Best movies like One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Last updated March 2024
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Plot Summary:
Fly-on-the-wall treatment of an ordinary day in the life of a prisoner in Stalin's Gulag. Closely adapted from Solzhenitsyn's classic novel based on his own experiences. Shot entirely on location in northern Norway.
IMDB Rating: 7.1
IMDB Votes: 617
Genere: Drama
Country: UK, Norway, USA
Duration: 104 min
Plot tags: depressing, political, independent film
Best tv shows and movies like One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1970):
Similar in 76%
The Pacifist (1970)
Plot Summary:
Barbara (Monica Vitti) is a journalist investigating the local counterculture who becomes involved, after an unpleasant start of battery and stalking, with Pierre Clémenti's louche all-around dropout.
IMDB Rating: 5.4
IMDB Votes: 210
Genere: Drama
Country: Italy, France, West Germany
Duration: 85 min
Plot tags: political
Similar in 90%
Workers, Peasants (2001)
Plot Summary:
A group of men and women have been brought together after World War II, when Italy regained its national and territorial unity. They make up a primitive community which seeks to erase not only the distress created by the war but also the hardships of life, and look to protect themselves from violence, misery and fear. Amid the ruins of this post-war period, these men and women build a new rapport between themselves, between sexes, between generations, between social and geographical origins, between political camps.
IMDB Rating: 5.9
IMDB Votes: 182
Genere: Drama
Country: France, Germany, Italy
Duration: 123 min
Plot tags: light
Similar in 88%
Class Relations (1984)
Plot Summary:
A young man (Christian Heinisch), recently arrived in New York from Europe, becomes swept up in a series of events that are beyond his knowledge or control.
IMDB Rating: 6.9
IMDB Votes: 748
Genere: Drama
Country: West Germany, France
Duration: 126 min
Plot tags: political, contemplative, masterpiece
Similar in 81%
White Night (1995)
Plot Summary:
Directed by Arnon Zadok.
IMDB Rating: 7.6
IMDB Votes: 26
Genere: Drama
Country: Israel
Duration: 92 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 79%
Gulag Vorkuta (2016)
Plot Summary:
Two dissidents, fall in love in a Marxist USSR Gulag death camp. As their friends die, they commit to the seeming impossible, escape, but both must first answer their deepest moral questions about the meaning of life, sacrifice and freedom.
IMDB Rating: 6.8
IMDB Votes: 61
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 98 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 75%
Prison Break (2017)
Plot Summary:
One late night in June 1942, Sakuma Seitaro dangles from the frame of a skylight in an isolation cell in Akita Prison. He forces open the glass window and breaks out of jail. This crime even reaches the ears of Urata Susumu, the chief warden of Kosuge Prison in Tokyo. Urata had been in charge of those sentenced to life in the prison until last year. Although Sakuma is a dangerous person who had also broken out of jail in Aomori, he submits to Urata who is the only person who had treated him kindly in the past. However, three months after escaping from jail, Sakuma shows up at Urata’s house. He has come to complain about the inhumane Akita prison officers. But he is locked up again after Urata notifies the police during an unguarded moment. A year later, Sakuma is sent to Abashiri Prison and Urata is also ordered to transfer as the prison’s chief warden.
IMDB Rating: 6.4
IMDB Votes: 138
Genere: Drama
Country: Japan
Duration: 108 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 84%
Gli Invisibili (1988)
Plot Summary:
At the beginning of the eighties, Sirio, a young worker at the steelworks in Terni with a past in the student struggles, decided to abandon his job as a soldier in an extreme left-wing group.
IMDB Rating: 5.7
IMDB Votes: 28
Genere: Drama
Country: Italy
Duration: 99 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 84%
Spring Night (1976)
Plot Summary:
A story of two siblings who for the first time spend a night without their parents, and are visited by strangers who ask for room for the night. Based on the novel by Norwegian writer Tarjei Vesaas.
IMDB Rating: 5.0
IMDB Votes: 32
Genere: Drama
Country: Norway
Duration: 95 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 85%
Breathing Lessons (1994)
Plot Summary:
A married couple review their lives and renew their love for one another while driving to a friend's funeral.
IMDB Rating: 6.5
IMDB Votes: 424
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 93 min
Plot tags: road movie
Similar in 87%
Comrade Pedersen (2006)
Plot Summary:
A drama focused on Norwegian society in the 1970s, an era politically influenced by Marxism and Leninism.
IMDB Rating: 5.7
IMDB Votes: 2000
Genere: Drama
Country: Norway
Duration: 123 min
Plot tags: philosophical, political
Similar in 79%
The Brig (1964)
Plot Summary:
A ultra-realistic depiction of life in a Marine Corps brig (or jail) at a camp in Japan in 1957. Marine prisoners are awakened and put through work details for the course of a single day, submitting in the course of it to extremely harsh and shocking physical and mental degradation and abuse.
IMDB Rating: 7.1
IMDB Votes: 299
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 68 min
Plot tags: experimental, political, independent film
Similar in 90%
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 88%
Mandela (1987)
Plot Summary:
Nelson Mandela becomes South Africa's first Black President, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his leadership in negotiating a bloodless revolution in that country.
IMDB Rating: 6.5
IMDB Votes: 259
Genere: Drama
Country: UK
Duration: 135 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 79%
Lessons at the End of Spring (1991)
Plot Summary:
A young boy loses his innocence in a pre-perestroika Russian prison during the chaotic last months of the Khrushchev regime.
IMDB Rating: 6.7
IMDB Votes: 153
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 75 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 90%
Havlandet (1985)
Plot Summary:
This is a tale that has an epic scope in scenery "the northern snow-covered lands of coastal Norway" and is dramatized by moments of tumultuous stormy weather. But the focus is on Heikki (Stein Bjorn) a young man who is inspired by the northern lights to take a horse-drawn sled and make his way to the sea, hoping to come back with abundant fish. He is overtaken by a snowstorm and is forced to find shelter in a small, isolated cabin that is home to a half-crazy widow, her baby, and a blind man. Driven to arson by her internal demons, the woman destroys the cabin. She and the blind man perish, but Heikki manages to save the baby. He is now faced with an even greater challenge as he holds the infant and looks in the direction of the coastline.
IMDB Rating: 5.4
IMDB Votes: 25
Genere: Drama
Country: Norway
Duration: 90 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 80%
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 79%
The Dresser (1983)
Plot Summary:
In a touring Shakespearean theater group, a backstage hand - the dresser, is devoted to the brilliant but tyrannical head of the company. He struggles to support the deteriorating star as the company struggles to carry on during the London blitz. The pathos of his backstage efforts rival the pathos in the story of Lear and the Fool that is being presented on-stage, as the situation comes to a crisis.
IMDB Rating: 7.5
IMDB Votes: 6000
Genere: Drama
Country: UK
Duration: 118 min
Plot tags: psychological, realistic, talky, touching, serious, gloomy, crying, independent film, tense, light
Similar in 81%
Judgement in Berlin (1988)
Plot Summary:
American judge in Germany must decide if the hijacking of an East German plane into West Berlin was justified.
IMDB Rating: 5.8
IMDB Votes: 871
Genere: Drama
Country: West Germany, USA
Duration: 96 min
Plot tags: realistic, serious, suspense, sincere, touching, political, independent film
Similar in 84%
The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968)
Plot Summary:
Metropolitan Archbishop Lakota of L'viv, freed after twenty years in the Soviet Gulag, travels to Rome where circumstances conspire to see him elevated to the Papacy. Inspired by the life story of Ukrainian Catholic Cardinal Josyf Slipyj,.
IMDB Rating: 7.0
IMDB Votes: 4000
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 162 min
Plot tags: tense, epic, serious, realistic, christian film, retro, spiritual
Similar in 84%
A Rather English Marriage (1998)
Plot Summary:
A squadron leader and a retired milkman decide to bury their differences and move in together after they are both widowed on the very same night. They become a companionable if odd couple, until their unlikely friendship is threatened by the arrival of an alluring woman with a hidden agenda.
IMDB Rating: 7.8
IMDB Votes: 608
Genere: Drama
Country: UK
Duration: 104 min
Plot tags: touching, humorous, realistic, semi serious
Similar in 87%
Communists (2014)
Plot Summary:
Jean-Marie Straub pushes this musicality of blocks to a paroxysmal extreme, mixing blocks of time (40 years separate the various extracts that are going to be used, and what is to be filmed), blocks of text (Malraux, Fortini, Vittorini, Hölderlin) and blocks of language (French, Italian, German), and from this ruckus emerges the history of the world, yes, History with a capital H, and from the same movement, the political hope of its being overtaken. So this is an adventure film, about the Human adventure, still one that is always, in the end, overtaken by Nature. (Arnaud Dommerc).
IMDB Rating: 6.0
IMDB Votes: 192
Genere: Drama
Country: France, Switzerland
Duration: 70 min
Plot tags: experimental, thought provoking, atmospheric, serious, realistic, political
Similar in 79%
Women of San Quentin (1983)
Plot Summary:
A young female prison guard finds out that her first assignment is to San Quentin, one of the toughest prisons in the country.
IMDB Rating: 5.8
IMDB Votes: 110
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 100 min
Plot tags: rough, bleak, serious, realistic
Similar in 88%
Fast-Walking (1982)
Plot Summary:
A dirty corrections officer gets involved in a murder plot involving one of the inmates.
IMDB Rating: 6.4
IMDB Votes: 749
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 115 min
Plot tags: political, independent film, rough, clever, bleak, serious, realistic, suspenseful, disturbing, cynical
Similar in 82%
King Rat (1965)
Plot Summary:
When Singapore surrendered to the Japanese in 1942 the Allied POWs, mostly British but including a few Americans, were incarcerated in Changi prison. This was a POW detention center like no other. There were no walls or barbed-wire fences for the simple reason that there was no place for the prisoners to escape to. Included among the prisoners is the American Cpl. King, a wheeler dealer who has managed to established a pretty good life for himself in the camp. While most of the prisoners are near starvation and have uniforms that are in tatters, King eats well and and has crisp clean clothes to wear every day. His nemesis is Lt. Robin Grey, the camp Provost who attempts to keep good order and discipline. He knows that King is breaking camp rules by bartering with the Japanese but can't quite get the evidence he needs to stop him. King soon forms a friendship with Lt. Peter Marlowe an upper class British officer who is fascinated with King's élan and no rules approach to life.
IMDB Rating: 7.5
IMDB Votes: 5000
Genere: Drama, War
Country: USA
Duration: 134 min
Plot tags: black and white, bleak, realistic, sad, rough, serious, suspenseful, independent film, freeze frame, feel good
Similar in 87%
Blind Flight (2003)
Plot Summary:
The true story of Irishman Brian Keenan and Englishman John McCarthy's extraordinary relationship as hostages of militias in Lebanon during the 1979-91 Civil War.
IMDB Rating: 6.8
IMDB Votes: 682
Genere: Drama
Country: UK
Duration: 97 min
Plot tags: sincere, thought provoking, serious, captivating, political, realistic, gloomy
Similar in 85%
The Blue Kite (1993)
Plot Summary:
The lives of a Beijing family throughout the 1950s and 1960s, as they experience the impact of the Hundred Flowers Campaign, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution.
IMDB Rating: 7.5
IMDB Votes: 3000
Genere: Drama
Country: China, Hong Kong
Duration: 140 min
Plot tags: depressing, political, realistic, controversial, sincere, thought provoking, serious, contemplative, gloomy, tense
Similar in 88%
Last Orders (2001)
Plot Summary:
Jack Dodd was a London butcher who enjoyed a pint with his mates for over 50 years. When he died, he died as he lived, with a smile on his face watching a horse race on which he had bet, with borrowed money. But before he died he had a final request, 'Last Orders', that his ashes be scattered in the sea at Margate. The movie follows his mates, Ray, Lenny and Vic and his foster son Vince as they journey to the sea with the ashes. Along the way, the threads of their lives, their loves and their disappointments are woven together in their memories of Jack and his wife Amy.
IMDB Rating: 6.9
IMDB Votes: 7000
Genere: Drama
Country: UK, Germany
Duration: 109 min
Plot tags: sentimental, touching, realistic, talky, atmospheric, sincere, serious, emotional, contemplative, road movie
Similar in 80%
Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985)
Plot Summary:
Luis Molina and Valentin Arregui are cell mates in a South American prison. Luis, a homosexual, is found guilty of immoral behaviour and Valentin is a political prisoner. To escape reality Luis invents romantic movies, while Valentin tries to keep his mind on the situation he's in. During the time they spend together, the two men come to understand and respect one another.
IMDB Rating: 7.3
IMDB Votes: 17000
Genere: Drama
Country: Brazil, USA
Duration: 120 min
Plot tags: political, psychological, sincere, touching, captivating, clever, emotional, talky, sexy, erotic
Similar in 83%
Bless You, Prison (2002)
Plot Summary:
Based on Nicole Valery-Grossu's European best seller autobiographic novel "Bless you, prison", the film is a true story, with real events and characters. A young intellectual woman, Nicole is arrested. There follow three months of exhausting interrogation and isolation. Alone in a cell, she undergoes a spiritual experience similar to that of the great mystics.
IMDB Rating: 7.5
IMDB Votes: 543
Genere: Drama
Country: Romania
Duration: 90 min
Plot tags: uplifting, thought provoking, disturbing, captivating, bleak, serious, realistic
Similar in 90%
Attica (1980)
Plot Summary:
A behind the scenes look of the 1971 prisoners revolt at the Attica prison.
IMDB Rating: 6.5
IMDB Votes: 526
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 97 min
Plot tags: political, rough, thought provoking, serious, captivating, realistic, suspenseful, disturbing, tension, suspense