20 best movies like Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983)

List of the best movies like Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983): Emperor, Merrill's Marauders, King Rat, The Burmese Harp, Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, A Woman in Berlin, The Railway Man, Crossing Over, The Boys in Company C.

Tags: movies similar to Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983) - full list

Markimdb: 6.5
Genredrama, military, history
CountryJapan, USA
Duration01:45

As the Japanese surrender at the end of WWII, Gen. Fellers is tasked with deciding if Emperor Hirohito will be hanged as a war criminal. Influencing his ruling is his quest to find Aya, an exchange student he met years earlier in the U.S.

Markimdb: 6.6
Genredrama, adventure, military
CountryUSA
Duration01:38

Brigadier General Frank D. Merrill leads the 3,000 American volunteers of his 5307th Composite Unit (Provisional), aka "Merrill's Marauders", behind Japanese lines across Burma to Myitkyina, pushing beyond their limits and fighting pitched battles at every strong-point.

Markimdb: 7.5
Genredrama, military
CountryUSA
Duration02:09

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...

Markimdb: 8
Genredrama, military, music
CountryJapan

In the War's closing days, when a conscience-driven Japanese soldier fails to get his countrymen to surrender to overwhelming force, he adopts the lifestyle of a Buddhist monk.

Markimdb: 8
Genredrama, documentary, military, biography
CountryGermany, United Kingdom, France
Duration01:20

In 1966, Dieter Dengler was shot down over Laos, captured, and, down to 85 pounds, escaped. Barefoot, surviving monsoons, leeches, and machete-wielding villagers, he was rescued. Now, near 60, living on Mt. Tamalpais, Dengler tells his story: a German lad surviving Allied bombings in World War II, postwar poverty, apprenticed to a smith, beaten regularly. At 18, he emigrates and peels potatoes in the U.S. Air Force. He leaves for California and college, then enlistment in the Navy to learn to fly. A quiet man of sorrows tells his story: war, capture, harrowing conditions, escape, and miraculous rescue. Where did he find the strength; how does he now live with his memories?

Markimdb: 7.2
Genredrama, military, history
CountryUSA
Duration02:18

In the wake of Pearl Harbor, a young lieutenant leaves his expectant wife to volunteer for a secret bombing mission which will take the war to the Japanese homeland.

Markimdb: 7
Genredrama, military, biography, history
CountryGermany, Poland
Duration02:11

A nameless woman keeps a diary as the Russians invade Berlin in the spring of 1945. She is in her early 30s, a patriotic journalist with international credentials; her husband, Gerd, a writer, is an officer at the Russian front. She speaks Russian and, for a day or two after the invasion, keeps herself safe, but then the rapes begin. She resolves to control her fate

Markimdb: 7.1
Genremelodrama, drama, military, biography
CountryAustralia, United Kingdom
Duration01:56

A victim from World War II's "Death Railway" sets out to find those responsible for his torture. A true story.

Markimdb: 5.9
Genredrama, military
CountryRussia
Duration01:29

Immigrants from around the world enter Los Angeles every day, with hopeful visions of a better life, but little notion of what that life may cost. Their desperate scenarios test the humanity of immigration enforcement officers. In Crossing Over, writer-director Wayne Kramer explores the allure of the American dream, and the reality that immigrants find – and create -- in 21st century L.A.

Markimdb: 6.9
Genredrama, military, history
CountryHong Kong, USA
Duration02:05

Disheartened by futile combat, appalled by the corruption of their South Vietnamese ally, and constantly endangered by the incompetence of their own company commander, the young men find a possible way out of the war. They are told that if they purposely lose a soccer game against a South Vietnamese team, they can spend the rest of their tour playing exhibition games behind the lines.

Markimdb: 7.6
Genreaction, drama, military, history
CountryChina, Hong Kong
Duration02:26

A Westerner finds refuge with a group of women in a church during Japan's rape of Nanking in 1937. Posing as a priest, he attempts to lead the women to safety.

Markimdb: 7
Genredrama, military, history
CountryPoland
Duration01:59

An examination of the Soviet slaughter of thousands of Polish officers and citizens in the Katyn forest in 1940.

Markimdb: 6.5
Genredrama, military, biography, history
CountryUSA
Duration02:10

The film portrays MacArthur's (Gregory Peck) life from 1942, before the Battle of Bataan, to 1952, the time after he had been removed from his Korean War command by President Truman (Ed Flanders) for insubordination, and is recounted in flashback as he visits West Point.

Markimdb: 6.9
Genreaction, drama, military
CountryUnited Kingdom, Japan, USA
Duration01:47

The "Memphis Belle" is a World War II bomber, piloted by a young crew on dangerous bombing raids into Europe. The crew only have to make one more bombing raid before they have finished their duty and can go home. In the briefing before their last flight, the crew discover that the target for the day is Dresden, a heavily-defended city that invariably causes many Allied casualties

Markimdb: 7
Genredrama, military, biography
CountryUSA

Based on the story about Guy Gabaldon, a Los Angeles Hispanic boy raised in the 1930s by a Japanese-American foster family. After Pearl Harbor, his foster family is interned at the Manzanar camp for Japanese Americans, while he enlists in the Marines, where his ability to speak Japanese becomes a vital asset. During the Battle of Saipan, he convinces 800 Japanese to surrender after their general commits suicide.

Markimdb: 7
Genreaction, drama, military
CountryUSA
Duration01:50

Based on a real-life story, this drama focuses on a small group of Allied soldiers in Burma who are held captive by the Japanese. Capt. Ernest Gordon (Ciaran McMenamin), Lt. Jim Reardon (Kiefer Sutherland) and Maj. Ian Campbell (Robert Carlyle) are among the military officers kept imprisoned and routinely beaten and deprived of food. While Campbell wants to rebel and attempt an escape, Gordon tries to take a more stoic approach, an attitude that proves to be surprisingly resonant.

Markimdb: 7.9
Genredrama, short, military, history
CountryUnited Kingdom, Kosovo
Duration00:58

The friendship of two boys is tested to its limits as they battle for survival during the Kosovo war.

Markimdb: 7.2
Genredrama, military, biography, history
CountryFrance, China, Germany
Duration02:14

A true-story account of a German businessman who saved more than 200,000 Chinese during the Nanjing massacre in 1937-38.

Markimdb: 7
Genredrama, military, history
CountryItaly, Yugoslavia, West Germany
Duration02:24

In January 1943 the German army, afraid of an Allied invasion of the Balkans, launched a great offensive against Yugoslav Partisans in Western Bosnia. The only way out for the Partisan forces and thousands of refugees was the bridge on the river Neretva.

Markimdb: 7.9
Genredrama, military
CountryUnited Kingdom
Duration02:03

North Africa, World War II. British soldiers on the brink of collapse push beyond endurance to struggle up a brutal incline. It's not a military objective. It's The Hill, a manmade instrument of torture, a tower of sand seared by a white-hot sun. And the troops' tormentors are not the enemy, but their own comrades-at-arms.

Markimdb: 6.8
Genredrama, military, history
CountryAustralia, USA
Duration02:02

A group of English, American, Dutch and Australian women creates a vocal orchestra while being imprisoned in a Japanese POW camp on Sumatra during World War II.

Markimdb: 6.6
Genredrama, adventure, military, history
CountryUnited Kingdom, Netherlands, USA
Duration01:53

In 1879, the British suffer a great loss at the Battle of Isandlwana due to incompetent leadership.

Markimdb: 5.9
Genreaction, drama, military
CountryUnited Kingdom, Poland
Duration01:53

The story of the Polish fliers who found themselves fighting for the freedom of their own country in foreign skies. Seen through the eyes of a Polish fighter ace and adventurer, it tells how the Poles—driven across Europe by the German war machine—finally make their last stand. Flying Hurricanes for the RAF over Britain, they became a key component in the legend of ‘The Few’. Up against the might of the Luftwaffe they hoped that, by saving Great Britain from Nazi invasion, they were keeping the dream of a free Poland alive.

Markimdb: 7.3
Genreaction, melodrama, drama, detective, military, history
CountryJapan
Duration02:24

A young man Kentaro Saeki (Haruma Miura) keeps failing his bar test and does not know what to do any more. His older sister Keiko is a freelance writer. Kentaro and Keiko begin to search for information on their grandfather Kyuzo Miyabe (Junichi Okada) who dead in the special forces during World War II. Their grandfather Kyuzo Miyabe was terrified of death and obsessed with life. Why did he join the special forces? According to his fellow navy soldiers, Kyuzo Miyabe was a genius and also a coward. Kentaro and Keiko then discovers the shocking truth which has been sealed for 60 years.

Markimdb: 7.6
Genredrama, military, biography, history
CountryUSA, United Kingdom
Duration01:36

The historical recreation of the 1942 Wannsee Conference, in which Nazi and SS leaders gathered in a Berlin suburb to discuss the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question". Lead by SS-General Reinhard Heydrich, this group of high ranking German officials came to the historic and far reaching decision that the Jews of Europe were to be exterminated in what would come to be known as the Holocaust.

Markimdb: 6.6
Genreaction, drama, military
CountryUSA, Australia
Duration02:12

As World War II rages, the elite Sixth Ranger Battalion is given a mission of heroic proportions: push 30 miles behind enemy lines and liberate over 500 American prisoners of war.

Markimdb: 6.3
Genreaction, drama, adventure, military
CountryUSA

An American soldier who escapes the execution of his comrades by Japanese soldiers in Borneo during WWII becomes the leader of a personal empire among the headhunters in this war story told in the style of Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling. The American is reluctant to rejoin the fight against the Japanese on the urging of a British commando team but conducts a war of vengeance when the Japanese attack his adopted people.

Markimdb: 6.5
Genreaction, drama, military, history
CountryUnited Kingdom
Duration02:05

Set in German-occupied Norway, resistance fighter Knut Straud enlists the reluctant physicist Rolf Pedersen in an effort to destroy the German heavy water production plant in rural Telemark.

Markimdb: 7.6
Genredrama, military
CountryItaly, France, Yugoslavia

Determined to survive at any price, Edith, a young Jewish woman deported to an extermination camp, manages to survive by accepting the role of kapo, a privileged prisoner whose mission is to ruthlessly guard other prisoners.

Markimdb: 7.5
Genreaction, drama, military, history
CountryJapan, USA
Duration02:24

In the summer of 1941, the United States and Japan seem on the brink of war after constant embargos and failed diplomacy come to no end. "Tora! Tora! Tora!", named after the code words use by the lead Japanese pilot to indicate they had surprised the Americans, covers the days leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, which plunged America into the Second World War.

Markimdb: 6.4
Genredrama, military
CountryGermany, Russia, Ukraine
Duration01:33

Germany, Baltic Sea coast, May 1945, a few days before the end of World War II. A small Soviet patrol arrives at an isolated house where an elderly baroness gives shelter to a group of orphan girls and a boy who is determined to continue the fight.

Markimdb: 6.8
Genreaction, drama, military, biography, history
CountryUSA, United Kingdom, France
Duration02:20

Le Ly lives in a small Vietnamese village whose serenity is shattered when war breaks out. Caught between the Viet Cong and the South Vietnamese army, the village is all but destroyed. After being both brutalized and raped, Le Ly resolves to flee. She leaves for the city, surviving desperate situations, but surviving nonetheless. Eventually she meets a U.S. Marine named Steve Butler who treats her kindly and tells her he would like to be married -- maybe to her.

Markimdb: 7.7
Genreaction, drama, military, history
CountryChina, Hong Kong
Duration02:13

City of Life and Death takes place in 1937, during the height of the Second Sino-Japanese War. The Imperial Japanese Army has just captured the then-capital of the Republic of China, Nanjing. What followed was known as the Nanking Massacre, or the Rape of Nanking, a period of several weeks wherein tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers and civilians were killed.

Markimdb: 3.4
Genreaction, drama, military, history
CountryUSA

Untold and lost history. A true story of the American Pathfinders, the volunteer paratroopers whose deadly mission was to land 30 minutes before the Normandy invasion, locate and mark strategic "drop zones" and set up the top-secret navigation equipment needed to guide the main airborne assault on D-Day.

Markimdb: 5.6
Genreaction, drama, military
CountryRussia
Duration02:15

Drama set in 1942, during one of the most important battles of World War II, which stopped the progress of Nazi forces and turned the tide of war in favor of the Allies. The Soviet army mounts a counter-attack on the Nazi forces that occupy half of Stalingrad on the other side of the Volga, but the operation to cross the river is unsuccessful. A few soldiers who managed to get to the other side take refuge in a house on the bank of Volga. Here they find a girl who didn’t escape when the Germans came. While the whole might of the German army descends onto them, the heroes of Stalingrad experience love, loss, joy and the sense of ultimate freedom that can only be felt by those about to die. They defend the house at all costs while the Red Army prepares for another attack.

Markimdb: 7
Genredrama, military, history
CountryUnited Kingdom

An investigation of the massacre of 24 men, women and children in Haditha, Iraq allegedly shot by 4 U.S. Marines in retaliation for the death of a U.S. Marine killed by a roadside bomb. The movie follows the story of the Marines of Kilo Company, an Iraqi family, and the insurgents who plant the roadside bomb.

Markimdb: 7.5
Genredrama, military
CountryPoland
Duration01:37

This harrowing tale of survival centers on Rose, a Masurian woman, whose German soldier husband was killed in the war, leaving her alone on their farm. A single woman had no defense against Russian soldiers who raped as a form of revenge, nor against plundering Poles who found themselves in desperate straits. Help arrives for Rose in the form of Tadeusz, a former officer in the Polish Home Army who deserted after he saw his wife raped and murdered by Russian troops and is attempting to hide his identity.

Markimdb: 7.6
Genreaction, drama, military
CountryUSA, China, United Kingdom
Duration02:14

Last months of World War II in April 1945. As the Allies make their final push in the European Theater, a battle-hardened U.S. Army sergeant in the 2nd Armored Division named Wardaddy commands a Sherman tank called "Fury" and its five-man crew on a deadly mission behind enemy lines. Outnumbered and outgunned, Wardaddy and his men face overwhelming odds in their heroic attempts to strike at the heart of Nazi Germany.

Markimdb: 6.3
Genredrama, military, biography, history
CountryUSA
Duration01:48

Battle Hymn was inspired by the true story of American minister Dean Hess, played here with rare sensitivity by Rock Hudson. A bomber pilot during World War II, Hess inadvertently releases a bomb which destroys a German orphanage. Tortured by guilt, Hess relocates in Korea after the war to offer his services as a missionary. Combining the best elements of Christianity and Eastern spiritualism, Hess establishes a large home for orphans. The preacher's efforts are threatened when the Korean "police action" breaks out in 1950.

Markimdb: 6.4
Genredrama, military
CountryUnited Kingdom, USA
Duration02:38

A luxury liner carries Jewish refugees from Hitler's Germany in a desperate fight for survival.

Markimdb: 7.5
Genredrama, military
CountryDenmark, United Kingdom, Sweden, Norway
Duration01:57

A Danish officer, Michael (Thomsen), is sent away to the International Security Assistance Force operation in Afghanistan for three months. His first mission there is to find a young radar technician who had been separated from his squad some days earlier. While on the search, his helicopter is shot down and he is taken as a prisoner of war, but is reported dead to the family.

Markimdb: 6.4
Genreaction, melodrama, drama, military, history
CountryRomania, Hungary, Canada, USA

Regent Horthy is the leader of Hungary and a German ally, but his favorable standing with Hitler changes as the war comes to an end. Forced to cede Hungary’s power or else witness the execution of his son, Regent Horthy gives up control of his country to the Nazis, who quickly move Hungarians to ghettos and death camps, with no hope in sight. But the despair changes when a young man named Elek emerges. Separated from his family during the relocations and aided by the woman he loves , Elek defies the enemy by becoming one of them. In a race against time, disguised as a Nazi Officer he embarks on a mission to save his family and thousands of his countrymen.

Markimdb: 7.2
Genredrama, military
CountryUSA
Duration02:15

Shortly after Pearl Harbor, a squadron of PT-boat crews in the Philippines must battle the Navy brass between skirmishes with the Japanese. The title says it all about the Navy's attitude towards the PT-boats and their crews.

Markimdb: 6.9
Genredrama, military
CountryIsrael, France, Germany, United Kingdom
Duration01:33

During the First Lebanon War in 1982, a lone tank and a paratroopers platoon are dispatched to search a hostile town.

Markimdb: 8
Genredrama, military
CountryWest Germany
Duration01:43

A group of German boys are ordered to protect a small bridge in their home village during the waning months of the second world war. Truckloads of defeated, cynical Wehrmacht soldiers flee the approaching American troops, but the boys, full of enthusiasm for the "blood and honor" Nazi ideology, stay to defend the useless bridge.

Markimdb: 8
Genredrama, military
CountrySoviet Union
Duration01:37

The story of a man (Andrey Sokolov) whose life was ruthlessly crippled by World War II. His wife and daughters were killed during the bombing of his village, he spent some time as a prisoner, and his only son was killed in action only a few days before the victory...

Markimdb: 5.4
Genrehorror, thriller, drama, detective, military
CountryUnited Kingdom
Duration01:28

In 1944, in the Belgian - German border, seven German soldiers survive an American attack in the front and lock themselves in a bunker to protect the position. Under siege by the enemy and with little ammunition, they decide to explore underground tunnels to seek supplies and find an escape route. While in the tunnel, weird things happen with the group.

Markimdb: 6.6
Genredrama, military
CountryItaly, France
Duration02:10

Naples, year 1943, in the middle of World War II. The city has just be liberated by American troops in an era in which nobody knows just when the war or where begins the peace; winners and losers face...

Markimdb: 7.4
Genredrama, military, biography, history
CountryPoland, Germany, United Kingdom

The story of Polish pedagogue Janusz Korczak and his dedication to protecting Jewish orphans during the war.

Markimdb: 7.1
Genredrama, military
CountryItaly

War seen through the eyes of Serra, a university student from Palermo who volunteers in 1942 to fight in Africa. He is assigned to the Pavia Division on the southern line in Egypt. Rommel and the Axis forces are bogged down; it's October, the British prepare an offensive. At first, boredom, heat, hunger, and thirst bedevil the Italians; then the Brits attack, and there's no luck or heroism in death. Finally, it's retreat in confusion. Serra, his sergeant Rizzo, and his lieutenant Fiori take a last walk toward home. It's said that each soldier gets three miracles; when Serra's are used up, what then?




MoviesList