Best movies like Zama
Last updated March 2024
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Plot Summary:
Based on the novel by Antonio Di Benedetto. Don Diego de Zama, a Spanish officer of the 17th century settled in Asunción, awaits his transfer to Buenos Aires.
IMDB Rating: 6.7
IMDB Votes: 7000
Genere: Drama, History
Country: Argentina, Brazil, Spain, Dominican Republic, France, Netherlands, Mexico, Switzerland, USA, Portugal, Lebanon
Duration: 115 min
Plot tags: art house, artsy, avant garde, independent film, existential, cult classic
Best tv shows and movies like Zama (2017):
Similar in 85%
Fanny Lye Deliver'd (2019)
Plot Summary:
On an isolated English farm in 1657, Fanny lives a quiet life with her oppressive husband John and their young son. One day their life is rocked with the arrival of young couple Thomas and Rebecca who claim to have been robbed and need a place to stay. But are these strangers really who they say they are?.
IMDB Rating: 6.2
IMDB Votes: 2000
Genere: Drama, History, Thriller
Country: UK, Germany
Duration: 112 min
Plot tags: masterpiece
Similar in 82%
Sunset (2018)
Plot Summary:
Set in Budapest in 1913, when the city was considered to be at the heart of Europe. 20-year-old Irisz Leiter, arrives in the Hungarian capital after spending her younger years in an orphanage, hoping to work as a milliner in the legendary hat store that belonged to her late parents. She is suddenly confronted with her past and starts searching for answers about her family before stumbling upon dark secrets.
IMDB Rating: 6.3
IMDB Votes: 5000
Genere: Drama, History
Country: Hungary, France
Duration: 142 min
Plot tags: art house
Similar in 85%
Lola (2006)
Plot Summary:
The film is a French-Spanish production and most of the dialog is in French. 'Lo que se de Lola' - in English 'What I know about Lola' - is about a lonely guy, living an uneventful life in Paris. He takes care of his mother. One day, a girl with a more exciting life moves in his apartment building.
IMDB Rating: 5.9
IMDB Votes: 249
Genere: Drama
Country: Spain, France
Duration: 112 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 79%
The Black Book (2018)
Plot Summary:
The story of the adventures, in the twilight of the eighteenth century, of a singular couple formed by a little orphan with mysterious origins and his young Italian nurse of a similarly uncertain birth. They lead us in their wake, from Rome to Paris, from Lisbon to London, from Parma to Venice. Always followed in the shadows, for obscure reasons, by a suspicious-looking Calabrian and a troubling cardinal, they make us explore the dark intrigues of the Vatican, the pangs of a fatal passion, a gruesome duel, banter at the court of Versailles and the convulsions of the French Revolution.
IMDB Rating: 5.3
IMDB Votes: 231
Genere: Drama, History, Romance
Country: Portugal, France
Duration: 113 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 86%
The Conspiracy of Torture (1969)
Plot Summary:
In 1599 Italy, Beatrice Cenci is the teenage daughter of the crazed landowner and nobleman Francesco Cenci whom he keeps his daughter locked up in the dungeon of his castle and sexually abuses her as well. Beatrice then plots with her stepmother, her besotted servant Olimpio, as well as a local bandit, named Catalano, to plan Francesco’s murder.
IMDB Rating: 6.6
IMDB Votes: 1000
Genere: Drama, History
Country: Italy
Duration: 99 min
Plot tags: slasher, gothic horror, classic horror
Similar in 82%
Salem Witch Trials (2002)
Plot Summary:
The film recounts the sobering tale of how 19 innocent lives were taken in a community experiencing paranoid hysteria regarding the suspected - but unproved - presence of the occult in the small New England town.
IMDB Rating: 6.0
IMDB Votes: 941
Genere: Drama, History
Country: Canada, USA
Duration: 189 min
Plot tags: serious, realistic, suspenseful, disturbing, suspense, detective, historical drama, thought provoking, fairy tale
Similar in 79%
Ganga Zumba (1963)
Plot Summary:
The life of a runaway slave who founded the Quilombo dos Palmares, an outlaw community of Brazilian slaves.
IMDB Rating: 6.6
IMDB Votes: 132
Genere: Drama, History
Country: Brazil
Duration: 100 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 83%
Mademoiselle Paradis (2017)
Plot Summary:
18th century Vienna. The true story of Maria Theresia von Paradis, a gifted piano player and close friend of Mozart’s, who lost her eye-sight as a child. Desperate to cure their talented daughter, the Paradis entrust Maria to Dr. Mesmer, a forward-thinking-physician who gives her the care and attention that she requires. With the doctor’s innovative techniques of magnetism, Maria slowly recovers her sight. But this miracle comes at a price as the woman progressively starts to lose her gift for music. Faced with a heavy dilemma, Mademoiselle Paradis will have to choose: an ordinary life in the light or an extraordinary life in darkness, as a virtuoso.
IMDB Rating: 6.6
IMDB Votes: 790
Genere: Drama, History
Country: Austria, Germany
Duration: 97 min
Plot tags: atmospheric, serious, captivating, stylized, period piece
Similar in 86%
Hans Staden (1999)
Plot Summary:
On the eve of his return to Europe after an extended involuntary stay in 16th-century Brazil, the German sailor Hans Staden is captured by a hostile cannibal Indian tribe. In order to survive he tries to convince the Indians that he is not Portuguese (their enemies) but a friend of the French (their allies), and that his God would be very angry if they were to eat him.
IMDB Rating: 6.6
IMDB Votes: 372
Genere: Biography, Drama, History
Country: Brazil, Portugal
Duration: 92 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 80%
Age of Uprising: The Legend of Michael Kohlhaas (2013)
Plot Summary:
In the 16th century in the Cévennes, a horse dealer by the name of Michael Kohlhaas leads a happy and prosperous family life. When a lord treats him unjustly, this pious, upstanding man raises an army and puts the country to fire and sword in order to have his rights restored.
IMDB Rating: 6.1
IMDB Votes: 9000
Genere: Drama, History
Country: France, Germany
Duration: 122 min
Plot tags: serious, captivating, realistic, stylized, action adventure, period drama
Similar in 81%
The Other Conquest (1998)
Plot Summary:
The film is a drama about the aftermath of the 1520s Spanish Conquest of Mexico told from the perspective of the indigenous Aztec people. It explores the social, religious, and psychological changes brought about by a historical process of colonization that both defined the American continent and is also highly reminiscent of today’s neocolonialism.
IMDB Rating: 6.6
IMDB Votes: 1000
Genere: Drama, History
Country: Mexico
Duration: 105 min
Plot tags: serious, realistic, baroque
Similar in 78%
El Dorado (1988)
Plot Summary:
The story of an expedition down the Orinoco and Amazon rivers in 1560 by Spanish soldiers searching for the fabled city of gold, El Dorado.
IMDB Rating: 6.4
IMDB Votes: 648
Genere: Drama, History
Country: Spain, France, Italy
Duration: 149 min
Plot tags: tense, rough, bleak, epic, serious, captivating, realistic, disturbing
Similar in 79%
She Said (2022)
Plot Summary:
New York Times reporters Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor break one of the most important stories in a generation — a story that helped launch the #MeToo movement and shattered decades of silence around the subject of sexual assault in Hollywood.
IMDB Rating: 7.2
IMDB Votes: 28000
Genere: Drama, History
Country: USA, Japan
Duration: 129 min
Plot tags: serious, sexual, sexy, interesting
Similar in 86%
Save and Protect (1989)
Plot Summary:
Inspired by Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Sokurov’s Save and Protect recalls the most crucial events of Emma’s decline and fall: affairs with the aristocratic Rodolphe and the student Leon, the humiliation that follows her husband’s botching of the operation on the stable boy’s clubfoot. The universality of the theme of eternal struggle between the soul and the flesh is conveyed through the absence of specific reference to time or place: although the film seems to begin in 1840, its surreal mode effortlessly accommodates an automobile and the strains of “When the Saints Go Marching In” on an off-screen radio. Focusing on passion from a woman’s perspective and downplaying plot, Sokurov explores his subject in exquisite detail, capturing not only the heat of passion but also the quiet moments before and after and the innocent sensuousness of the body.
IMDB Rating: 6.4
IMDB Votes: 311
Genere: Drama, History
Country: Soviet Union, West Germany
Duration: 167 min
Plot tags: avant garde
Similar in 80%
Even the Rain (2010)
Plot Summary:
Focuses on Sebastian and Costa, obsessive filmmakers who, in their quest to uncover the myth of Christopher Columbus and resistance to colonial power by Indian rebel Hatuey, ultimately end up embroiled in a modern revolt against Western multinationals in the Bolivian "water wars" brought on by the forced privatization of Bolivia's leading public water companies in 2000.
IMDB Rating: 7.4
IMDB Votes: 14000
Genere: Drama, History
Country: Spain, Mexico, France
Duration: 103 min
Plot tags: political, talky, tense, harsh, visually appealing, serious, thought provoking, realistic, clever, cynical
Similar in 81%
Blonde (2022)
Plot Summary:
From her volatile childhood as Norma Jeane, through her rise to stardom and romantic entanglements, this reimagined fictional portrait of Hollywood legend Marilyn Monroe blurs the lines of fact and fiction to explore the widening split between her public and private selves.
IMDB Rating: 5.5
IMDB Votes: 70000
Genere: Drama, History
Country: USA
Duration: 167 min
Plot tags: exciting, depressing, art house, black and white, cerebral, visual, crying, period piece, erotic drama, psychological
Similar in 76%
Marquis de Sade (1996)
Plot Summary:
Based on the true story of the notorious Marquis de Sade. In 18th century Paris, an innocent beauty's search for her missing sister leads her into the deadly sensuous realm of the infamous Marquis de Sade. Imprisoned for his sordid crimes, the Marquis likewise has the beauty morally trapped... for she must help him complete his banned book of lust, or never learn the fate of her sister. It becomes a test of wills and wit, as the Marquis attempts to convert her to his deviously sexual philosophy. When the Marquis escapes his prison, she must follow him to his remote chateau of sin to finally discover her sister's fate, and to face her own.
IMDB Rating: 4.3
IMDB Votes: 672
Genere: Drama, History
Country: USA, Russia
Duration: 93 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 77%
The Baby of Mâcon (1993)
Plot Summary:
A town cursed with barren women and famine is saved by a miracle birth to an old, ugly woman: the Mother. Immediately afterwards, the old woman's Daughter (Ormond) claims to have delivered the baby herself in a virgin birth. She imprisons the Mother and begins to exploit the Baby by selling blessings to the desperate townspeople of Mâcon.
IMDB Rating: 6.9
IMDB Votes: 5000
Genere: Drama, History
Country: Netherlands, France, UK, Germany
Duration: 122 min
Plot tags: disturbing, avant garde, surreal, serious, atmospheric, rough, stylized, bleak, controversial, philosophical
Similar in 82%
One Nation, One King (2018)
Plot Summary:
Un peuple et son roi crosses the destinies of the men and women of the population, and those of historical figures. Their meeting place is the newly founded National Assembly. At the heart of the story lie the fate of the king and the birth of the French Republic….
IMDB Rating: 5.8
IMDB Votes: 2000
Genere: Drama, History
Country: France, Belgium
Duration: 121 min
Plot tags: realistic, factual, tense, captivating, political
Similar in 87%
That Night in Varennes (1982)
Plot Summary:
In June of 1791, a group of passengers in a stagecoach find themselves caught up in the events of the French Revolution, when they find themselves in the city of Varennes when revolutionists arrest the fleeing King Louis.
IMDB Rating: 7.2
IMDB Votes: 2000
Genere: Drama, History
Country: France, Italy
Duration: 150 min
Plot tags: historical drama, road movie, costume drama, serious, realistic, surprise ending, period drama, baroque, eighties, masterpiece
Similar in 80%
The Crucible (1996)
Plot Summary:
The movie is centered around the Salem Massachusetts witch trials of 1692. The movie is based on the play "The Crucible" by Arthur Miller. He also wrote the screen play adaptation.
IMDB Rating: 6.8
IMDB Votes: 40000
Genere: Drama, History
Country: USA
Duration: 124 min
Plot tags: talky, suspense, rough, disturbing, dramatic, emotional, gothic, depressing, factual, period piece
Similar in 80%
This Earth of Mankind (2019)
Plot Summary:
A Javanese royal and half-Dutch woman fall in love as Indonesia rises to independence from colonial rule.
IMDB Rating: 6.9
IMDB Votes: 847
Genere: Drama, History
Country: Indonesia
Duration: 181 min
Plot tags: psychological, romantic, captivating, disturbing, period piece, period drama
Similar in 82%
Black Venus (2010)
Plot Summary:
The story of Saartjes Baartman, a Black domestic who, in 1808, left Southern Africa, then ruled by Dutch settlers, for Europe, following her boss Hendrick Caesar , hoping to find fame and fortune there. Once in London her master turned manager does nothing but exhibit her as a freak in a phony and humiliating carnival show. After a series of troubles caused by their act, Caesar, Saartje and their new friend, bear-tamer Réaux, head for Paris where once again, and against her will, she has to mimic savagery and expose her body, first in carnivals, then in the aristocratic salons of Paris, later on among the libertines and finally in brothels where she ends up being a prostitute. In the meantime, French anatomists will have taken an interest in her unusual anatomy (enormous buttocks and labia) only to declare her the missing link from ape to man. In 1815, aged only 27, she dies alone, of a combination of pneumonia and venereal disease.
IMDB Rating: 6.8
IMDB Votes: 3000
Genere: Drama, History
Country: France, Belgium
Duration: 162 min
Plot tags: serious, captivating, thought provoking, realistic, erotic, existential horror, gloomy, iconic, tragic
Similar in 81%
The Affair of the Necklace (2001)
Plot Summary:
In pre-Revolutionary France, a young aristocratic woman left penniless by the political unrest in the country, must avenge her family's fall from grace by scheming to steal a priceless necklace.
IMDB Rating: 6.0
IMDB Votes: 6000
Genere: Drama, History, Romance
Country: USA
Duration: 118 min
Plot tags: costume drama, period piece, factual, atmospheric, realistic, epic, serious, stylized, historical drama, light
Similar in 78%
The Mission (1986)
Plot Summary:
When a Spanish Jesuit goes into the South American wilderness to build a mission in the hope of converting the Indians of the region, a slave hunter is converted and joins his mission. When Spain sells the colony to Portugal, they are forced to defend all they have built against the Portugese aggressors.
IMDB Rating: 7.4
IMDB Votes: 65000
Genere: Adventure, Drama, History
Country: UK, France
Duration: 125 min
Plot tags: epic, thought provoking, christian film, harsh, spiritual, realistic, breathtaking, dramatic, visually stunning, touching
Similar in 83%
The New World (2005)
Plot Summary:
A drama about explorer John Smith and the clash between Native Americans and English settlers in the 17th century.
IMDB Rating: 6.7
IMDB Votes: 89000
Genere: Biography, Drama, History, Romance
Country: USA, UK
Duration: 135 min
Plot tags: epic, emotional, period piece, romantic, scenic, lyrical, historical drama, touching, serious, cerebral
Similar in 82%
The Master (2012)
Plot Summary:
Freddie, a volatile, heavy-drinking veteran who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, finds some semblance of a family when he stumbles onto the ship of Lancaster Dodd, the charismatic leader of a new "religion" he forms after World War II.
IMDB Rating: 7.1
IMDB Votes: 184000
Genere: Drama, History
Country: USA
Duration: 138 min
Plot tags: art house, psychological, stylized, atmospheric, philosophical, surreal, disturbing, artsy, cynical, cerebral
Similar in 79%
And Your Mother Too! (2001)
Plot Summary:
In Mexico, two teenage boys and an attractive older woman embark on a road trip and learn a thing or two about life, friendship, sex, and each other.
IMDB Rating: 7.7
IMDB Votes: 128000
Genere: Drama
Country: Mexico
Duration: 106 min
Plot tags: sexy, road movie, erotic, realistic, art house, sensual, sex comedy, hispanic, eros, humorous
Similar in 79%
Macbeth (1971)
Plot Summary:
A ruthlessly ambitious Scottish lord siezes the throne with the help of his scheming wife and a trio of witches.
IMDB Rating: 7.4
IMDB Votes: 15000
Genere: Drama, History
Country: UK, USA
Duration: 140 min
Plot tags: disturbing, visual, atmospheric, bleak, spiritual, existential, fairy tale, emotional, political thriller, controversial
Similar in 81%
Silence (2016)
Plot Summary:
Two Jesuit priests travel to seventeenth century Japan which has, under the Tokugawa shogunate, banned Catholicism and almost all foreign contact.
IMDB Rating: 7.2
IMDB Votes: 121000
Genere: Drama, History
Country: USA, UK, Taiwan, Japan, Mexico
Duration: 161 min
Plot tags: philosophical, stylized, cerebral, intellectual, suspense, melancholic, visually stunning, psychological, epic, emotional