Best movies like Gruber's Journey
Last updated March 2024
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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:
Best tv shows and movies like Gruber's Journey (2008):
Similar in 76%
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 76%
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 88%
The Face of Jizo (2004)
Plot Summary:
Based on a play by Hisashi Inoue, it focuses on the sufferings of the survivors of Hiroshima. The film takes place during 4 days in the summer of 1948, as the ghost of her father visits Mitsué (Rié Miyama). He had somehow learned that she has fallen in love, and tries to convince her to start her new life. But Mitsué obstinately refuses his warm and humorous encouragements : « People were killed in my place. I do not have the right to find happiness », she says.
IMDB Rating: 7.2
IMDB Votes: 247
Genere: Drama
Country: Japan
Duration: 99 min
Plot tags: minimal cast, retro
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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 89%
The Day the Clown Cried (1972)
Plot Summary:
A circus clown is imprisoned by the Nazis and goes with Jewish children to their deaths.
IMDB Rating:
IMDB Votes:
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 90 min
Plot tags: emotional, controversial, independent film, weird
Similar in 81%
Cold Days (1966)
Plot Summary:
Andras Kovacs' film, considered one of the most important Hungarian films of the 1960's, centers around four men who await trial for their involvement in the massacre of several thousand Jewish and Serbian people of Novi Sad in 1942. Each denies any responsibility, claiming that they were only following orders. The film is sigificant for its willingness to address the subject of Hungary's role in WWII, which was taboo at the time of the its release.
IMDB Rating: 7.8
IMDB Votes: 502
Genere: Drama
Country: Hungary
Duration: 96 min
Plot tags: epic, cult film, cult movie cast
Similar in 83%
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 84%
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%
Kornblumenblau (1989)
Plot Summary:
Based on a true story of a Polish musician who survived the concentration camp only because he could play on the accordion the title melody.
IMDB Rating: 6.8
IMDB Votes: 135
Genere: Drama, Music
Country: Poland
Duration: 88 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 84%
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 79%
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 87%
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 79%
1945 (2017)
Plot Summary:
An unsettling feeling overwhelms a small Hungarian town when two orthodox Jews arrive with a mysterious trunk. As residents begin to speculate on the purpose of the visit of these two strangers, order starts to crumble in town with some pursuing devious plans and others finding remorse in their hearts.
IMDB Rating: 7.1
IMDB Votes: 4000
Genere: Drama
Country: Hungary
Duration: 91 min
Plot tags: black and white, motivational, tense, art house, grim
Similar in 82%
The 25th Hour (1967)
Plot Summary:
A Romanian peasant fights to get back to his family after he's imprisoned by the Nazis.The picture is based on real events. It includes Hungary's government in collaboration with the Nazis, the encroachment of Romania by Stalin's troopers, and other happenings.
IMDB Rating: 7.4
IMDB Votes: 2000
Genere: Drama, War
Country: France, Italy, Yugoslavia
Duration: 130 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 80%
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
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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 77%
Red Dirt Rising (2011)
Plot Summary:
Based on a true story, this film shares with us a decade in the lives of Jimmie Lewallen and his wife Carrie as they experience the joys of love and marriage alongside the tragedies of war and poverty (1939-1949).
IMDB Rating: 3.9
IMDB Votes: 380
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 93 min
Plot tags:
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Then I Sentenced Them All to Death (1972)
Plot Summary:
A young boy is adopted by a priest and his wife during the Nazi occupation of Romania during the Second World War. He befriends the village idiot, who's despised by everyone else. When a German is killed in the last days of the war, the village is threatened with total destruction unless the murderer is handed over. The villagers decide to hand over the idiot.
IMDB Rating: 8.0
IMDB Votes: 963
Genere: War, Drama
Country: Romania
Duration: 103 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 80%
A Rose in Winter (2018)
Plot Summary:
The true story of Edith Stein, a German Jewish philosopher and feminist who converted to Christianity and became a nun, and died in Auschwitz to became Saint and Martyr, the Patron of Europe with the name Saint Theresa Benedicta of the Cross.
IMDB Rating: 6.1
IMDB Votes: 67
Genere: Drama
Country: UK
Duration: 135 min
Plot tags: psychological, captivating, disturbing
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Never Forget (1991)
Plot Summary:
Mr. Mermelstein (Leonard Nimoy) and Mrs. Mermelstein (Blythe Danner) a true-life California couple, thrown into the spotlight of judicial history in the 1980s. He is a Hungarian-born Jew, sole-survivor of his family's extermination at Auschwitz, and she is a Southern Baptist from Tennessee. Their four children are good kids, typical Americans, with just enough orneriness to irritate each other, but enough love and class to pull together when it counts. When challenged by a hate group to prove that Jews were actually gassed at Auschwitz, Mel Mermelstein rises to the occasion with the support of his wife and children, in spite of the dangers to himself, his business, and his family. William John Cox (Dabney Coleman) provides legal help (pro bono) as a lawyer, originally a Roman Catholic from Texas.
IMDB Rating: 6.8
IMDB Votes: 300
Genere: Drama, History
Country: USA
Duration: 94 min
Plot tags: political
Similar in 76%
Bulgarian Rhapsody (2014)
Plot Summary:
the story of two adolescents, Moni and Zhozho, who meet 17-year-old Zheni in 1943 and with whom both fell in love. The events that follow unfold while Bulgaria has to decide on the deportation of 11 343 Jewish citizens in Macedonia and Thrace.
IMDB Rating: 6.9
IMDB Votes: 437
Genere: Drama
Country: Bulgaria, Israel
Duration: 108 min
Plot tags: touching, captivating, emotional, suspenseful, serious, realistic
Similar in 88%
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 85%
One Day You'll Understand (2008)
Plot Summary:
A man endeavors to collect memories of his grandparents who died in a concentration camp during the Holocaust.
IMDB Rating: 5.7
IMDB Votes: 367
Genere: Drama
Country: France, Germany, Israel
Duration: 90 min
Plot tags: touching, serious, emotional, realistic, bleak, contemplative, gloomy
Similar in 88%
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:
Similar in 84%
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 85%
The Revolt of Job (1983)
Plot Summary:
"The Revolt of Job" tells the story of a childless Jewish couple in WWII-era Hungary who adopt a Hungarian boy. They raise him with their values and traditions. Unfortunately, the Nazis eventually come and round up all Jewish families in the village. The final scene shows the boy watching as his parents are hauled away like cattle.
IMDB Rating: 7.5
IMDB Votes: 683
Genere: Drama
Country: Hungary
Duration: 105 min
Plot tags: thought provoking, uplifting, touching, bleak, serious, emotional, realistic, gloomy
Similar in 82%
The Man in the Glass Booth (1975)
Plot Summary:
Arthur Goldman is a rich Jewish industrialist, living in luxury in a Manhattan high-rise. He banters with his assistant Charlie, often shocking Charlie with his outrageousness and irreverence about aspects of Jewish life. Nonetheless, Charlie is astonished when, one day, Israeli secret agents burst in and arrest Goldman for being not a Jewish businessman but a Nazi war criminal. Whisked to Israel for trial, Goldman forces his accusers to face not only his presumed guilt--but their own.
IMDB Rating: 7.0
IMDB Votes: 1000
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 117 min
Plot tags: sad, independent film, tense, serious, captivating, realistic, suspenseful, talky
Similar in 90%
Reunion (1989)
Plot Summary:
Two young boys from very different backgrounds become friends in 1933 Stuttgart. However, they don't realize how different they are until much later as one is the son of a well-to-do Jewish doctor and the other the son of a German aristocrat. After that summer and the election of Hitler, things change as antisemitism gains fervor. After the core of the film deals with that era, the film flashes to the present and the Jewish man now returns to his boyhood home and seeks his old friend with some surprises.
IMDB Rating: 6.9
IMDB Votes: 557
Genere: Drama, History
Country: France, West Germany, UK
Duration: 110 min
Plot tags: independent film, thought provoking, serious, realistic, disturbing
Similar in 90%
Out of the Ashes (2003)
Plot Summary:
The real-life story of Gisella Perl, a Jewish Hungarian doctor imprisoned in the notorious Auschwitz death camp of World War II.
IMDB Rating: 6.8
IMDB Votes: 1000
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 113 min
Plot tags: realistic, touching, serious, bleak, captivating, emotional, contemplative, uplifting