History
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Popular History Movies

Gangs of New York
Gangs of New York
In 1863, Amsterdam Vallon returns to the Five Points of America to seek vengeance against the psychotic gangland kingpin, Bill the Butcher, who murdered his father years earlier. With an eager pickpocket by his side and a whole new army, Vallon fights his way to seek vengeance on the Butcher and restore peace in the area.
Gangs of New York 2002
Benedetta
Benedetta
A 17th-century nun becomes entangled in a forbidden lesbian affair with a novice. But it is Benedetta's shocking religious visions that threaten to shake the Church to its core.
Benedetta 2021
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence
Island of Java, 1942, during World War II. British Major Jack Celliers arrives at a Japanese prison camp, run by the strict Captain Yonoi. Colonel John Lawrence, who has a profound knowledge of Japanese culture, and Sergeant Hara, brutal and simpleton, will witness the struggle of wills between two men from very different backgrounds who are tragically destined to clash.
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence 1983
The Draughtsman's Contract
The Draughtsman's Contract
A young artist is commissioned by the wife of a wealthy landowner to make a series of drawings of the estate while her husband is away.
The Draughtsman's Contract 1983
The Tin Drum
The Tin Drum
Oskar Matzerath is a very unusual boy. Refusing to leave the womb until promised a tin drum by his mother, Agnes, Oskar is reluctant to enter a world he sees as filled with hypocrisy and injustice, and vows on his third birthday to never grow up. Miraculously, he gets his wish. As the Nazis rise to power in Danzig, Oskar wills himself to remain a child, beating his tin drum incessantly and screaming in protest at the chaos surrounding him.
The Tin Drum 1980
The Passion of Joan of Arc
The Passion of Joan of Arc
A classic of the silent age, this film tells the story of the doomed but ultimately canonized 15th-century teenage warrior. On trial for claiming she'd spoken to God, Jeanne d'Arc is subjected to inhumane treatment and scare tactics at the hands of church court officials. Initially bullied into changing her story, Jeanne eventually opts for what she sees as the truth. Her punishment, a famously brutal execution, earns her perpetual martyrdom.
The Passion of Joan of Arc 1929
Battleship Potemkin
Battleship Potemkin
A dramatized account of a great Russian naval mutiny and a resultant public demonstration, showing support, which brought on a police massacre. The film had an incredible impact on the development of cinema and is a masterful example of montage editing.
Battleship Potemkin 1926
Good Night, and Good Luck.
Good Night, and Good Luck.
The story of journalist Edward R. Murrow's stand against Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist witch-hunts in the early 1950s.
Good Night, and Good Luck. 2005
Loving Vincent
Loving Vincent
A young man arrives at the last hometown of painter Vincent van Gogh to deliver the troubled artist's final letter and ends up investigating his final days there.
Loving Vincent 2017
Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Aguirre, the Wrath of God
A few decades after the destruction of the Inca Empire, a Spanish expedition led by the infamous Aguirre leaves the mountains of Peru and goes down the Amazon River in search of the lost city of El Dorado. When great difficulties arise, Aguirre’s men start to wonder whether their quest will lead them to prosperity or certain death.
Aguirre, the Wrath of God 1972
Corsage
Corsage
A fictional account of one year in the life of Empress Elisabeth of Austria. On Christmas Eve 1877, Elisabeth, once idolized for her beauty, turns 40 and is officially deemed an old woman; she starts trying to maintain her public image.
Corsage 2022
Wilde
Wilde
The story of Oscar Wilde, genius, poet, playwright and the First Modern Man. The self-realisation of his homosexuality caused Wilde enormous torment as he juggled marriage, fatherhood and responsibility with his obsessive love for Lord Alfred Douglas.
Wilde 1997
Ran
Ran
With Ran, legendary director Akira Kurosawa reimagines Shakespeare's King Lear as a singular historical epic set in sixteenth-century Japan. Majestic in scope, the film is Kurosawa's late-life masterpiece, a profound examination of the folly of war and the crumbling of one family under the weight of betrayal, greed, and the insatiable thirst for power.
Ran 1985
Selma
Selma
"Selma," as in Alabama, the place where segregation in the South was at its worst, leading to a march that ended in violence, forcing a famous statement by President Lyndon B. Johnson that ultimately led to the signing of the Voting Rights Act.
Selma 2014
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
The true story of Elle France editor Jean-Dominique Bauby, who, in 1995 at the age of 43, suffered a stroke that paralyzed his entire body, except his left eye. Using that eye to blink out his memoir, Bauby eloquently described the aspects of his interior world, from the psychological torment of being trapped inside his body to his imagined stories from lands he'd only visited in his mind.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly 2007
Borg vs McEnroe
Borg vs McEnroe
The Swedish Björn Borg and the American John McEnroe, the best tennis players in the world, maintain a legendary duel during the 1980 Wimbledon tournament.
Borg vs McEnroe 2018
Hunger
Hunger
The story of Bobby Sands, the IRA member who led the 1981 hunger strike during The Troubles in which Irish Republican prisoners tried to win political status.
Hunger 2008
Dear Comrades!
Dear Comrades!
When the communist government raises food prices in 1962, the rebellious workers from the small industrial town of Novocherkassk go on strike. The massacre which then ensues is seen through the eyes of a devout party activist.
Dear Comrades! 2020
Hiroshima Mon Amour
Hiroshima Mon Amour
The deep conversation between a Japanese architect and a French actress forms the basis of this celebrated French film, considered one of the vanguard productions of the French New Wave. Set in Hiroshima after the end of World War II, the couple -- lovers turned friends -- recount, over many hours, previous romances and life experiences. The two intertwine their stories about the past with pondering the devastation wrought by the atomic bomb dropped on the city.
Hiroshima Mon Amour 1959
Madame Bovary
Madame Bovary
Bored with the limited and tedious nature of provincial life in 19th-century France, the fierce and sensual Emma Bovary finds herself in calamitous debt and pursues scandalous sexual liaisons with absolute abandon. However, when her volatile lifestyle catches up to her, the lives of everyone around her are endangered.
Madame Bovary 1991
Land of Mine
Land of Mine
In the days following the surrender of Germany in May 1945, a group of young German prisoners of war is handed over to the Danish authorities and subsequently sent to the West Coast, where they are ordered to remove the more than two million mines that the Germans had placed in the sand along the coast. With their bare hands, crawling around in the sand, the boys are forced to perform the dangerous work under the leadership of a Danish sergeant.
Land of Mine 2017
Josep
Josep
February 1939. Overwhelmed by the flood of Republicans fleeing Franco's dictatorship, the French government's solution consists in confining the Spanish refugees in concentration camps where they have no other choice than to build their own shelters, feed off the horses which have carried them out of their country, and die by the hundred for lack of hygiene and water... In one of these camps, two men, separated by barbwire, will become friends. One is a guard the other is Josep Bartoli (Barcelona 1910 - New York 1995), a cartoonist who fights against the Franco regime.
Josep 2020
One Second
One Second
A movie fan escapes from a labour camp during the Chinese Cultural Revolution and strikes up a relationship with a homeless female vagabond.
One Second 2022
Sunset Song
Sunset Song
The daughter of a Scottish farmer comes of age in the early 1900s.
Sunset Song 2016
The Innocent
The Innocent
Tullio Hermil is a chauvinist aristocrat who flaunts his mistress to his wife, but when he believes she has been unfaithful he becomes enamored of her again.
The Innocent 1979
Brotherhood of Blades II: The Infernal Battlefield
Brotherhood of Blades II: The Infernal Battlefield
An imperial guard searches for the truth behind a conspiracy that framed him and his partners. The proof of his innocence lies with a wanted woman named Bei Zhai... but will she reveal what she knows? In this intense prequel to BROTHERHOOD OF BLADES, the only thing he can truly trust is his sword.
Brotherhood of Blades II: The Infernal Battlefield 2017
A Cock and Bull Story
A Cock and Bull Story
Steve Coogan, an arrogant actor with low self-esteem and a complicated love life, is playing the eponymous role in an adaptation of "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman" being filmed at a stately home. He constantly spars with actor Rob Brydon, who is playing Uncle Toby and believes his role to be of equal importance to Coogan's.
A Cock and Bull Story 2005
Grand Illusion
Grand Illusion
A group of French soldiers, including the patrician Captain de Boeldieu and the working-class Lieutenant Maréchal, grapple with their own class differences after being captured and held in a World War I German prison camp. When the men are transferred to a high-security fortress, they must concoct a plan to escape beneath the watchful eye of aristocratic German officer von Rauffenstein, who has formed an unexpected bond with de Boeldieu.
Grand Illusion 1937
The Cut
The Cut
In 1915 a man survives the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire, but loses his family, speech and faith. One night he learns that his twin daughters may be alive, and goes on a quest to find them.
The Cut 2014
Salt of the Earth
Salt of the Earth
At New Mexico's Empire Zinc mine, Mexican-American workers protest the unsafe work conditions and unequal wages compared to their Anglo counterparts. Ramon Quintero helps organize the strike, but he is shown to be a hypocrite by treating his pregnant wife, Esperanza, with a similar unfairness. When an injunction stops the men from protesting, however, the gender roles are reversed, and women find themselves on the picket lines while the men stay at home.
Salt of the Earth 1954
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser
The film follows Kaspar Hauser (Bruno S.), who lived the first seventeen years of his life chained in a tiny cellar with only a toy horse to occupy his time, devoid of all human contact except for a man who wears a black overcoat and top hat who feeds him.
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser 1974
Vincere
Vincere
The story of the descent into madness of Mussolini's secret first wife, Ida Dasler, who was seduced by his passion and vigor but blind to the fascist dictator's many flaws.
Vincere 2009
October (Ten Days that Shook the World)
October (Ten Days that Shook the World)
Sergei M. Eisenstein's docu-drama about the 1917 October Revolution in Russia. Made ten years after the events and edited in Eisenstein's 'Soviet Montage' style, it re-enacts in celebratory terms several key scenes from the revolution.
October (Ten Days that Shook the World) 1928
Land and Freedom
Land and Freedom
David Carr is a British Communist who is unemployed. In 1936, when the Spanish Civil War begins, he decides to fight for the Republican side, a coalition of liberals, communists and anarchists, so he joins the POUM militia and witnesses firsthand the betrayal of the Spanish revolution by Stalin's followers and Moscow's orders.
Land and Freedom 1995
The Destiny
The Destiny
In the 12th century's Andalusia lives Ibn Rushd a prominent Islamic philosopher with his wife Zeinab and daughter Salma. The principality is ruled by Khalifa ElMansour who has two sons, ElNasser, an intellectual that likes Ibn Rush and is in love with his daughter Salma. The younger son Abdallah is more into dancing and poetry, spending most of his times with the gypsy family and getting the daughter pregnant. The Khalifa is depending on the extremists to build his army granting them more power which they use to combat artists and philosophers. The extremists succeed in recruiting Abd Allah and train him to kill his father. Events go on where Marawan, the gypsy singer, is killed and Ibn Rushd's books are burnt. Adapted from the real life of Ibn Rushd AlMasir is Chahine's statement against extremism.
The Destiny 1997
Castle of Purity
Castle of Purity
A disciplined and sexually driven man forces his family to stay isolated in their home in order to protect them from the “evil nature” of human beings.
Castle of Purity 1973
Unrest
Unrest
In 1877, in a watch factory in a valley in north-western Switzerland, Josephine produces balance spindles, tiny parts that ensure the agitation movement ("unrueh") of the mechanical watches. She soon grows uneasy with the organisation of work and possession in the village and its factory and joins the anarchist worker movement of the local watchmakers. There she meets Piotr Kropotkin, a moony Russian traveller. The two of them meet at a time when new technologies such as time measurement, photography and the telegraph are transforming the social order and anarchist discourse is addressing emerging nationalism. During a walk in the woods, Josephine and Piotr ask themselves whether time, money and the government are not all but fictions.
Unrest 2022
Zama
Zama
In a remote South American colony in the late 18th century, officer Zama of the Spanish crown waits in vain for a transfer to a more prestigious location. He suffers small humiliations and petty politicking as he increasingly succumbs to lust and paranoia.
Zama 2017
Labyrinth of Cinema
Labyrinth of Cinema
The only movie theater on the Onomichi seafront is about to close its doors. Its last night of screenings will be an all-night marathon of Japanese war films. When lightning strikes the theater, three young men in the audience find themselves thrown back in time into the world inside the screen.
Labyrinth of Cinema 2020
Sunset
Sunset
In 1913, an orphaned young woman arrives in Budapest to take up employment as a milliner at the hat store that belonged to her late parents but becomes mired in a search for a brother she had never known of.
Sunset 2019
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