Tags: movies similar to The Circle (2000) - full list
Mark | imdb: 6.8 |
Genre | drama, military |
Country | Iran, Italy, Japan |
Itinerant Kurdish teachers, carrying blackboards on their backs, look for students in the hills and villages of Iran, near the Iraqi border during the Iran-Iraq war. Said falls in with a group of old men looking for their bombed-out village; he offers to guide them, and takes as his wife Halaleh, the clan's lone woman, a widow with a young son. Reeboir attaches himself to a dozen pre-teen boys weighed down by contraband they carry across the border; they're mules, always on the move. Said and Reeboir try to teach as their potential students keep walking. Danger is close; armed soldiers patrol the skies, the roads, and the border. Is there a role for a teacher? Is there hope?
Mark | imdb: 7.6 |
Genre | drama |
Country | Iran |
Akbar has just turned eighteen. He has been held in a rehabilitation centre for committing murder at the age of sixteen when he was condemned to death. Legally speaking, he had to reach the age of eighteen so that the conviction could be carried out. Now, Akbar is transferred to prison to await the day of his execution. A'la, a friend of Akbar, who himself has undergone imprisonment for burglary, soon after his release tries desperately to gain the consent of Akbar's plaintiff so as to stop the execution
Mark | imdb: 6.8 |
Genre | drama, crime |
Country | France |
When political thugs murder an opponent's volunteer and also kill a cop, chief inspector Verjeat believes the politician who hired them is as guilty as the murderous goon. Verjeat's pursuit of the councilman, Lardatte, gets him a warning from his superiors. When he embarrasses Lardatte while disarming a hostage (the dead volunteer's father), Verjeat is told he's being transferred within a week. He speeds up his hunt for the goon and, with Lefévre, one of his young detectives, he engineers a complicated scheme to buy more time before the transfer. How should Verjeat play out his values of honor and duty?
Mark | imdb: 7 |
Genre | drama |
Country | Iran |
Award-winning Iranian filmmaker Rakshan Banietemad ends her eight-year hiatus from feature filmmaking with this ingenious, mosaic-like narrative, which knits together the stories of seven characters to create a microcosm of Iranian working-class society.
Mark | imdb: 7.5 |
Genre | action, thriller, drama, crime |
Country | Norway, France, Sweden, Poland |
Duration | 01:56 |
Based on a true story: Norwegian winter, 1915. On the island Bastøy, outside Oslo, a group of young boys aged 11 to 18, are held in an institution for delinquent youth, notorious for its sadistic regime. One day a new boy, Erling, arrives, determined to escape from the island. After a tragic incident, he ends up leading the boys in a violent uprising. When the boys manage to take over the island, 150 soldiers are sent in to restore order.
Mark | imdb: 7.5 |
Genre | drama, military |
Country | Republic of Ireland, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Luxembourg, Belgium |
Duration | 02:07 |
In 1920s Ireland young doctor Damien O'Donovan prepares to depart for a new job in a London hospital. As he says his goodbyes at a friend's farm, British Black and Tans arrive, and a young man is killed. Damien joins his brother Teddy in the Irish Republican Army, but political events are soon set in motion that tear the brothers apart.
Mark | imdb: 8.1 |
Genre | drama, military |
Country | Italy, Algeria |
Duration | 02:01 |
Tracing the struggle of the Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale to gain freedom from French colonial rule as seen through the eyes of Ali from his start as a petty thief to his rise to prominence in the organisation and capture by the French in 1957. The film traces the rebels' struggle and the increasingly extreme measures taken by the French government to quell the revolt.
Mark | imdb: 6.5 |
Genre | drama |
Country | Iran |
A man, his dog, a young woman and a filmmaker in a house by the Caspian Sea. All three are wanted, but they are also in search of each other. Thus begins an absurd game in which reality and fiction merge.
Mark | imdb: 7.7 |
Genre | drama |
Country | Iran, France |
Duration | 01:35 |
A middle-aged Tehranian man, Mr. Badii is intent on killing himself and seeks someone to bury him after his demise. Driving around the city, the seemingly well-to-do Badii meets with numerous people, including a Muslim student, asking them to take on the job, but initially he has little luck. Eventually, Badii finds a man who is up for the task because he needs the money, but his new associate soon tries to talk him out of committing suicide.
Mark | imdb: 7.5 |
Genre | comedy, drama |
Country | France, Lebanon, Egypt, Italy, Qatar |
Duration | 01:50 |
On a remote, isolated, unnamed Lebanese village inhabited by both Muslims and Christians. The village is surrounded by land mines and only reachable by a small bridge. As civil strife engulfed the country, the women in the village learn of this fact and try, by various means and to varying success, to keep their men in the dark, sabotaging the village radio, then destroying the village TV.
Mark | imdb: 7.1 |
Genre | drama, biography, history |
Country | United Kingdom, South Africa, France |
Duration | 02:21 |
A chronicle of Nelson Mandela's life journey from his childhood in a rural village through to his inauguration as the first democratically elected president of South Africa.
Mark | imdb: 8.1 |
Genre | drama, military |
Country | France, Italy |
Duration | 02:25 |
Betrayed by an informant, Philippe Gerbier finds himself trapped in a torturous Nazi prison camp. Though Gerbier escapes to rejoin the Resistance in occupied Marseilles, France, and exacts his revenge on the informant, he must continue a quiet, seemingly endless battle against the Nazis in an atmosphere of tension, paranoia and distrust.
Mark | |
Genre | drama |
Country | Russia |
A story of a successful businessman who falls in love with a silent movies actress and starts to look everywhere for a woman who looks exactly like her.
Mark | imdb: 5.1 |
Genre | thriller, drama, crime |
Country | USA |
Duration | 01:36 |
Forced to work under slave-like conditions in a "prison for profit" program, the inmates of a mostly-African-American female prison, Whitehead Correctional, try to take over the institution. At the core of the story is Frances, who finds herself in prison after being falsely convicted of murder, and who is told that her baby has been murdered, sparking her to lead her fellow inmates in the protest
Mark | imdb: 7.3 |
Genre | drama |
Country | South Korea |
Duration | 01:12 |
A poor North Korean fisherman finds himself an accidental defector, and is groomed to be a spy by an ambitious South Korean military officer.
Mark | imdb: 6 |
Genre | melodrama, drama |
Country | Nigeria, United Kingdom |
Duration | 01:51 |
An epic love story: Olanna and Kainene are glamorous twins, living a privileged city life in newly independent 1960s Nigeria. The two women make very different choices of lovers, but rivalry and betrayal must be set aside as their lives are swept up in the turbulence of war.
Mark | imdb: 7.2 |
Genre | drama |
Country | Iran |
Reza, residing in the wilderness with his wife and son, lives a retired life and devotes himself to freshwater fish farming. A private company that has targets on his land is ready to do anything to force him to sell.
Mark | imdb: 7 |
Genre | drama, history |
Country | Iran |
Duration | 01:40 |
The famous actress Behnaz Jafari has no idea what to do when she receives a video in which a young girl is begging for help after her family did not allow her to study at Tehran Theatrical University. Behnaz abandons her shoot and turns to the director Jafar Panahi so that they can help the girl deal with her problems together. They drive to the northwest of the country, where they meet the charming and generous people of a mountain village. But Behnaz and Jafar also observe that in these places, it is the traditions of their ancestors that completely determine the way of life.
Mark | imdb: 7.9 |
Genre | drama, military |
Country | United Kingdom |
Duration | 02:03 |
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.
Mark | imdb: 6 |
Genre | comedy, drama |
Country | France, Italy, Spain, Luxembourg |
Duration | 02:00 |
Marquise is a drama about the rise and fall of a beauteous actress. As cheerfully portrayed by Sophie Marceau, the eponymous heroine is an engagingly ribald, but perhaps rather too modern, character. She rises from an impoverished background to become a favourite of the Sun King, Louis XIV, and the mistress of the celebrated Racine, who wrote roles especially for her; but her fate, in the end, is a tragic one.
Mark | imdb: 6.8 |
Genre | drama |
Country | Iran |
I'm not Angry! is the story of Navid, a starred and expelled university student who - while trying to provide the least requirements of a normal life -, tries not to get angry when he is faced with the immoralities prevalent in the society, and does all he can to keep his love, Setareh.
Mark | imdb: 8.2 |
Genre | drama, family |
Country | Iran |
The story revolves around a blind boy named Mohammed who is released from his special school in Tehran for summer vacation. His father, shamed and burdened by Mohammed's blindness, arrives late to pick him up and then tries to convince the headmaster to keep Mohammed over the summer. The headmaster refuses, so Mohammed's father eventually takes him home.
Mark | imdb: 7.7 |
Genre | drama, military |
Country | Iran |
After their father dies, a family of five are forced to survive on their own in a Kurdish village on the border of Iran and Iraq. Matters are made worse when 12 year old Ayoub, the new head of the family, is told that his handicapped brother, Madi, needs an immediate operation in order to remain alive. This heartbreaking tale shows the lengths to which a family will go in order to survive in the harshest of conditions, where even the horses are fed liquor in order to work.
Mark | imdb: 7.5 |
Genre | drama, crime |
Country | Brazil, Argentina, Italy |
Carandiru, a story based on real facts and on the book written by the doctor Drauzio Varella, starts when he decides to carry out an AIDS prevention program inside Latin America’s largest prison: the Casa de Detenção de São Paulo, Carandiru, the victim of one of the darkest days in Brazilian History, when the State of São Paulo’s Military Police, with the excuse for law enforcement, shot to death 111 people.
Mark | imdb: 7.8 |
Genre | drama, military |
Country | Italy, France, Germany |
The final film in Rossellini's war film trilogy (the first two being Rome, Open City and Paisà). Germany Year Zero takes place in post-war Germany, unlike the others, which take place in German-occupied Rome and post-war Italy, respectively. The story follows a twelve-year-old boy, Edmund Kohler, who is mainly left to his own devices in order to survive and to help his family do the same.
Mark | imdb: 6.2 |
Genre | drama |
Country | Turkey, France, Germany |
Araf is the story of Zehra and Olgun whose lives are caught in a vacuum. The world in which they live and work is a place of throwaway culture and constant change. They too are waiting for a chance to change and escape from their empty, monotonous lives.
Mark | imdb: 7.4 |
Genre | thriller, drama, crime |
Country | Iran |
Duration | 01:35 |
For Hussein, a pizza delivery driver, the imbalance of the social system is thrown in his face wherever he turns. One day when his friend, Ali, shows him the contents of a lost purse, Hussein discovers a receipt of payment and cannot believe the large sum of money someone spent to purchase an expensive necklace. He knows that his pitiful salary will never be enough to afford such luxury. Hussein receives yet another blow when he and Ali are denied entry to an uptown jewelry store because of their appearance. His job allows him a full view of the contrast between rich and poor. He motorbikes every evening to neighborhoods he will never live in, for a closer look at what goes on behind closed doors. But one night, Hussein tastes the luxurious life, before his deep feelings of humiliation push him over the edge.
Mark | imdb: 7.3 |
Genre | thriller, drama, crime |
Country | United Kingdom |
Duration | 01:37 |
An urban hotel in London is a gathering and flash point for legal and illegal immigrants attempting to cobble together their lives in a new country. The immigrants include Senay, a Turkish woman, and a Nigerian doctor named Okwe who is working as a night porter at the hotel. The pair discover the hotel is a front for all sorts of clandestine activities. Their only wish is to avoid possible deportation. Okwe becomes more entangled in the goings on when he is called to fix a toilet in one of the rooms. He discovers the plumbing has been clogged by a human heart.
Mark | imdb: 7.6 |
Genre | action, thriller, drama, crime, biography |
Country | USA |
Duration | 01:52 |
Escape from Alcatraz tells the story of the only three men ever to escape from the infamous maximum security prison at Alcatraz. In 29 years, the seemingly impenetrable federal penitentiary, which housed Al Capone and "Birdman" Robert Stroud, was only broken once - by three men never heard of again.