Best movies like Splendor
Last updated March 2024
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Plot Summary:
Splendor is the name of an old movie theater managed by Jordan (Mastroianni), who inherited it from his father. The theater is in decay and only generates debts and trouble, but Jordan gets aid in his almost quixotian quest from projectionist Luigi (Troisi) and ushurette Chantale (Vlady). However, Jordan is finally forced to sell the Splendor to businessman Lo Fazio (Piperno), which plans to transform it in some kind of furniture store. When Jordan leaves the theater for the last time (the very first scene), he recalls the glorious days of Splendor and movies in general.
IMDB Rating: 7.1
IMDB Votes: 1000
Genere: Drama
Country: Italy, France
Duration: 115 min
Plot tags: emotional
Best tv shows and movies like Splendor (1989):
Similar in 76%
I Knew Her Well (1965)
Plot Summary:
Adriana, a young woman from the provinces, moves to Rome in order to become a celebrity.
IMDB Rating: 7.6
IMDB Votes: 3000
Genere: Drama
Country: Italy, France, West Germany
Duration: 115 min
Plot tags: depressing
Similar in 90%
The Wind Blows Round (2005)
Plot Summary:
The aging, conservative population of a small, sleepy village in the Italian Alps are surprised to see that a former French professor has settled there with his young wife and their three children to produce goat cheese, in order to escape the wrongs of civilization. At first they are suspicious of his unconventional ideas and lifestyle, then are conquered by the enthusiasm, kindness, helpfulness of the young family and start to see in them a possible rebirth of the place. But little by little misunderstandings, envy and conflicts take over.
IMDB Rating: 7.4
IMDB Votes: 759
Genere: Drama
Country: Italy
Duration: 110 min
Plot tags: independent film
Similar in 77%
Almost a Man (1966)
Plot Summary:
Jacques Perrin was awarded Best Actor at the 1966 Venice Film Festival for his gripping portrayal of a young writer's descent into madness. Alienated, neurotic, and plagued by guilt, Perrin retreats from reality, loses interest in work, and comes to the brink of suicide before being sent to an asylum for shock therapy. Escaping from the asylum, Perrin returns to his boyhood home, where he learns the reasons for his present mental state. The strong supporting cast, including Lea Padovani and Pier Paolo Capponi, bring credence to their roles, but it is De Seta's direction, Perrin's controlled performance, and a relatively subtle score by Ennio Morricone which keep this film from becoming as overwrought as it might have become in other hands.
IMDB Rating: 7.1
IMDB Votes: 223
Genere: Drama
Country: Italy, France
Duration: 93 min
Plot tags: existential
Similar in 88%
Land in Between (1996)
Plot Summary:
SILHOUETTE: Nigerian prostitutes dealing with miscellaneous customers EUGLEN & GERTIAN: Daily recruitment of Albanian immigrants seeking work but without working residency permit. SELF SERVICE: a night with Ahmed, egyptian illegal gas station attender, who has been living in italy for many years.
IMDB Rating: 6.6
IMDB Votes: 208
Genere: Drama
Country: Italy
Duration: 78 min
Plot tags: semi documentary, independent film
Similar in 86%
Sweet Skin (1963)
Plot Summary:
Strip-tease has a pleasing Paris setting and a convincing strip club atmosphere, where a roster of exotic dancers do their thing. Making the club atmosphere work is the animated Dany Saval, as a charming gossip and outspoken cheerleader for the art of the strip-tease. Berthe encourages Ariane to loosen up and enjoy what she's doing.
IMDB Rating: 6.2
IMDB Votes: 179
Genere: Drama
Country: France, Italy
Duration: 95 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 87%
Queen of the Blues (1979)
Plot Summary:
A seedy striptease club in London's West End becomes the target for unpleasant crooks.
IMDB Rating: 2.9
IMDB Votes: 173
Genere: Drama
Country: UK
Duration: 62 min
Plot tags: sex comedy
Similar in 81%
Melissa (1995)
Plot Summary:
Melissa follows her dream of becoming a dancer all the way to New York City but finds when she gets there that reaching her goal might cost more than she is willing to sacrifice. In dire need of money, she becomes an exotic dancer in a strip club where a sinister love triangle puts both her heart and her life in danger.
IMDB Rating: 3.9
IMDB Votes: 136
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 81 min
Plot tags: erotic
Similar in 87%
Mark's Diary (2019)
Plot Summary:
Mark and Andrew are two disabled men. When they meet, an incredible attraction between them emerges but it can only flourish as a "mental construct". What they have is a virtual kind of love, a fantasy, but also the awareness that nothing will ever be the same again.
IMDB Rating:
IMDB Votes:
Genere: Drama
Country: Italy, UK
Duration: 75 min
Plot tags: independent film, art film
Similar in 77%
His Days Are Numbered (1962)
Plot Summary:
A middle-aged plumber quits his job and questions his life after seeing somebody his own age suddenly die from a heart attack on his way to work.
IMDB Rating: 7.6
IMDB Votes: 577
Genere: Drama
Country: Italy
Duration: 98 min
Plot tags: existential
Similar in 88%
Frig (2018)
Plot Summary:
Frig — a film in three parts (Love, Shit and Sperm) — is an experimental drama beginning with the end of a love affair. Love and the resulting experience are presented as a metaphor that goes beyond the personal and into a deeper consideration of life’s cycles, ultimately becoming a reflection on life, death and rebirth. Opening with a personal poem and accompanied by fragmented images, the film plunge into Sade’s universe in “120 Days of Sodom” and charts the descent into one’s own, personal hell, revealing the hidden face of society.
IMDB Rating: 5.4
IMDB Votes: 93
Genere: Drama
Country: France
Duration: 60 min
Plot tags: avant garde, experimental, art house, allegory, queer cinema, scatology
Similar in 82%
The Beekeeper (1986)
Plot Summary:
A bee keeper, Spiros, travels from the north to the south of Greece with his bees to meet the spring.
IMDB Rating: 7.3
IMDB Votes: 3000
Genere: Drama
Country: Greece, France, Italy
Duration: 122 min
Plot tags: road movie, art house, slow cinema, contemplative, aesthetic, avant garde
Similar in 85%
Family Portrait (1962)
Plot Summary:
Marcello Mastroianni gives a sensitive, finely judged performance as Enrico, a struggling journalist in the Rome of 1945. He receives a phone call informing him that his younger brother Lorenzo (Jacques Perrin) has died. Enrico recalls their long and difficult relationship; he was brought up by their poor but warm-hearted grandmother (Sylvie), Lorenzo was raised as a gentleman by a wealthy local aristocrat. Reunited in the Florence of the 1930s, Enrico becomes his spoilt brother's keeper, forever haunted by a sense of guilty responsibility towards a man he both hates and loves. Beautifully photographed by Giuseppe Rotunno, this austere, deeply-felt masterwork has been acclaimed as one of Zurlini's greatest achievements.
IMDB Rating: 7.2
IMDB Votes: 1000
Genere: Drama
Country: Italy
Duration: 113 min
Plot tags: psychological, touching, serious, realistic, non-linear
Similar in 89%
The Empty Canvas (1963)
Plot Summary:
An aspiring young artist breaks from his wealthy, possessive mother to live a bohemian existence in the artist's section of Rome and falls in love with a beautiful model who wants an uncommitted relationship.
IMDB Rating: 6.8
IMDB Votes: 1000
Genere: Drama
Country: Italy, France
Duration: 105 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 84%
The Last Movie (1971)
Plot Summary:
A film shoot in Peru goes badly wrong when an actor is killed in a stunt, and the unit wrangler, Kansas, decides to give up film-making and stay on in the village, shacking up with local prostitute Maria. But his dreams of an unspoiled existence are interrupted when the local priest asks him to help stop the villagers killing each other by re-enacting scenes from the film for real because they don't understand movie fakery.
IMDB Rating: 6.1
IMDB Votes: 3000
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 108 min
Plot tags: psychedelic, mondo, cult classic, rough, offbeat, serious, realistic, surreal, contemplative, neo noir
Similar in 85%
Down the Ancient Stairs (1975)
Plot Summary:
A mental hospital somewhere in Tuscany during the thirties. Far away from fascism, this closed world is rules over by Dr. Bonaccorsi, a passionate benevolent psychiatrist whose dream is to isolate the germ of madness. He is also a very active ladies'man and makes three women benefit from his sexual itch: Francesca the hospital manager's wife, Bianca, his devoted nurse and Carla, a nymphomaniac doctor's wife. His well-ordered universe starts being challenged with the coming of Anna, a trainee psychiatrist, who disapproves of his theory on the origin of madness. Worse, she resists his advances. As Bonaccorsi is more insecure than he looks, what will become of him.
IMDB Rating: 6.7
IMDB Votes: 405
Genere: Drama
Country: Italy, France
Duration: 102 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 83%
Dubbel-8 (2000)
Plot Summary:
The arrival of a beautiful new stranger in town prompts two boys to spend their summer holidays enticing the young woman to act in a short-film. However their motivation is purely that of seeing her naked.
IMDB Rating: 5.1
IMDB Votes: 652
Genere: Drama
Country: Sweden
Duration: 88 min
Plot tags: psychological, captivating, disturbing, erotic
Similar in 83%
Last Film Show (2021)
Plot Summary:
A 9-year-old boy in a remote village in India begins a lifelong love affair with cinema when he bribes his way into a rundown movie palace and spends a Summer watching movies from the projection booth.
IMDB Rating: 7.5
IMDB Votes: 4000
Genere: Drama
Country: India, France, USA
Duration: 110 min
Plot tags: psychological, captivating, entertaining, disturbing, gujarati, semi autobiographical, extraordinary, nostalgic
Similar in 75%
A Useful Life (2010)
Plot Summary:
A movie-theater employee adjusts to a new life after the cinema he worked at for over 25 years is forced to shut down.
IMDB Rating: 6.4
IMDB Votes: 1000
Genere: Drama
Country: Uruguay, Spain
Duration: 67 min
Plot tags: realistic, sentimental, contemplative, psychological, atmospheric, captivating, sincere, uplifting, serious
Similar in 89%
The Stranger (1967)
Plot Summary:
The Stranger is a literal (but still very cinematic) adaptation of the novel by Albert Camus. Marcello Mastrioanni stars as Meursault, a man who feels utterly isolated from everyone and everything around him. This alienation results in sudden, inexplicable bursts of violence, culminating in murder. The subsequent trial of Meursault manages to convey the oppressive heat of its Algerian setting with director Luchino Visconti's usual veneer of elegant decadence. Though set in the 1930s, the sensibilities of the film were very much attuned to the 1960s: the problem was that Camus' sentiments had been adopted by so many other filmmakers of the period that The Stranger seemed rather commonplace. The film was originally released in Italy as Lo Staniero.
IMDB Rating: 7.1
IMDB Votes: 3000
Genere: Drama
Country: Italy, France, Algeria
Duration: 104 min
Plot tags: philosophical, neo noir, neorealism, existential, psychological, sincere, thought provoking, clever, bleak, serious
Similar in 78%
A Special Day (1977)
Plot Summary:
The film is set during the late 1930s: the occasion is the first meeting between Mussolini and Hitler. Left alone in her tenement home when her fascist husband runs off to attend the historic event, Sophia Loren strikes up a friendship with her homosexual neighbor Mastroianni. As the day segues into night, Loren and Mastroianni develop a very special relationship that will radically alter both of their outlooks on life.
IMDB Rating: 8.1
IMDB Votes: 15000
Genere: Drama
Country: Italy, Canada
Duration: 106 min
Plot tags: psychological, philosophical, minimal cast, cerebral, poetic, touching, emotional, realistic, talky, semi serious
Similar in 75%
Macaroni (1985)
Plot Summary:
A businessman from the United States returns to Italy for the first time in four decades only to discover that an old girlfriend of his, along with her brother, have involved him in a massive hoax.
IMDB Rating: 6.4
IMDB Votes: 841
Genere: Comedy, Drama
Country: Italy
Duration: 105 min
Plot tags: feel good, humorous, realistic, semi serious
Similar in 80%
Fair Sex (2012)
Plot Summary:
Would-be filmmaker Sophie left Africa for Canada as a child. After graduating, she films the daily doings as part of a summer job at a fair. When pointing the camera at herself, she reveals painful secrets from the past.
IMDB Rating: 6.8
IMDB Votes: 107
Genere: Drama
Country: Canada
Duration: 89 min
Plot tags: sincere, serious, captivating, emotional, thought provoking, explicit, realistic, hot
Similar in 86%
The Story of Piera (1983)
Plot Summary:
This sometimes confusing erotic drama about the incestuous relationship of a mother and daughter is based on the autobiography of Italian theater actress Piera Degli Esposti though it focuses more on her mother Eugenia.
IMDB Rating: 6.1
IMDB Votes: 821
Genere: Biography, Drama
Country: Italy, France, West Germany
Duration: 105 min
Plot tags: erotic, neorealism, independent film, psycho sexual, grotesque
Similar in 84%
Shun Li and the Poet (2011)
Plot Summary:
A study of the friendship between a Chinese woman and a fisherman who came to Italy from Yugoslavia many years ago, who live in a small city-island in the Veneto lagoon.
IMDB Rating: 7.2
IMDB Votes: 2000
Genere: Drama
Country: Italy, France
Duration: 98 min
Plot tags: serious, atmospheric, touching, emotional, realistic, light, gloomy
Similar in 81%
Sweet Dreams (1981)
Plot Summary:
Michele Apicella is a young film and theater director, who lives his troubles as an artist. In Italy reach the Eighties, and Michele, who was contestant in the Sixties, now finds himself in a new era full of crisis of values and ignorance. So Michele, with his works, meants to represent the typical outcast and left indifferent intellectual outcast who establishes a breach between him and the world of ordinary people.
IMDB Rating: 6.9
IMDB Votes: 1000
Genere: Comedy, Drama
Country: Italy
Duration: 105 min
Plot tags: semi autobiographical
Similar in 89%
A Few Days of Respite (2010)
Plot Summary:
Mohsen teaches French at the University of Tehran, and Hassan is a photographer. Mohsen and Hassan are also lovers, and in Iran they live in fear, as homosexuality is punishable by death. Tired of denying their love, Mohsen and Hassan flee Iran to head to Paris, where they'll be illegal aliens but can at least live openly as a couple. To avoid arousing suspicion until they arrive in Paris, Mohsen and Hassan keep their distance while traveling, and during a train stop, Mohsen helps a sixty-ish women, Yolande, with her luggage. The two strike up a conversation and she clearly enjoys his company; over dinner, she offers to help him find work in town and let him stay at her apartment. It's clear to Yolande that Mohsen is an illegal immigrant, but she doesn't realize that he's gay, and he finds himself wondering if he should stay with Hassan or live with Yolande, where he would not have love but would enjoy safety, security and could easily become a French citizen through marriage.
IMDB Rating: 5.9
IMDB Votes: 43
Genere: Drama
Country: France, Algeria
Duration: 79 min
Plot tags: emotional, sincere, touching, serious, realistic, contemplative, queer cinema
Similar in 86%
Everybody's Fine (1990)
Plot Summary:
Matteo Scuro is a retired Sicilian bureaucrat, a widower with five children, all of whom live on the mainland and hold responsible jobs. He decides to surprise each with a visit and finds none as he imagined.
IMDB Rating: 7.7
IMDB Votes: 4000
Genere: Drama
Country: Italy, France
Duration: 118 min
Plot tags: psychological, philosophical, sentimental, clever, serious, emotional, tragicomedy, realistic, contemplative, road movie
Similar in 84%
The Night (1961)
Plot Summary:
A married couple attend a bourgeois party and wade through the stifling strain that long-term marriage has imposed upon them.
IMDB Rating: 8.0
IMDB Votes: 24000
Genere: Drama
Country: Italy, France
Duration: 122 min
Plot tags: cerebral, art house, erotic, black and white, neorealism, atmospheric, realistic, contemplative, stylized, sexual
Similar in 78%
Cinema Paradiso (1988)
Plot Summary:
A filmmaker recalls his childhood, when he fell in love with the movies at his village's theater and formed a deep friendship with the theater's projectionist.
IMDB Rating: 8.5
IMDB Votes: 277000
Genere: Drama, Romance
Country: Italy, France
Duration: 155 min
Plot tags: sad, uplifting, inspirational, touching, emotional, realistic, feel good, atmospheric, heartbreaking, compassionate
Similar in 87%
Eight and a Half (1963)
Plot Summary:
With 8 ½ Frederico Fellini leaves a self-portrait where dreams and reality are a mix. With help from a most excellent cast and unique scenery this self reflecting film is one of his master works.
IMDB Rating: 8.0
IMDB Votes: 124000
Genere: Drama
Country: Italy, France
Duration: 138 min
Plot tags: art house, psychological, surreal, philosophical, cerebral, stylized, black and white, atmospheric, postmodern, visual