Best movies like Rainbow: A Private Affair

Three partisans bound by a strong friendship return home after the war, but the clash with everyday reality puts a strain on their bond.

The Night of San Lorenzo, the night of the shooting stars, is the night when dreams come true in Italian folklore. In 1944, a group of Italians flee their town after hearing rumours that the Nazis plan to blow it up and that the Americans are about to arrive to liberate them.

A group of rich young intellectuals hiding from the war in rural Italy play at being partisans when some disbanded soldiers and some refugees ask them for shelter in their villa. The young and aristocratic Andrea strikes up a friendship with a peasant girl, Lucia. Then the Germans suddenly appear, looking for the real partisans, and the time comes for serious decisions.

Summer, 1943: wealthy youth in the Riccione district of Rimini play while the war gets closer. Carlo Caremoli, a young man who follows the crowd, has found ways to avoid military service. Then, on the beach, he meets Roberta, a war widow with a child. Roberta's mother warns Roberta to avoid Carlo, but to her, he seems attentive and to her daughter he is kind. Romance develops. Within a few weeks, Roberta is risking everything. Can there be a resolution between passion, on the one hand, and war, duty, and social expectation on the other?

World War II, 1940. When the Nazi hordes invade and occupy Great Britain, the English citizens are soon divided between those who choose to submissively collaborate and those who are willing to fight.

A young man returns to his countryside hometown to investigate the unclear circumstances behind the death of his father, ostensibly killed by Fascists in 1936, before his birth. As he unravels a web of lies that seems to encompass the whole town, he finds himself entangled in the same web.

Four circus freaks with superpowers find themselves trapped in Nazi-occupied Rome after their owner and father figure goes missing in the aftermath of the 1943 surrender of Italy to the Allies.

September 1943: in the general confusion a thief dressed as a priest and a sergeant exchange clothes and roles.

7th September 1943. The honest and reliable carabiniere Umberto is sent to escort the flamboyant con man Raoul Nuvolini from Terni to Venice. Umberto's fiancée Luisa follows him against his will.

The real story of the partisan Silvio Corbari. He starts his career killing publicly one of his friends that was a fascist. Than, he set up a band of partisans in north Italy, completely independent from the Italian organized resistance (CLN). Ines, leave his husband to join the band and became Silvio's lover. Silvio Corbari succeeded also to set up a free-zone, his personal republic, independent from the Nazi occupied Italy, in a little village called Tregnano. But the opponent Nazi-Fascist army is too much for any kind of resistance, especially if not included in the organized CNL. All his partisan friends are captured and sentenced to death, Ines, close to be captured, suicides. Corbari, even if survives to a first hanging, can't escape to a second one. After WWII he deserved a gold medal to the memory from the Italian Republic.

This is a true story about forty Jewish children on their way to Palestine, who were blocked by the German and Italian occupation of Yugoslavia in 1941. Before finding a haven at Villa Emma in Nonantola in northern Italy, where they arrived on June 17, 1942, the children spent several adventurous months in Slovenia, caught up in the ongoing fight between the partisans and the Italian army. In April 1943, another 33 children, some from the Balkans, others from France, joined the original group. All were orphans who had lost their parents in concentration camps and had subsequently been smuggled out of Germany by Recha Freier, a well-known Zionist. The group ranged in age from six to twenty one and settled in at Villa Emma with their chaperones and teachers, Josef Indig, Marco Schoky and the pianist Boris Jochverdson.

When her sweetheart Bruno joins the Italian army, Gina, bored by her lack of social life, weds Tullio. She comes to regret her decision when Tullio proves to be a Nazi collaborationist. Casting her lot with the Resistance movement, Gina is forced into a difficult decision when the safety of ex-lover Bruno is endangered by the treachery of Tullio.

Northern Italy, Autumn 1944, the last days of World War II. Germans and Italians try to defend the Gothic Line and fight the partisans who support the inexorable advance of the US Army.

A dramatic re-enactment of the Warsaw Ghetto Jewish uprising in April 1943 were 650 armed members of the Jewish Fighting Organization of Poland held off a 3,000 strong Nazi force in which only a handful of Jews survived. Tom Conti plays Dolek Berson, a Jewish smuggler who joins the resistance movement and is aided on the Aryan side of the wall by a former teacher named Regina Kowalski played by Rachel Roberts in her final role.

In 1945, the dictator of fascist Italy and Hitler's close ally Benito Mussolini faces defeat. In a desperate attempt to avoid capture, he tries to flee the country with his lover Claretta Petacci, but Italian partisans are on their tail.

1944. Primo Arcovazzi is a fanatical and dim-witted Fascist Party militiaman who accepts to escort an opponent of the regime to Rome in the hope of be promoted—still oblivious as ever to the nearing end of the regime. Travelling by sidecar through an Italy ravaged by war, the two will manage to build up some kind of comradeship in spite of their differences.

Set in the 17th-century, an Italian nobleman weds an impoverished countess, who is wooed by the King of Piedmont and faces pressure from his entire court to succumb to his wishes.

In the Nazi occupied city of Rome, an assault on an SS brigade draws retaliation from the military governship. "Massacre in Rome" is the true story of how this partisan attack led to the mass execution of Italian nationals under the orders of SS-Lieutenant Colonel Kappler.

A group of Italian villagers struggle to survive during a tumultuous time in 1943, debating how much assistance to give the partisans with the impending arrival of the Germans. Based on True Events.

Occupied Yugoslavia. With organised resistance shattered by the Nazi onslaught it is only the activity of small guerrilla bands that bring fresh hope to the people. But quislings and infiltrators are everywhere – and trusting the wrong person could easily get you killed...

1943. The affair between Anna, unhappily married to wheelchair-bound Pino, and deserter Franco unfolds in foggy Ferrara, intertwining with the power struggle taking place within local Fascist ranks that culminates in a massacre of civilians, including Franco's father – Pino sees it all from his window, but will he tell anyone?

Chronicle of the unheralded and unsuccessful invasion of the Soviet Union by the Italian army during World War II.

Alvaro Cosenza, also known as the Hunchback from Quarticciolo, during Rome's occupation by Nazis in 1943, decides to revolt.

'Dalla nube alla resistenza (From the Cloud to the Resistance ) (1978), based on two works by Cesare Pavese, falls into the category of History Lessons and Too Early, Too Late as well. It, too, has two parts—a twentieth-century text and a text regarding the myths of antiquity, each set in the appropriate landscape. Pavese's The Moon and the Bonfires looks back on the violent deaths of Italian anti-Fascist resistance fighters; Dialogues with Leucò is a series of dialogues between heroes and gods, connecting myth and history and returning to an ambiguous stage in the creation of distinctions, such as that between animal and human, which are fundamental to grammar and language itself. Such a juxtaposition of political engagement with profoundly contemplative issues such as myth, nature, and meaning points to the characters of Empedocles and Antigone in the Hölderlin films.' (From "Landscapes of resistance. The German Films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub" by Barton Byg)

During the 20 months before Italy's liberation from Fascism, a group of university students trade empty rhetoric for action by joining the Partisans into the mountains of Nazi-occupied northern Italy. There, group leader Gigi falls in love with his best friend's girl. As the Resistance struggle continues, some of the "little teachers" are killed, and the brutal reality of war leaves its mark on their youthful idealism.

Pistoia, World War II. After the Nazi occupation of Tuscany, Silvano Fedi, together with a group of twenty-year-olds like him, decides to establish the 'Squadre Franche Libertarie', the local and national resistance, ready to give their lives in order to free Italy from oppression and injustice and rebuild it on the ideals of freedom and non-violence.

After the 8th September 1943 north of Italy is occupied by Germans. Italian army collapsed and the soldiers are escaped to the mountains trying to set up a resistance. Many civilians did the same and Johnny, an English literature student, is among them. Johnny avoids to band together the red partisans (communists) and tries to be part of the azure bands (former regular soldiers). But in both cases he is deluded by the partisan bands and discovers that the partisan war is less poetic and genuine that he thought. At one point anyway the partisans free Alba from Germans. When the city falls again in German hands Johnny escape with Ettore and Pierre. But, one after another, German army and Italian fascists captures the partisans and Johnny will pass the winter alone and isolated. He then finds the way to participate to one of the last attack to occupants, in fact the war will be over two months later.

Aldo Piscitello, a minor government clerk, is forced in 1934 to join the Fascist party. When the war comes, he finds himself able only to talk ineffectually in secret against Mussolini, even as his own son Giovanni is sent into battle. By the end of the war, Aldo has found the courage to stand up for his beliefs, but by then it is too late.

Although released anonymously, as was the custom with all films produced by the Italian Navy, La Nave Bianca is the first feature-length effort directed by Roberto Rossellini; it is also very much the work of its co-writer and supervisor Francesco De Robertis. The film combines a documentary look at the Italian Navy during World War II with newsreel combat footage and a scripted love story performed by non-professional actors.

September the 8th 1943, Rome, day of the armistice. Danilo escapes the fascist enlist, while Michele succeeded to leave his administration moving from Rome. On the way to come back Rome the two meets Gino and all together will try to pass trough the Gothic Line.

In Milan, in the winter of 1944, the ruthless Cane Nero leads the fascists against the partisans. Enne 2, one of the leading figures of the C.N.L., meets Berta, whom he loved three years ago, but Berta refuses to leave her husband for him. Enne 2 is pursued by the fascists of Cane Nero and, instead of running away to Turin, waits for Berta to rejoin him

A farcical account of the happenings in Rome in 1943 when the allied army and the partisans fight the nazis.

In 1943, Vincenzio and Maria take their children to his father's Tuscan farm. Vincenzio commutes to Rome where he's a physician and, in the hospital basement, prints an anti-Fascist paper. His brother is in the Resistance; his father supplies food to a local monastery where 12 fugitives hide. All is seen through the eyes of the oldest child, Paulo, who's about 7 and the only lad at school who doesn't wear a Fascist Youth uniform. For Paulo and his siblings, it's great fun playing with their nonno, finding herbs in the fields, watching a maid's tryst with a soldier, teasing a silent monk. Then the war reaches the farm when Italy surrenders and the Germans exact revenge.

A cinematographic account of the reprisal ordered by the ruthless Austrian colonel Kappler in 1944 in Rome. In Via Rasella (Rasella Street) ten Italian civilians were sentenced to death for each German soldier killed in a partisan attempt.