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What History Movies to Watch Right Now

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1,369 results

1,369 results

1. The Leopard (re-release)

Aug 13, 2004 • Rated Approved

Set in Sicily in 1860, Luchino Visconti's spectacular 1963 adaptation of Giuseppe di Lampedusa's international bestseller is one of the cinema's greatest evocations of the past, achingly depicting the passing of an ancient order. (Film Forum)

2. Shoah (re-release)

Dec 10, 2010 • Rated Not Rated

Twelve years in the making, Shoah is Claude Lanzmann’s monumental epic on the Holocaust featuring interviews with survivors, bystanders and perpetrators in 14 countries. The film does not contain any historical footage but rather features interviews which seek to ‘‘reincarnate’’ the Jewish tragedy and also visits places where the crimes took place. Growing out of Lanzmann’s concern that the genocide perpetrated only 40 years earlier was already retreating into the mists of time, and that the atrocity was becoming sanitized as History, his massive achievement-at once epic and intimate, immediate and definitive-is a triumph of form and content that reveals hidden truths while rewriting the rules of documentary filmmaking. Shoah remains nothing less than essential. [IFC Films]

3. Intolerance

Sep 5, 1916 • Rated Passed

The story of a poor young woman, separated by prejudice from her husband and baby, is interwoven with tales of intolerance from throughout history.

4. The Passion of Joan of Arc

Mar 28, 1929 • Rated Passed

In 1431, Jeanne d'Arc is placed on trial on charges of heresy. The ecclesiastical jurists attempt to force Jeanne to recant her claims of holy visions.

5. Quo Vadis, Aida?

Mar 5, 2021 • Rated Approved

Bosnia, July 11th 1995. Aida is a translator for the United Nations in the small town of Srebrenica. When the Serbian army takes over the town, her family is among the thousands of citizens looking for shelter in the UN camp. As an insider to the negotiations Aida has access to crucial information that she needs to interpret. What is at the horizon for her family and people - rescue or death? Which move should she take? [Super LTD]

6. Battleship Potemkin

Dec 5, 1926 • Rated TV-14

In the midst of the Russian Revolution of 1905, the crew of the battleship Potemkin mutiny against the brutal, tyrannical regime of the vessel's officers. The resulting street demonstration in Odessa brings on a police massacre.

7. 12 Years a Slave

Oct 18, 2013 • Rated R

In the pre-Civil War United States, Solomon Northup, a free black man living in upstate New York, is abducted and sold into slavery.

8. Schindler's List

Dec 15, 1993 • Rated TV-MA

Steven Spielberg's epic drama tells the compelling true story of German businessman Oskar Schindler (Neeson) who comes to Nazi-occupied Poland looking for economic prosperity and leaves as a savior. (History in Film)

9. Zero Dark Thirty

Dec 19, 2012 • Rated R

For a decade, an elite team of intelligence and military operatives, working in secret across the globe, devoted themselves to a single goal: to find and eliminate Osama bin Laden. [Columbia Pictures]

10. I Am Not Your Negro

Dec 9, 2016 • Rated PG-13

Director Raoul Peck envisions the book James Baldwin never finished - a radical narration about race in America, using the writer’s original words. He draws upon James Baldwin’s notes on the lives and assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr to explore and bring a fresh and radical perspective to the current racial narrative in America. [Magnolia Pictures]

11. Small Axe: Lovers Rock

Nov 27, 2020 • Rated TV-MA

A single evening at a house party in 1980s West London sets the scene, developing intertwined relationships against a background of violence, romance and music.

12. Woodstock

Mar 26, 1970 • Rated R

It happened on a small farm in upstate New York, for three remarkable days of mud and happiness in 1969, when over half a million people came together to celebrate life, love, and music--Woodstock. One camera crew was there, in the middle of everything, recording the live performances of many of the greatest singers and musicians of the era, and the joy, peace and rock 'n' roll experienced by hundreds of thousands.

13. We Were Here

Sep 9, 2011 • Rated Not Rated

We Were Here documents the coming of what was called the “Gay Plague” in the early 1980s. It illuminates the profound personal and community issues raised by the AIDS epidemic as well as the broad political and social upheavals it unleashed. It offers a cathartic validation for the generation that suffered through, and responded to, the onset of AIDS. It opens a window of understanding to those who have only the vaguest notions of what transpired in those years. It provides insight into what society could, and should, offer its citizens in the way of medical care, social services, and community support. [Red Flag Releasing]

14. Chimes at Midnight

Mar 17, 1967 • Rated Not Rated

The career of Shakespeare's Sir John Falstaff (Orson Welles) as a roistering companion to young Prince Hal (Keith Baxter), circa 1400 to 1413.

15. The Wild Child

Sep 11, 1970 • Rated G

In a French forest in 1798, a child is found who cannot walk, speak, read or write. A doctor becomes interested in the child and patiently attempts to civilize him.

16. Mr. Turner

Dec 19, 2014 • Rated R

Mr. Turner explores the last quarter century of the life of the great if eccentric British painter J.M.W. Turner (Timothy Spall). Profoundly affected by the death of his father, loved by a housekeeper he takes for granted and occasionally exploits sexually, he forms a close relationship with a seaside landlady with whom he eventually lives incognito in Chelsea, where he dies. Throughout this, he travels, paints, stays with the country aristocracy, visits brothels, is a popular if anarchic member of the Royal Academy of Arts, has himself strapped to the mast of a ship so that he can paint a snowstorm, and is both celebrated and reviled by the public and by royalty.

17. Dunkirk

Jul 21, 2017 • Rated PG-13

Dunkirk opens as hundreds of thousands of British and Allied troops are surrounded by enemy forces. Trapped on the beach with their backs to the sea they face an impossible situation as the enemy closes in. [Warner Bros.]

18. Shoah: Four Sisters

Nov 14, 2018 • Rated Not Rated

Starting in 1999, Claude Lanzmann made several films that could be considered satellites of Shoah, comprised of interviews conducted in the 1970s that didn’t make it into the final, monumental work. In the last years of the late director’s life, he decided to devote a film to four women from four different areas of Eastern Europe with four different destinies, each finding herself improbably alive after war’s end: Ruth Elias from Ostravia, Czechoslovakia; Paula Biren from Lodz, Poland; Ada Lichtman from further south in Krakow; and Hannah Marton from Cluj, or Kolozsvár, in Transylvania. Survivors of unimaginable Nazi horrors during the Holocaust, they tell their individual stories and become crucial witnesses to the barbarism they experienced. Each possesses a vivid intelligence and a commitment to candor that make their accounts of what they suffered through both searing and unforgettable. Four Sisters now arrives on the screen to remind audiences of the immense courage it took for these witnesses to return to their past as they share their deeply moving personal tragedies. The frankness of their words, their intensely scrutinized faces, and their bravery as they revisit unimaginable experiences will make them lasting presences in the moral universe of younger generations. [Cohen Media Group]

19. The Decline of Western Civilization

Jul 5, 1981 • Rated Not Rated

The Los Angeles punk music scene circa 1980 is the focus of this film. With Alice Bag Band, Black Flag, Catholic Discipline, Circle Jerks, Fear, Germs, and X.

20. Quiz Show

Sep 14, 1994 • Rated PG-13

This fact-based film tells the story behind the quiz show scandal of the 1950s, focusing on "Twenty-One" champion Charles Van Doren (Fiennes).

21. The Act of Killing

Jul 19, 2013 • Rated Not Rated

A documentary in which former Indonesian death squad leaders reenact their real-life mass-killings in various cinematic genres.

22. Let It Fall: L.A. 1982-1992

Apr 21, 2017 • Rated TV-MA

Let It Fall takes a unique and in-depth look at the years and events leading up to the city-wide violence that began April 29, 1992, when the verdict was announced in the Rodney King case.

23. The Look of Silence

Jul 17, 2015 • Rated PG-13

The Look of Silence is Joshua Oppenheimer's powerful companion piece to the Oscar®-nominated The Act of Killing. Through Oppenheimer's footage of perpetrators of the 1965 Indonesian genocide, a family of survivors discovers how their son was murdered, as well as the identities of the killers. The documentary focuses on the youngest son, an optometrist named Adi, who decides to break the suffocating spell of submission and terror by doing something unimaginable in a society where the murderers remain in power: he confronts the men who killed his brother and, while testing their eyesight, asks them to accept responsibility for their actions.

24. The Gatekeepers

Feb 1, 2013 • Rated PG-13

A documentary by the Israeli director Dror Moreh which consists of interviews with six surviving former heads of Shin Bet, the Israeli security agency established in 1949 which has engaged in counter-terrorism and intelligence gathering, among other things.

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