Best movies like My Friend Ivan Lapshin
Last updated March 2024
Looking for movies like My Friend Ivan Lapshin? Provide your expertise to direct others towards tv series and films you've viewed previously that they may enjoy as well. Assist in enlarging the group of people introducing videos to each other. We value your input!
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
Best tv shows and movies like My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1985):
Similar in 77%
An Englishman Abroad (1983)
Plot Summary:
Actress Coral Browne travels to Moscow, and meets a mysterious Englishman. Turns out he's the notorious spy, Guy Burgess. Based on a true story, with Ms. Browne playing herself.
IMDB Rating: 7.5
IMDB Votes: 608
Genere: Drama
Country: UK
Duration: 61 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 85%
The Legend of Suram Fortress (1985)
Plot Summary:
A film version of a well-known Georgian folk-tale. A young boy has to be immured into the walls of a fortress in order to stop it from crumbling to pieces.
IMDB Rating: 7.3
IMDB Votes: 2000
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 88 min
Plot tags: art house, spiritual, surreal, contemplative, poetic, serious, stylized, gloomy, folk tale, weird
Similar in 77%
Private Life (1982)
Plot Summary:
Mikhail Ulyanov is the Bergmanesque protagonist of the Russian Private Life. A government-appointed factory executive, Ulyanov is reduced to quivering confusion when he is dismissed. Recovering from this blow, he decides to review and realign his life. In so doing, he discovers that there's plenty left in the world to make life worth living. Private Life was nominated for the "best foreign picture" Academy Award in 1983.
IMDB Rating: 7.0
IMDB Votes: 253
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 102 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 78%
The Red Snowball Tree (1974)
Plot Summary:
A former thief is released from a prison. He tries to start a new life with his penfriend - a good village woman, but his past doesn't let him go.
IMDB Rating: 7.6
IMDB Votes: 2000
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 110 min
Plot tags: ironic, sentimental, thought provoking, touching, disturbing, sad, cynical
Similar in 81%
Farewell (1983)
Plot Summary:
Matyora is a small village on a beautiful island with the same name. The existence of the village is threatened with flooding by the construction of a dam. This is the story of the inhabitants of Matyora and their farewell to their homeland.
IMDB Rating: 7.5
IMDB Votes: 743
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 121 min
Plot tags: spiritual
Similar in 77%
Don't Grieve (1968)
Plot Summary:
Benjamin, the local doctor is a soul of a local society, the educated, friendly, democratic person who often treats the poor for free. It makes him very popular with the locals but most certainly does not help with his bank account. He is in love with a beautiful Manette who is also crazy about him but is being watched closely by her father who called his daughter "his small capital" and is determined to protect her virginity until the moment the marriage contract has been signed.
IMDB Rating: 7.8
IMDB Votes: 1000
Genere: Comedy, Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 90 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 89%
Three Days (1991)
Plot Summary:
In Kaliningrad two Lithuanian boys meet two Russian girls. They have difficulties in finding places where they can sleep together. But this is the only problem they do solve. All four justly feel miserable because their lives are meaningless (the recurrent dull and poorly kept house façads could well be taken as a comparative symbol). In addition, everyone is so absorbed by his or her own distress and hardly capable of bothering about the anguish of the others. The three days end with a pervasive lack of contact. Written by Max Scharnberg, Stockholm,.
IMDB Rating: 6.9
IMDB Votes: 748
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union, Lithuania
Duration: 75 min
Plot tags: slow cinema, bleak, contemplative, artsy, aesthetic, avant garde
Similar in 80%
Whispering Pages (1994)
Plot Summary:
The pages that whisper through this brooding, beautiful tone poem are from nineteenth-century Russian literature, primarily Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. An anonymous man wanders through decomposing, fog-enshrouded catacombs and encounters a series of “the degraded and the humiliated,” including a holy prostitute and a Kafkaesque bureaucrat. Shot partly in Sokurov’s dreamlike black and white with a dense sound track of eerie, echoing voices and bursts of mournful Mahler.
IMDB Rating: 6.9
IMDB Votes: 630
Genere: Drama
Country: Russia, Germany
Duration: 77 min
Plot tags: spiritual, contemplative, existential, poetic, avant garde
Similar in 84%
The First Teacher (1965)
Plot Summary:
Dyuishen is assigned to the mountainous Kirghiz region of Central Asia by the Young Communist League after he is discharged from the Red Army. It is 1923 and the Civil war has ended. The former soldier becomes a teacher, bringing the Leninist doctrine to the remote Moslem area where elders did not allow children to go to school. He falls in love with one of his students, but the young woman is sold by her father to a wealthy chieftain. When the school is burned down, the majestic poplar trees that are a source of local pride are cut down to rebuild the new structure.
IMDB Rating: 7.5
IMDB Votes: 601
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 102 min
Plot tags: political
Similar in 87%
Khrustalyov, My Car! (1998)
Plot Summary:
Military doctor General Klenski is arrested in Stalin's Russia in 1953 during an anti-Semitic political campaign accused of being a participant in so-called "doctors' plot".
IMDB Rating: 7.3
IMDB Votes: 2000
Genere: Comedy, Drama
Country: Russia, France
Duration: 147 min
Plot tags: psychedelic, political, black and white, slow cinema, aesthetic, clever, offbeat, humorous, realistic, witty
Similar in 76%
Trial on the Road (1986)
Plot Summary:
A Russian POW joins the partisan guerrillas and proves his loyalty fighting the Nazis.
IMDB Rating: 7.9
IMDB Votes: 3000
Genere: Drama, War
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 96 min
Plot tags: political, black and white
Similar in 81%
King Lear (1970)
Plot Summary:
King Lear, old and tired, divides his kingdom among his daughters, giving great importance to their protestations of love for him. When Cordelia, youngest and most honest, refuses to idly flatter the old man in return for favor, he banishes her and turns for support to his remaining daughters. But Goneril and Regan have no love for him and instead plot to take all his power from him. In a parallel, Lear's loyal courtier Gloucester favors his illegitimate son Edmund after being told lies about his faithful son Edgar. Madness and tragedy befall both ill-starred fathers.
IMDB Rating: 8.1
IMDB Votes: 2000
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 140 min
Plot tags: spiritual, bleak, serious, emotional, realistic, contemplative
Similar in 79%
Tomorrow Was the War (1987)
Plot Summary:
A drama a life in a small Russian provincial town in 1940 - one year before Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Two school girls for the first time in their lives discover truth about Stalin repressions against innocent people. Based on a novel by Boris Vasiliev.
IMDB Rating: 7.7
IMDB Votes: 951
Genere: Drama, War
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 89 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 77%
Scarecrow (1984)
Plot Summary:
A twelve years old girl Lena who has come to live with her grandfather in a small Russian town is being bullied by her classmates. She took the rap of being a class traitor because she was in love with the boy who had betrayed his classmates when they were bunking off and going to cinema instead of a literature lesson. The class is penalized for that, not being allowed to go to Moscow for fall holidays with the rest of the school. Lena is being ostracized, "boycotted" however not telling the truth, waiting that the boy himself would confess to be guilty.
IMDB Rating: 7.7
IMDB Votes: 2000
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 127 min
Plot tags: bleak, suspenseful, sincere, touching, spiritual, serious, realistic, disturbing, gloomy, biting
Similar in 81%
Flights in Dreams and in Reality (1983)
Plot Summary:
On the eve of his fortieth anniversary Sergei Makarov looks back at his life and learns that he has achieved nothing. He was not able to be happy and to bring happiness to the closest people in his life, neither to his long-suffering wife nor young mistress nor friends nor work... It is about the men who never grew up and could not find themselves in the time of stagnation – gifted, charming, but infantile and lost, they never were able to realize themselves.
IMDB Rating: 7.5
IMDB Votes: 1000
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 92 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 85%
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%
You and Me (1971)
Plot Summary:
A neurosurgeon returns back to the USSR from Sweden and has to deal with rejection - both at work and at home.
IMDB Rating: 7.2
IMDB Votes: 431
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 97 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 78%
Heat (1963)
Plot Summary:
Larisa Shepitko's diploma film. An idealistic high school graduate goes to work on a state farm on the Kazakh steppe, only to clash with its authoritarian leader.
IMDB Rating: 7.0
IMDB Votes: 223
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union, Kyrgyzstan
Duration: 75 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 76%
Wild Pigeon (1986)
Plot Summary:
In a poor provincial town, the ragamuffin boys are frenziedly drilled for combat, and at nights the local elite, gathered in a pool room, boasts of fictitious biographies, while bands of boys amuse themselves with bloody fights on trashy vacant plots… One of the most vivid staples of the postwar childhood were pigeons. They could be bought, sold or stolen. One day a beautiful white dove appeared over the town. Risking his life, Ivan caught the White. And immediately became the target of the “pigeon” mafia….
IMDB Rating: 6.9
IMDB Votes: 183
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 100 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 82%
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 85%
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 78%
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 81%
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 79%
The Wishing Tree (1976)
Plot Summary:
This poetic parable is part of Tenghiz Abuladze’s cinematic triptych: “The Supplication” – “The Wishing Tree” – “Repentance”. The place is Georgia at the beginning of the 20th century. That’s how director Tenghiz Abuladze described his film: “’The Wishing Tree’ is a film about the people lit up by a dream. Every character has its own ideal. One is worshipping the skies, another the earth, some idolize the body, others elevate the spirit. Some destroy the body, others the soul…” Marita, the film’s heroine, arrived here to live with her aunt. She meets a poor young lad, Gedia, and falls in love with him. But her relatives are determined to marry the girl off to a local rich man….
IMDB Rating: 8.1
IMDB Votes: 2000
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 107 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 90%
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 77%
The Criminal Shall Not Escape (1965)
Plot Summary:
Mukhtar comes to live and work at the police kennels through rather unusual circumstances. Together with his handler, Glazychev, Mukhtar helps to solve large and small crimes.
IMDB Rating: 7.7
IMDB Votes: 622
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 82 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 82%
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 87%
Nostalgia (1983)
Plot Summary:
The Russian poet Andrei Gorchakov, accompanied by guide and translator Eugenia, is traveling through Italy researching the life of an 18th-century Russian composer. In an ancient spa town, he meets the lunatic Domenico, who years earlier had imprisoned his own family in his house for seven years to save them from the evils of the world. Seeing some deep truth in Domenico's act, Andrei becomes drawn to him. In a series of dreams, the poet's nostalgia for his homeland and his longing for his wife, his ambivalent feelings for Eugenia and Italy, and his sense of kinship with Domenico become intertwined.
IMDB Rating: 7.9
IMDB Votes: 29000
Genere: Drama
Country: Italy, Soviet Union
Duration: 125 min
Plot tags: atmospheric, philosophical, art house, cerebral, contemplative, poetic, black and white, visual, mind twisting, emotional
Similar in 84%
Mother and Son (1997)
Plot Summary:
A slow and poignant story of love and patience told via a dying mother nursed by her devoted son. The simple narrative is a thread woven among the deeply spiritual images of the countryside and cottage.
IMDB Rating: 7.3
IMDB Votes: 4000
Genere: Drama
Country: Russia, Germany
Duration: 73 min
Plot tags: contemplative, slow cinema, depressing, aesthetic, psychological, atmospheric, mind bending, touching, serious, emotional
Similar in 79%
The Steamroller and the Violin (1961)
Plot Summary:
Seven year old Sasha practices violin every day to satisfy the ambition of his parents. Already withdrawn as a result of his routines, Sasha quickly regains confidence when he accidentally meets and befriends worker Sergei, who works on a steamroller in their upscale Moscow neighborhood.
IMDB Rating: 7.4
IMDB Votes: 7000
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 46 min
Plot tags: art house, serious, realistic, spiritual, uplifting, touching, feel good, stylized, slow cinema, weird