
Plot Summary:
A family drama.
IMDB Rating: 5.9
IMDB Votes: 283
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 111 min
Plot tags: independent film
Similar in 85%
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 80%
When He's Not a Stranger (1989)
Plot Summary:
At a California university, Lyn goes to meet her best friend Melanie in the dorm room of Melanie's boyfriend Ron, a football star. When Lyn arrives, Melanie is not there. Ron forces himself on Lyn. When she resists, Ron throws her on the bed and rapes her. Lyn initially tries to forget about it, but when she does decide to pursue a university hearing, the pressure of Melanie, Ron, and the school is brought to bear.
IMDB Rating: 6.2
IMDB Votes: 269
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 100 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 78%
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:
Similar in 80%
The Snow Goose (1971)
Plot Summary:
Based upon Paul Gallico's delicate novel, Patrick Garland's Golden Globe winning The Snow Goose is a stark and hauntingly beautiful drama set amongst the striking scenery of the Essex salt marshes during the early years of WWII. A bearded Richard Harris leads the modest cast with his sensitive portrayal of tormented soul Philip Rhayader, a lonely misshapen man shunned by society but with a great love of life; Harris isnt overly bitter of his treatment and expresses his compassion through his paintings and love of the waterfowl that surround him. Harris is ably supported by the waiflike Jenny Agutter as Frith, who radiates the requisite amount of youthful innocence and naivety, and won a best supporting actress Emmy Award for her performance.
IMDB Rating: 8.1
IMDB Votes: 434
Genere: Drama
Country: UK, USA
Duration: 60 min
Plot tags: tear jerker, period drama, tearjerker
Similar in 75%
Silencing Mary (1998)
Plot Summary:
Mary Stuartson is proud to be the first in her family to attend a university, but when her roommate, Holly, is raped by the school's star football player, Mary, who is a reporter for the college newspaper, begins her own investigation.
IMDB Rating: 5.8
IMDB Votes: 336
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 120 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 77%
Dying to Belong (1997)
Plot Summary:
When a girls friend is killed by a college hazing, she is the only one who can find out the truth.
IMDB Rating: 5.5
IMDB Votes: 948
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 120 min
Plot tags: sad, psychological, mind bending, serious, realistic, suspenseful
Similar in 89%
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 88%
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:
Similar in 90%
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:
Similar in 81%
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
Similar in 77%
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 81%
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 90%
Miriam (2006)
Plot Summary:
Heart-wrenching story of a woman who takes another's identity to survive the most horrible time of the 20th Century. Miriam is the triumphant story of one woman's survival and success, which takes place in Lithuania over a period of forty years, from the German occupation of World War II through the Soviet era, and is based upon the true story of Miriam Shafer.
IMDB Rating: 7.3
IMDB Votes: 47
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 122 min
Plot tags: captivating, suspense, suspenseful, disturbing
Similar in 83%
Valiant Hearts (2021)
Plot Summary:
In August 1942, during the Second World War, Six Jewish children are trying to escape the Nazis. They are hidden by the resistance in the Chambord Castle, where paintings from Le Louvre are being stored as well. The Nazis are looking for paintings from private collections that would be hidden there as well.
IMDB Rating: 5.4
IMDB Votes: 83
Genere: Drama
Country: France, Belgium
Duration: 92 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 75%
The Hell with Heroes (1968)
Plot Summary:
In 1946 North Africa, two former US Air Force pilots are forced to work for an international smuggler to get money needed for their return to civilian life after fighting in World War II.
IMDB Rating: 5.8
IMDB Votes: 254
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 102 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 89%
A Separate Peace (1972)
Plot Summary:
Gene and Finny are two boys who are best friends living in 1943, at the height of World War II. The idea that the boys will most likely be drafted when they turn eighteen is surrounding them, and they are practically forced to live their lives to the fullest. The two boys attend the Devon School, which prepares them for military life that they will most likely be subjected to. The film begins with a narration by an older Gene, traveling back to Devon some years later. The thing he wishes most to see is the tree, which had a great effect on the boys' lives.
IMDB Rating: 5.4
IMDB Votes: 499
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 104 min
Plot tags: touching, serious, emotional, realistic, disturbing, sexual, sexy
Similar in 80%
Boys Life: Three Stories of Love, Lust, and Liberation (1994)
Plot Summary:
Each of the three short films in this collection presents a young gay man at the threshold of adulthood. In "Pool Days," Justin is a 17-year old Bethesda lad, hired as the evening life guard at a fitness center. In the course of the summer, he realizes and embraces that he's gay. In "A Friend of Dorothy," Winston arrives from upstate for his freshman year at NYU. He has to figure out, with some help from Anne, a hometown friend, how to build a social life as a young gay man in the city. In "The Disco Years," Tom looks back on 1978, the year in high school that he came out of the closet after one joyful and several painful encounters.
IMDB Rating: 7.2
IMDB Votes: 531
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 91 min
Plot tags: anthology, independent film, sentimental, touching, humorous, realistic, semi serious, sexy, feel good, sweet
Similar in 85%
Simon & the Oaks (2011)
Plot Summary:
Epic story about two families and their friendship and common destiny in Sweden's Gothenburg in the 1940s and 1950s. Told from the perspective of young Simon Larsson, who learns that he's an adopted child who has a Jewish father from Germany. After WWII Simon travels to explore his roots - a journey that leads to the basic mysteries of the human life. After the bestselling novel by Marianne Fredriksson.
IMDB Rating: 6.5
IMDB Votes: 3000
Genere: Drama
Country: Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Norway
Duration: 122 min
Plot tags: realistic, tense, touching, psychological, captivating, contemplative, bleak, serious, romantic drama
Similar in 82%
Tsili (2014)
Plot Summary:
Tsili is a young girl caught in the middle of World War II. After her family is taken to a concentration camp, Tsili hides in the forest, free from hatred and men, until the arrival of Marek, a stranger who speaks to her in Yiddish.
IMDB Rating: 5.0
IMDB Votes: 64
Genere: Drama
Country: Israel, France, Italy
Duration: 88 min
Plot tags: serious, realistic, bleak, disturbing, tense
Similar in 88%
Summer of '42 (1971)
Plot Summary:
Silent as a painting, the movie shows us day-dreamer Hermie and his friends Oscy and Benjie spending the summer of '42 on an US island with their parents - rather unaffected by WWII. While Oscy's main worries are the when and how of getting laid, Hermie honestly falls in love with the older Dorothy, who's married to an army pilot. When her husband returns to the front, Hermie shyly approaches her. Written by Bob Dawson.
IMDB Rating: 7.2
IMDB Votes: 9000
Genere: Drama, Romance
Country: USA
Duration: 104 min
Plot tags: romantic, sentimental, touching, sad, serious, captivating, realistic, crying, weeping, romantic drama
Similar in 76%
Heart of Dixie (1989)
Plot Summary:
Set at a Southern college during the 1950s, three co-eds (Ally Sheedy, Virginia Madsen and Phoebe Cates) re-assess their values in light of the burgeoning civil rights movement.
IMDB Rating: 5.2
IMDB Votes: 826
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 95 min
Plot tags: independent film, sincere, thought provoking, touching, serious, emotional, realistic, contemplative, nostalgic
Similar in 85%
The Chosen (1981)
Plot Summary:
The Chosen follows the story of two teenage boys determined to remain friends despite the deep differences between their two families. Set in New York during the 1940s, this provocative film follows the son of an orthodox rabbi and the son of a secular father, raised to question everything around him, including his religion. A moving coming of age story.
IMDB Rating: 7.2
IMDB Votes: 2000
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 108 min
Plot tags: touching, realistic, motivational, thinking, serious, contemplative, independent film, thought provoking, clever, feel good