Best movies like Last Train to Shanghai

Australian journalist Guy Hamilton travels to Indonesia to cover civil strife in 1965. There—on the eve of an attempted coup—he befriends a Chinese Australian photographer with a deep connection to and vast knowledge of the Indonesian people, and also falls in love with a British national.

This documentary movie is about the battle of San Pietro, a small village in Italy. Over 1,100 US soldiers were killed while trying to take this location, that blocked the way for the Allied forces from the Germans.

House Un-American Activities Committee investigators Jim McLain and Mal Baxter come to post war Hawaii to track Communist Party activities even though belonging to the party was legal at the time. They are interested in everything from insurance fraud to the sabotage of a U.S. naval vessel.

During World War II, an American mission hospital is headed up by Dr. Gray Thompson and Dr. Sara Durand. Sara is secretly in love with Gray but hides her feelings as his new wife, Louise, arrives at the hospital. Sparks fly, however, when Louise becomes jealous of Sara, and then tries to convince her husband to leave war-torn China behind for a calmer life in the United States. But Thompson is attached to both Sara and the people who need his help.

Austrian mountaineer, Heinrich Harrer journeys to the Himalayas without his family to head an expedition in 1939. But when World War II breaks out, the arrogant Harrer falls into Allied forces' hands as a prisoner of war. He escapes with a fellow detainee and makes his way to Llaso, Tibet, where he meets the 14-year-old Dalai Lama, whose friendship ultimately transforms his outlook on life.

Mentally ill. Deviant. Diseased. And in need of a cure. These were among the terms psychiatrists used to describe gay women and men in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. And as long as they were “sick”, progress toward equality was impossible. This documentary chronicles the battle waged by a small group of activists who declared war against a formidable institution – and won a crucial victory in the modern movement for LGBTQIA+ equality.

Short documentary about 50 years of history of Czechoslovakia, with archive images.

The story of journalist Edward R. Murrow's stand against Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist witch-hunts in the early 1950s.

We are in the year 1871. A journalist for Versailles Television broadcasts a soothing and official view of events while a Commune television is set up to provide the perspectives of the Paris rebels. On a stage-like set, more than 200 actors interpret characters of the Commune, especially the Popincourt neighbourhood in the XIth arrondissement. They voice their own thoughts and feelings concerning the social and political reforms. The scenes consist mainly of long camera takes.

A British woman on a visit to post-war Berlin is caught up in an espionage ring smuggling secrets into and out of the Eastern Bloc.

A Christian woman wants a newspaper man to publish a story about a One World Foundation being set up whose only goal is to control the world. She wants him to warn people that this is coming and explain how it ties into the end times spoken about in the Bible. The newsman is opposed to such an idea until he sees the woman being pursued by the Foundation. As this adventure unfolds, the newspaper man begins to realize that what the woman is saying could be true. This evangelistic, classic end times film presents the truth about Jesus Christ and has interesting insight into what might be coming in the last days.

Many times during his presidency, Lyndon B. Johnson said that ultimate victory in the Vietnam War depended upon the U.S. military winning the "hearts and minds" of the Vietnamese people. Filmmaker Peter Davis uses Johnson's phrase in an ironic context in this anti-war documentary, filmed and released while the Vietnam War was still under way, juxtaposing interviews with military figures like U.S. Army Chief of Staff William C. Westmoreland with shocking scenes of violence and brutality.

Based on real events, A Hill in Korea charts the fortunes of a small group of British soldiers serving in the Korean War. Out on a routine patrol, the soldiers find that Chinese troop movements have cut them off from their own lines. They try to fight their way back to safety but with the enemy surrounding them on all sides, the prospects look bleak. Facing almost insurmountable odds, they decide to stand a fight.

In 1944, in eastern part of China, U.S.Army Major Baldwin and his volunteer team of demolition engineers are left behind the retreating Chinese forces. Their task is to slow down the Japanese advance into eastern China by blowing up bridges, roads, airfields and munitions dumps. They start by blowing up an American airfield and ammo dump. They receive the order to destroy a vital bridge over a mountain pass.The team uses a few army trucks to move around. At the bridge, they encounter a Nationalist Chinese Army unit in charge of guarding the bridge. Thanks to an American soldier who speaks some Chinese, Major Baldwin requests the permission, from the Chinese commander, to blow up the bridge.The Chinese colonel agrees but asks the American Major to do him a favor by also destroying a munitions dump located at some distance away.He also requests that Madame Sue-Mei Hung, the widow of a Chinese colonel, be transported by the American demolition team to the nearest major town.

In 1994, the Zapatista National Liberation Army, made up of impoverished Mayan Indians from the state of Chiapas, took over five towns and 500 ranches in southern Mexico. The government deployed its troops and at least 145 people died in the ensuing battle. Filmmaker Nettie Wild travelled to the country's jungle canyons to film the elusive and fragile life of this uprising.

Two young North Korean gymnasts prepare for an unprecedented competition in this documentary that offers a rare look into the communist society and the daily lives of North Korean families. For more than eight months, film crews follow 13-year-old Pak Hyon Sun and 11-year-old Kim Song Yun and their families as the girls train for the Mass Games, a spectacular nationalist celebration.

2019 marks the 30th year since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. Rich Hall examines the relationship between the West and the USSR in his inimitable fashion.

Shanghai, China. The last expatriate Westerners still living in the city are imprisoned in a hotel by the communist authorities in order to find the spy hiding among them.

Documentary made by the U.S. Army Signal Corps after the North African campaign.

Through interviews with both victims and instigators, Nanfu Wang, a first-time mother, breaks open decades of silence on a vast, unprecedented social experiment that shaped — and destroyed — countless lives in China.

Nick is a writer in New York when he gets posted to a bureau in Greece. He has waited 30 years for this. He wants to know why his mother was killed in the civil war years earlier. In a parallel plot line we see Nick as a young boy and his family as they struggle to survive in the occupied Greek hillside. The plot lines converge as Nick's investigations bring him closer to the answers.

Documentary about a group of Americans who go to Nicaragua to learn about the conflict between the Contras and the Sandinistas.

As Russian writer Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) thinks it is impossible that his novel Doctor Zhivago is published in the Soviet Union, because it supposedly shows a critical view of the October Revolution, he decides to smuggle several copies of the manuscript out of the country. It is first published in 1957 in Italia and the author receives the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958, which has consequences.

Priest Don Camillo blackmails his friendly rival Peppone into letting him join a Communist delegation visiting the Soviet Union.

An American intelligence agent is sent to Tokyo to track down a Communist spy ring.

A relentless chronicle of the tragedy of the Uighurs, an ethnic minority of some eleven million people who live in the Xinjiang region of northwest China, speak a Turkic language and practice the Muslim religion. The Uighurs suffer brutal cultural and political oppression by Xin Jinping's tyrannical government: torture, disappearances, forced labor, re-education of children and adults, mass sterilizations, extensive surveillance and destruction of historical heritage.

Portentously portrays the evacuation of Portland, Oregon, when threatened by a nuclear attack on its state-of-the-art civil defense system.

As the forces of ISIS and Assad tear through villages and society in Syria and Northern Iraq, a group of brave and idealistic women are taking up arms against them—and winning inspiring victories. Members of “The Free Women’s Party” come from Paris, Turkish Kurdistan, and other parts of the world. Their dream: To create a Democratic Syria, and a society based on gender equality. Guns in hand, these women are carrying on a movement with roots that run 40 years deep in the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) in Turkey. GIRL’S WAR honors the legacy of Sakine Cansiz, co-founder of the PKK who was assassinated in Paris in 2013, and reflects on the sacrifices made by all of the women in the movement, who have endured jail, rape, war, and persecution in their quest to liberate their lives and sisters from male dominance. With scenes of solidarity, strength, and love amongst these brave women soldiers, GIRL'S WAR is a surprising story of Middle Eastern feminism on the front lines.

The silent cinema had already created colossal movies based on ancient civilizations, but it is in the 1950s when peplums reach their apogee in Hollywood. Then, peplums take root at Cinecittà studios, in Rome, where cheap cinema is produced with bodybuilders as heroes. The genre decays in the late 1960s, but rises again decades later, when a modern classic is released in 2000.

Documentary charting the rise of Chinese art following the death of Mao, and how some artists embraced Western styles while other critiqued it by hijacking communist propaganda.

When the Chinese Communist Party launches a brutal crackdown on its citizens, a team of innocent students risk everything to expose the deadly propaganda and fight for freedom.

Back in his hometown after his university studies, Servan is witness to the burning down of his village and a series of other atrocities which eventually lead him to join the Kurdish resistance. In the ranks of the Kurdish liberation movement, he is seriously injured in clashes with the Turkish army. In order not to slow down his comrades and allow them to escape, Servan insists that he be left behind. Against all odds, he survives, enduring several days of acute pain. However, his friends cannot come back to pick him up, the area being surrounded by Turkish soldiers. As the soldiers approach, Servan decides to leave his hide away in spite of his serious injuries. He sets out to find his friends, overcoming countless obstacles in the forest, but nevertheless helped by Kurdish villagers throughout his journey. However, he is hunted down by death squads and village guards.

A pair of working class lovers - a secretary and an accountant, scheme to marry into the rich landed gentry.

By the People: The Election of Barack Obama is a documentary film produced by Edward Norton broadcast in November 2009 on HBO, which follows Barack Obama and various members of his campaign team, including David Axelrod, through the two years leading up to the United States presidential election on November 4th, 2008.