Best movies like Jacob

A fairly accurate historical account of Walter Reed's search for the cause of "Yellow Jack" or Yellow Fever and those who risked their lives in the pursuit.

A description of Romania before Ceausescu's downfall, through the story of Nela. Daughter of a former colonel of the Securitate, the romanian political police. She refused to become as her sister, an agent of this Securitate, and lives with her father. After he died, she leaves Bucharest, and ends up in a little town, where she meets Mitica, a surgeon, another herself, laughing of everything.

"Occident" is a bitter comedy about the people who want to emigrate from Romania, and about those who stay behind. The movie has a rich, interesting structure: there are three different stories - a weeklong in the film - that cross, interconnect and happen in the same period. The characters influence each others lives, sometimes even without knowing. Main characters from one story become secondary characters in another story. At the same time, scenes from the first part of the movie bring unexpected facts when seen the second or the third time. The stories do not have just one ending: the first story ends in each of the third parts in a different point, suggesting radically different solutions for the characters. The way in which the director fits time and links events together often produces thematically unexpected results.

A 1939 test pilot asks his best friend to use him as a guinea pig for a cryogenics experiment. Daniel McCormick wants to be frozen for a year so that he doesn't have to watch his love lying in a coma. The next thing Daniel knows is that he's been awoken in 1992.

A depiction of life in wartime England during the Second World War. Director Humphrey Jennings visits many aspects of civilian life and of the turmoil and privation caused by the war, all without narration.

An intense and imaginative artist, revered Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh possesses undeniable talent, but he is plagued by mental problems and frustrations with failure. Supported by his brother, Theo, the tormented Van Gogh eventually leaves Holland for France, where he meets volatile fellow painter Paul Gauguin and struggles to find greater inspiration.

An inexperienced prosecutor becomes involved with a local woman while investigating a miner's death.

In 1864, during the American Civil War, Mexican cattleman Alvarez Kelly supplies the Union with cattle until unexpected circumstances force him to change his customers.

The Blind Man has been hiding out for several years in an isolated cabin and has taken in and raised a young girl orphaned from a devastating house fire. Their quiet life together is shattered when a group of criminals kidnap the girl, forcing the Blind Man to leave his safe haven to save her.

When heavy fog prevents any flights from leaving London Airport, a group of passengers are put on a bus driven by Percy Lamb to drive to another airport. The fog is that heavy Percy doesn't know where he is going or that he is carrying stolen gold bullion that the robbers and police are relentlessly pursuing.

Story of a family. Problems, marriage, taxes, revenge, friendship, army, life and much more.

Documentary look at the 1996-97 effort of the dancers and support staff at a San Francisco peep show, The Lusty Lady, to unionize. Angered by arbitrary and race-based wage policies, customers' surreptitious video cameras, and no paid sick days or holidays, the dancers get help from the Service Employees International local and enter protracted bargaining with the union-busting law firm that management hires. We see the women work, sort out their demands, and go through the difficulties of bargaining. The narrator is Julia Query, a dancer and stand-up comedian who is reluctant to tell her mother, a physician who works with prostitutes, that she strips.

They're called bar women, hostesses, or sex workers and "western princesses." They come from poor families, struggling to earn a decent wage, only to be forced into the world's oldest profession. They're the women who work in the camptowns that surround U.S. military bases in South Korea. In 40 years, over a million women have worked in Korea's military sex industry, but their existence has never been officially acknowledged by either government. In The Women Outside, a film by J.T. Orinne Takagi and Hye Jung Park, some of these women bravely speak out about their lives for the first time. The film raises provocative questions about military policy, economic survival, and the role of women in global geopolitics

Dolores Huerta bucks 1950s gender conventions by starting the country's first farm worker's union with fellow organizer Cesar Chavez. What starts out as a struggle for racial and labor justice, soon becomes a fight for gender equality within the same union she is eventually forced to leave. As she wrestles with raising 11 children, three marriages, and is nearly beaten to death by a San Francisco tactical police squad, Dolores emerges with a vision that connects her new found feminism with racial and class justice.

After a mine cave in, the rescue crew risks their lives to search for two trapped miners.

Rusty Wittenburg is a Navy SEAL struggling to balance his family life and his job. He fights daily to maintain the line between reality and the nightmares his PTSD conjures up for him. Dedicated to his team and his mission, he is willing to give the ultimate sacrifice for his fellow brothers and teammates.

The Iron Guard, also known as Legion of Archangel Michael, was a Romanian nationalist and patriotic movement of extreme right; as such, after it rose to power, it supported Nazi Germany and started a fierce campaign of retaliation against its political enemies. As such, in the night of November 26-27, 1940, the Death Teams executed forty political prisoners in the Jilava prison (in the movie, named "Viraga"), and next day, other two Teams arrested and shot the former minister Virgil Madgearu and the world famous historian Nicolae Iorga. To squash down the political outcry, the Police Prefect Stefan Zävoianu conveniently assigns the cases to a commissioner from the "Morals Division" (prostitution, thieves), Tudor Moldovan, hoping that he will fail to get to the bottom of the case. However, Moldovan has communist sympathies, so he quickly comes under the influence of the Bolshevik Pîrvu, who had escaped during the Viraga...

In 1975 two Romanian kids go about their daily routine in their native fishing village on the Danube Delta when a mysterious stranger asks them for a ride in their fishing boat to an island located deep inside the river delta.

The plot concerns a unit of US marines operating in the Vietnam war during 1970, with the movie opening on a raid in a village. After massacring the villagers, the marines steal the villages gold, much to the objection of their Vietnamese translator and guide. Skip forward past the credits sequence; it's now 15 years later, and members of the unit are getting murdered one by one. This leads to the former head of the group, now a high ranking military officer, announcing that the only person who is up to the job of finding out the identity of the killer is an Aussie, Major Brad Cooper.

Jefferson is a lovable ski-bum temp worker whose singular joy comes from an annual excursion to the slopes with fellow vagabond/best friend, Curtis. When Jefferson falls for fellow temp worker, Stephanie, an ambitious go-getter, he is forced to re-evaluate his minimum wage, minimum commitment lifestyle.

A collective farm president is deserted by his bride 2 days after the wedding. A comedic radiography of village life.

Two peasants from Transylvania go to America in order to meet their brother who had left Romania ten years earlier. They meet a prophet in the American state of Utah and eventually help the cause of justice in the villages where the prophet proves to be a dictator and exploiter of the coal miners over there.

After a worker severely injured in their family business, Kadir is forced into making a moral decision, which will have an impact on his dreams, his family and the life of injured worker’s wife

Based on true events, The Ladder follows the spiritual journey of Andrei, a sensitive, socially awkward young man who turns to acting in his search for true happiness. After the fall of communism, he is blinded by the illusion of freedom and democracy and faces a series of brutal events that have deeply marked Romania's recent history. Finding comfort in playing the part of Aliosa in a stage adaptation of The Karamazov Brothers, he becomes closer and closer to his character, gradually discovering the way to understanding divinity.

Adaption of George Eliot's novel. When a respectable weaver is wrongfully accused of theft, he becomes a virtual hermit until his own fortune is stolen and an orphaned child is found on his doorstep.

A single mother's struggle to support her child leads her into the surreal netherworld of illegal sexual enterprises, with her finally ending up in the Bibliothèque Pascal; an elegant but bizarre house of prostitution in which men can re-enact sexual scenarios inspired by great works of literature for a hefty fee.

NELU, a man in his forties, works as a security guard in the local supermarket in Salonta, a small town on the Romanian-Hungarian border. This is the place where many illegal emigrants try to cross, by any means posible, to Hungary and then further to Western Europe. One morning, NELU will “fish” something different out of the river: a Turkish man trying to cross the border. Not able to communicate verballly, the two men will somehow understand each other. NELU takes the stranger to the farmhouse, gives him some dry clothes, food and shelter. He doesn’t really know how to help this stranger. The Turkish man gives NELU all the money he has on him so he will help him cross the border. Eventually, NELU takes the money and promises he will help him cross the border tomorrow, MORGEN…

A cinema-verite approach to this mystery story about the death of a young girl in a village adds credence to the story itself, it is as though the audience were following along with a real investigation instead of simply watching a narrative unfold. An inspector and his police team arrive to find out why the young girl drowned -- under suspicious circumstances -- and start to work interviewing the villagers. Shown in close-up and individually on the screen, each witness contributes to a growing knowledge that the girl was sexually assaulted and beaten before she died, and the real mystery is why no one reacted to the horror. As the interviews continue, the inspector realizes it will not be easy to extract the whole truth from any of the guarded, close-mouthed villagers.

The life-story confession of a prisoner waiting for his trial. Victor Petrini, a promising intellectual in the 1950s and a lecturer in Philosophy is arrested by the repressive secret police, wrongly accused of espionage, and sentenced to prison and forced labor.

Besnik is a lonely shepherd and devoted Muslim, haunted by unfulfilled love. He is the son of a Catholic mother and formerly Communist father whom he takes care of in an Albanian village in the mountains. Up here, Christians and Muslims have found a way to co-exist peacefully. Even after the discovery that the old mosque used to be a church and that the building was actually shared by the two religions in the past, the calm of daily life can be preserved - with Besnik's help. After the death of his father, however, drastic changes threaten Besnik's multi-faith family and the shepherd is forced to seek his own path.

Pili lives in rural Tanzania, working the fields for less than $1 a day to feed her two children and struggling to manage her HIV-positive status in secret. When she is offered the chance to rent a sought-after market-stall, Pili is desperate to have it. But with only two days to get the deposit together, Pili is forced to make increasingly difficult decisions with ever-deepening consequences. How much will she risk to change her life?

After refusing to compromise at his job, a university professor leaves the city and returns to his native village for the first time in many years.

Melania, a 15 years old high school student gets pregnant with Emi, a classmate. Melania does not tell anyone she's pregnant, Not even to Emi, or to her parents. The situation is extremely complicated because Emi's mother is the director of the high school where the two lovers study, and Melania's mother is secretary at the same high school. In the fifth month of pregnancy, Melania faints during class hours. She is urgently taken to the hospital by her mother who finds her daughter is 5 months pregnant so it's too late for an abortion. Melanie's mother is forced to tell the truth to Emi's mother. Emi's mother forces Melania's mother to promise to keep the pregnancy secret to everyone, even to Emi. Minor's mothers separates the two lovers and decide to give the baby up for adoption to a family of Romanians living abroad who don't have the right to legally adopt a child from Romania.

Virgil, the son of a director, fails to get into college and he is drafted in the army. This "forced" growing up is even more painful as he is followed by a "fata morgana", a lost love.

A Romanian architect who married abroad reunites with his birthplace, with those he met, with the women he loved, with the echoes of what happened once, with the great transformations that are taking place in the Capitol, on construction sites and in Romanian villages. Condemned by an incurable disease, but also overwhelmed by these realities and by the irrepressible longing for his homeland, the hero decides to return home for good.