Best movies like 8½
A picture that goes beyond what men think about - because no man ever thought about it in quite this way!
A unique, carefully handpicked, selection of the best movies like 8½ Starring Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale, Anouk Aimée, Sandra Milo, and more. If you liked 8½ then you may also like: Nine, Youth, The Woman Who Drinks, Nightmares in Red, White and Blue, October Gale and many more popular movies featured on this list. You can further filter the list even more or get a random selection from the list of similar movies, to make your selection even easier.
Guido Anselmi, a film director, finds himself creatively barren at the peak of his career. Urged by his doctors to rest, Anselmi heads for a luxurious resort, but a sorry group gathers—his producer, staff, actors, wife, mistress, and relatives—each one begging him to get on with the show. In retreat from their dependency, he fantasizes about past women and dreams of his childhood.
8½
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Youth
Two lifelong friends bond whilst vacationing in a luxury Swiss Alps lodge as they ponder retirement. While Fred has no plans to resume his musical career despite the urging of his loving daughter Lena, Mick is intent on finishing the screenplay for what may be his last important film for his muse Brenda. And where will inspiration lead their younger friend Jimmy, an actor grasping to make sense of his next performance?
Nightmares in Red, White and Blue
An exploration of the appeal of horror films, with interviews of many legendary directors in the genre.
October Gale
A doctor takes in a mysterious man who washes ashore at her remote cottage with a gunshot wound. Quickly they both learn the killer has arrived to finish the job, while a storm has cut them off from the mainland.
America's Sweethearts
In the midst of a nasty public breakup of married movie stars, a studio publicist scrambles to put a cap on the escalating situation as the couple's latest film has found it's only print kidnapped by the director.
Bad Education
Two children, Ignacio and Enrique, know love, the movies and fear in a religious school at the beginning of the 1960s. Father Manolo, director of the school and its professor of literature, is witness to and part of these discoveries. The three are followed through the next few decades, their reunion marking life and death.
A Cat in the Brain
The master of Italian horror, Lucio Fulci, stars as... Lucio Fulci, a filmmaker with a reputation for gruesome horror films. His body of work has started to plague his mental state, and he is haunted by the grotesque set-pieces his mind has conjured up during his career. His psychiatrist, Egon Schwarz, uses a hypnotised Fulci as an avatar to carry out his own disturbed fantasies, in hopes of ruining the master’s reputation once and for all.
Day for Night
A committed film director struggles to complete his movie while coping with a myriad of crises, personal and professional, among the cast and crew.
Death of a Salesman
Willy Loman is an aging salesman who was recently fired from his job. Dealing with feelings of failure, Willy begins to relive events from the past that involve his older son, Biff, and his wife, Linda. Willy tries to learn from past mistakes and works to make amends with his family, but his biggest struggle is to make peace with himself over a failed dream of financial success.
Contempt
A philistine in the art film business, Jeremy Prokosch is a producer unhappy with the work of his director. Prokosch has hired Fritz Lang to direct an adaptation of "The Odyssey," but when it seems that the legendary filmmaker is making a picture destined to bomb at the box office, he brings in a screenwriter to energize the script. The professional intersects with the personal when a rift develops between the writer and his wife.
Incendiary
A woman's life is torn apart when her husband and infant son are killed in a suicide bombing at a soccer match.
Juliet of the Spirits
Middle-aged Giulietta grows suspicious of her husband, Giorgio, when his behavior grows increasingly questionable. One night when Giorgio initiates a seance amongst his friends, Giulietta gets in touch with spirits and learns more about herself and her painful past. Slightly skeptical, but intrigued, she visits a mystic who gives her more information -- and nudges her toward the realization that her husband is indeed a philanderer.
The Humbling
Following a breakdown and suicide attempt, an aging actor becomes involved with a much younger woman but soon finds that it's difficult to keep pace with her.
Mistress
A comedy about a screenwriter (Wuhl) whose old movie script is read by a producer (Landau) and the search for financial backers begins. But it seems that each money source (Aiello, DeNiro, Wallach) has his own mistress that he wants put into the film. Gradually, the screenwriter is forced to make changes to his script to accommodate these backers until he finally sees no semblance of his original ideas in the writing.
Possession
A young woman left her family for an unspecified reason. The husband determines to find out the truth and starts following his wife. At first, he suspects that a man is involved. But gradually, he finds out more and more strange behaviors and bizarre incidents that indicate something more than a possessed love affair.
Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman
A nightclub singer uses alcohol in excess to sooth her painful life.
Stardust Memories
While attending a retrospect of his work, a filmmaker recalls his life and his loves: the inspirations for his films.
Treasure Island
Jim is a small child who lives in an inn run by his parents. The arrival of a strange captain to the Island they live will trouble his existence and tip him into an universe of adventures.
The Happy Ending
The triumphs and failures of middle age as seen through the eyes of runaway American housewife Mary Wilson, a woman who believes that ultimate reality exists above and beyond the routine procedures of conscious, uninspired, everyday life. She feels cheated by an older generation that taught her to settle for nothing less than storybook finales, people who are disillusioned and restless and don't know why, people for whom life holds no easy answers.
War Trap
During the Second World War, following an ambush carried out in a fort by German troops, Eugène, a French soldier, finds himself trapped underground. Now fighting for his survival, his destiny will play out alongside that of another survivor and both must find the energy to extricate themselves from a certain death, unaware of the terrible battle that awaits them on the outside.
Our Lady of the Turks
A man (Carmelo Bene) can not bear to be part of society. He considers himself a "jerk" and so invents its own philosophy, which involves the destruction of his land of Puglia where all citizens are devoted to the Catholic religion. However, the man can not destroy the belief of the pilgrims of Salento, because a woman would prevent that. It is an unknown "Santa Margherita", which tries to divert man from his weird and impossible philosophy. Successive scenes of the film show various situations unreal and dream in which the two protagonists try to obtain the best one on the other. After a blasphemous dialogue between monks, the man includes his whole philosophy in a Moorish building. In fact, this seems to have been the scene of the massacre of the famous 800 Martyrs of Otranto, which are considered by the scetic man the absolute death of Christianity.
A Mouthful of Air
Julie is a new mom and children's book author, who escapes into the bright Crayola-colored world of her creation in order to leave behind the darkness caused by her post-partum depression.
Stanley Kubrick's Boxes
A few years after his death, the widow of Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999) asks Jon Ronson to look through the contents of about 1,000 boxes of meticulously sorted materials Kubrick left. Ronson finds that most contain materials reflecting work Kubrick did after the release of "Barry Lyndon" in 1975, when Kubrick's film output slowed down. Ronson finds audition tapes for "Full Metal Jacket," photographs to find the right hat for "Clockwork Orange" or the right doorway for "Eyes Wide Shut" -- thousands of details that went into Kubrick's meticulous approach. Ronson believes that the boxes show "the rhythm of genius." Interviews with family, staff, and friends are included.
Conversazioni con altre donne
Two former partners reignite their spark at a wedding reception, but as the night wears on, fond memories fade into mutual regrets and their brief affair turns into a desperate attempt to recapture lost time.
The White Suit
A sergeant officer lives a life of a loner, reads literary classics and dreams about acting. On his journey by train, he madly falls in love with a prostitute, but her pimp - another passenger on a train - is not willing to let her go, which makes their destiny tragic.
The Man Who Loved Redheads
Framed in flashback, The Man Who Loved Redheads is an anecdotal comedy about a man (John Justin) whose life is defined by his first romantic experience. That liaison occurred in Justin's youth, when the young man matures and enters the diplomatic world, he spends the rest of his career searching for his first love.
My Tiny Universe
Having failed to make it as an actor, a suicidal man torments a top film producer while holding him captive.
Nine
Arrogant, self-centered movie director Guido Contini finds himself struggling to find meaning, purpose, and a script for his latest film endeavor. With only a week left before shooting begins, he desperately searches for answers and inspiration from his wife, his mistress, his muse, and his mother.