Best movies like Othon

Biography portraying the life of the Roman Emperor Nero.

As a young boy, future emperor Nero witnesses the mad Emperor Caligula kill his father and exile his mother. While in exile in the pontine islands, Agrippina, his mother, sees a vision telling her that her son can become emperor, but she will have to die first. She accepts the proposal. Back in Rome, Nero, now being raised by emperor Claudius after Caligula's death, Agrippina returns. She poisons Claudius' food and Nero becomes emperor. At first, Nero cuts taxes and introduces successful programs and invades Brittania. Soon he meets a beautiful slave named Claudia Acte, and marries her, throwing off his engagement with Claudius' daughter, Claudia Octavia, telling her she can marry someone she will be happy with. Heartbroken, she arrives at an island and kills herself. Nero enjoys being married to Claudia Acte, but soon he gradually goes mad with power and sets fire to Rome.

Based on the controversial novel by Philippa Gregory, "The Other Boleyn Girl" is a fictionalised account of the life of Lady Mary Boleyn who becomes mistress to England's king, Henry VIII, before being ousted by her younger sister, Anne. Mary leaves the Court to marry a commoner, but returns when Anne embarks on a reckless policy to save herself from ruin.

All-star cast glamorizes this lavish 1970 remake of the classic William Shakespeare play, which portrays the assassination of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March, and the resulting war between the faction led by the assassins and the faction led by Mark Anthony.

A Roman noble, Cethegus, tries to start a war, setting the Ostrogoths and their Queen, Amalasuntha, against the Byzantine Emperor Justinian; Cethegus wants to swoop in after they have destroyed each other and create a new Roman Empire from their combined kingdoms; however, he does not factor into his plans the vagaries of love and the personal integrity of the people in both kingdoms.

The King of Kings is the Greatest Story Ever Told as only Cecil B. DeMille could tell it. In 1927, working with one of the biggest budgets in Hollywood history, DeMille spun the life and Passion of Christ into a silent-era blockbuster. Featuring text drawn directly from the Bible, a cast of thousands, and the great showman’s singular cinematic bag of tricks, The King of Kings is at once spectacular and deeply reverent—part Gospel, part Technicolor epic.

Union soldiers march off to battle amid cheering crowds. After the battle turns against the Union Army, one soldier runs away, hiding in his girlfriend's house. Ashamed of his cowardice, he finds his courage and crosses enemy lines to bring help to his trapped comrades.

Lavishly told story of George Bryan Brummel, a commoner born in the era of Napoleon who uses wit, brilliance and sartorial flair to align himself with the future King George IV. Lush settings in authentic locations and Taylor in Regency …

The perversion behind imperial Rome, the epic story of Rome's mad Emporer. All the details of his cruel, bizarre reign are revealed right here: His unholy sexual passion for his sister, his marriage to Rome's most infamous prostitute, his fiendishly inventive means of disposing those who would oppose him, and more.

Two Brits—inventor Hengist Pod, and Horse, a brave and cunning fighter—are captured and enslaved by invading Romans and taken to Rome. One of their first encounters in Rome leaves Hengist being mistaken for a fighter, and gets drafted into the Royal Guard to protect Cleopatra.

As the Roman empire crumbles, young Romulus Augustus flees the city and embarks on a perilous voyage to Britain to track down a legion of supporters.

In the year 180 A.D. Germanic tribes are about to invade the Roman empire from the north. In the midst of this crisis ailing emperor Marcus Aurelius has to make a decission about his successor between his son Commodus, who is obsessed by power, and the loyal general Gaius Livius.

God and Satan war over earth; to settle things, they wager on the soul of Faust, a learned and prayerful alchemist.

In the reign of emperor Tiberius, Gallilean prophet John the Baptist preaches against King Herod and Queen Herodias. The latter wants John dead, but Herod fears to harm him due to a prophecy. Enter beautiful Princess Salome, Herod's long-absent stepdaughter. Herodias sees the king's dawning lust for Salome as her means of bending the king to her will. But Salome and her lover Claudius are (contrary to Scripture) nearing conversion to the new religion. And the famous climactic dance turns out to have unexpected implications...

Roman centurion Marcian is captured by Attila the Hun en route to Constantinople, but escapes. On arrival, he finds the eastern Roman emperor Theodosius plotting with Attila to look the other way while the latter marches against Rome. But Marcian gains the favor of Pulcheria, lovely sister of Theodosius, who favors a united Empire.

A young circus director ends up going into television after her father, a trapeze performer, dies in a circus accident.

The life and music of Johann Sebastian Bach as presented by his wife, Anna.

On the French island of Mont Saint-Michel, Sonia meets Jack and Tom. Sonia is a Norwegian physicist who abandoned a lucrative career after discovering that elements of her work were being applied to weapons development. Jack is an American politician attempting to make sense of his recent defeat as a presidential candidate. Tom is a poet, disillusioned former political speechwriter, and Jack's close friend. As they wander the picturesque medieval abbey, the trio engage in a wide-ranging conversation on political and social problems, exchanging their varied perspectives rooted in their different intellectual backgrounds.

Roman teenager, Atti is forced to join the Roman army when one of his clever schemes falls foul of Emperor Nero. He is sent to "miserable, cold, wet Britain" where "the natives are revolting - quite literally". Things go from bad to worse when Atti is captured by Orla, a feisty teenage Celt desperate to prove herself as a warrior.

The work-shy, lazy Germanicus is taken to Rome by slave traders and sold straight to the nouveau riche Roman Tusnelda. He manages to escape, but only to end up in the next misery as a taster at the imperial court. When the emperor dies, he is arrested as an emperor's assassin and is to be thrown to the tigers in the arena.With the help of the black slave Saba, he manages to win the deadly fight and is proclaimed - against his will - the new emperor of the Roman Empire.His pragmatic ideas as a statesman explain why the Roman Empire ended so abruptly. At the side of Saba, who is elevated to empress, he returns to his home village of Sumpfing, where he now promises himself completely new perspectives ...

Following the fall of the Roman Empire, a Roman woman plots to make her son the new Emperor and to fulfill the former glory of the city.

The film takes place in the 18th century Austria and revolves around Prince Christian, commonly known as General Crack. His father had been a respectable member of the nobility but his mother was a gypsy. General Crack, as a soldier of fortune, spent his adult life selling his services to the highest bidder. He espouses the doubtful cause of Leopold II of Austria after demanding the sister of the emperor in marriage as well as half of gold of the Empire. Before he has finished his work, however, he meets a gypsy dancer and weds her. Complications arise when he takes his gypsy wife to the Austrian court and falls desperately in love with the emperor's sister.

What is true and what is false in the hideous stories spread about the controversial figure of the Roman emperor Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (12-41), nicknamed Caligula? Professor Mary Beard explains what is accurate and what is mythical in the historical accounts that portray him as an unbalanced despot. Was he a sadistic tyrant, as Roman historians have told, or perhaps the truth about him was manipulated because of political interests?

Did you know that 1% of the white noise you see on old televisions is background radiation from The Big Bang? That the gold on a wedding ring comes from a star that exploded 5 billion years ago? And, that we're connected to the salt water of the first oceans through the water in our bodies? Our human story is actually 14 billion years old and the clues are all around us. This CGI-driven special will tell the history of our world in two hours, an ambitious story that will give surprising connections to our daily lives. From the formation of the earth and the emergence of life, to the advance of man and the growth of civilization, it’s a rapid-fire view of our unforgettable story.

The gripping true story of a boy abducted from the streets of Elizabethan London, and how his father fought to get him back. Presented by acclaimed children's author and academic Katherine Rundell, this intriguing tale is set behind the scenes in the golden age of Shakespeare and sheds a shocking light on the lives of children long before they were thought to have rights. Thirteen-year-old Thomas Clifton was walking to school on 13 December 1600, when he was violently kidnapped. And what's most extraordinary is that the men who took him claimed that they had legal authority to do so from Queen Elizabeth I herself. Children are so often missing from history, but this tale has survived by the skin of its teeth. This inventive film pieces together Thomas Clifton's story from contemporary accounts, court documents, plays and poetry, with the missing gaps beautifully illustrated by vivid hand-drawn animation.

The end of Trajan's Dacian Wars (106 AD), when south western Dacia was transformed into a Roman province: Roman Dacia.

Henry Bolingbroke has now been crowned King of England, but faces a rebellion headed by the embittered Earl of Northumberland and his son (nicknamed 'Hotspur'). Henry's son Hal, the Prince of Wales, has thrown over life at court in favour of heavy drinking and petty theft in the company of a debauched elderly knight, Sir John Falstaff. Hal must extricate himself from some legal problems, regain his father's good opinions and help suppress the uprising.

A psychological interpretation of the opera mixing in references to the history of Germany, Wagner’s life, German literature and philosophy. The action is centered on Wagner’s death mask. Kundry is the main character – one might read the film as the story of her redemption rather than that of Amfortas.

Film adaptation by Straub and Huillet of Hölderlin's 1798 tragedy on the symbolic death of Empedoclus, the legislator in Ancient Greece.

A fearless Antigone, refusing to allow the dishonored body of her murdered brother Polynices to be devoured by vultures and dogs, defies the Thebian tyrant Creon by burying him.

Set in contemporary Rome, the film shows through a series of encounters with “ancient” Romans, how the economic and political manipulation by ancient Roman society led to Caesar’s dictatorship. - British Film Institute

Community Action Center is a 69-minute sociosexual video by A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner which incorporates the erotics of a community where the personal is not only political, but sexual. This project was heavily inspired by porn-romance-liberation films, such as works by Fred Halsted, Jack Smith, James Bidgood, Joe Gage and Wakefield Poole, which served as distinct portraits of the urban inhabitants, landscapes and the body politic of a particular time and place. Community Action Center is a unique contemporary womyn-centric composition that serves as both an ode and a hole-filler.

Adam’s Passion is the moving first collaboration between two “masters of slow motion who harmonize perfectly with each other” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung). In the spectacular setting of a former submarine factory, American director and universal artist Robert Wilson creates a poetic visual world in which the mystical musical language of the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt can cast its meditative spell. Three of Pärt’s major works – Adam’s Lament, Tabula rasa, and Miserere, as well as Sequentia, a new work composed especially for this production – are brought together here using light, space, and movement to create a tightly-woven Gesamtkunstwerk in which the artistic visions of these two great artists mirror each other.

Mozart's La Clemenza Di Tito was originally commissioned to celebrate the coronation of the Emperor Leopold II as King of Bohemia in 1791. This rarely-seen masterpiece was Mozart's last opera. Nicholas Hytner's elegant staging for the Glyndebourne Festival Opera sheds new light on the compelling story of passion that overrides loyalty and integrity that is tested to the extreme.

The film — a mix of music, colors, abstract scenes and little dialogue — is based loosely on the life and death of Mexican-American actress Lupe Velez. The music, far more than mere background, borders on serving as the film’s narrative and ranges from classical to contemporary pop music.