Best movies like Splendor
A unique, carefully handpicked, selection of the best movies like Splendor Starring Marcello Mastroianni, Massimo Troisi, Marina Vlady, Paolo Panelli, and more. If you liked Splendor then you may also like: Unfair Competition, Roaring Years, All Roads Lead to Rome, Baaria, Dear Diary 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.
Splendor is the name of an old movie theater managed by Jordan (Mastroianni), who inherited it from his father. The theater is in decay and only generates debts and trouble, but Jordan gets aid in his almost quixotian quest from projectionist Luigi (Troisi) and ushurette Chantale (Vlady). However, Jordan is finally forced to sell the Splendor to businessman Lo Fazio (Piperno), which plans to transform it in some kind of furniture store. When Jordan leaves the theater for the last time (the very first scene), he recalls the glorious days of Splendor and movies in general.
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Roaring Years
In this satire inspired by Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector (aka The Inspector General) and transported to fascist era Italy, the (supposed) incognito visit of a Roman fascist official to a tiny country town shakes deeply the ruling class and their lack of integrity.
All Roads Lead to Rome
Maggie is an uptight, single mother and college writing teacher from New York City. In an effort to reconnect with her troubled teen daughter Summer, she decides to embark on a journey to a Tuscan village where she frequented in her younger days. Upon arrival, Maggie runs into Luca a handsome former lover who is still a bachelor and lives with his eighty-year-old mother Carmen. Summer (missing her “bad boy” boyfriend in NYC) and Carmen (secretly planning a wedding against Luca’s wishes to MARCELINO, her one true love in Rome) impulsively steal Luca’s car and race off to Rome. Maggie and Luca quickly pursue allowing the two mismatched couples to spend some time together and develop a new understanding of each other.
Dear Diary
Nanni Moretti recalls in his diary three slice of life stories characterized by a sharply ironic look: in the first one he wanders through a deserted Rome, in the second he visits a reclusive friend on an island, and in the last he has to grapple with an unknown illness.
Cinema Paradiso
A filmmaker recalls his childhood, when he fell in love with the movies at his village's theater and formed a deep friendship with the theater's projectionist.
The Conformist
A weak-willed Italian man becomes a fascist flunky who goes abroad to arrange the assassination of his old teacher, now a political dissident.
The Dinner
Story about two brothers and their wives, and the interactions between them and their two high school age children. When the kids get into serious trouble together, how will the parents relationships change with and among each other? Will the parents protect the kids or force them to face the consequences of their actions?
Lions Love
Three actors in Hollywood live and love together. A director comes from New York to make a movie about actors and Hollywood.
I Knew Her Well
A young woman from the Italian countryside experiences the dark side of the business after she moves to Rome to become a star.
I Could Go on Singing
Jenny Bowman is a successful singer who, while on an engagement at the London Palladium, visits David Donne to see her son Matt again, spending a few glorious days with him while his father is away in Rome in an attempt to attain the family that she never had. When David returns, Matt is torn between his loyalty to his father and his affection for Jenny.
A Special Day
In Rome, fascist supporter Emanuele attends a parade commemorating Adolf Hitler's historic meeting with Italian leader Benito Mussolini, leaving his apolitical wife, Antonietta, to tend to household duties. Antonietta encounters a man, Gabriele, who appears surprisingly nonplussed by the political event. Over the course of the day, the two forge a close friendship that will forever change their perceptions of life, love and politics.
Splendor
Veronica is a white-bread beauty searching for a good man in Los Angeles. While slam dancing at a Halloween rave, she meets Abel, a sensitive poet. Then she meets Zed, a supersexy tattooed drummer with incredible biceps. Who will she choose? Does she go for true love or cheap sex? She can't decide so she chooses both. But after managing to nurture a picture-perfect threesome, along comes Ernest, a rich movie director with deep baby blues that sweep Veronica off her feet. What's a girl to do now?
The Sweet Body of Deborah
A young newlywed couple from America returns to Geneva to visit Marcel's home town. Once there he is informed of his former lover's suicide and in turn is subjected to threats that accuse him of being responsible for her death and further, threaten his new fiancée's life. George Hilton plays a peculiar neighbor with voyeuristic tendencies who has an obsession with Deborah.
Sweet Dreams
Michele criticizes the film industry and its inhabitants, and is particularly embattled with a Neapolitan director making a musical about the 1968 student demonstrations. At the same time, Michele has a creative block and struggles to finish his film titled "Freud’s Mother." Nanni Moretti’s self-inquiry into filmmaking, political ennui, and men’s relations with their mothers.
The City of Your Final Destination
28-year-old Kansas University doctoral student Omar Razaghi wins a grant to write a biography of Latin American writer Jules Gund. Omar must get through to three people who were close to Gund – his brother, widow, and younger mistress – so he can get authorization to write the biography.
The Story of Piera
Piera is a young woman who grows up under the parentage of two extremely original overseers: both her mother and father have incestuous relations with her before they are committed to insane asylums. A special connection, between a mother and her daughter, full of sensuality and complicity, has allowed to portray a family full of fears, rather unbalanced, but nevertheless searching infinite love.
Close Friends
Fifteen-year-old Sabrina has lived with her father since he split with her mother. As the film unfolds it gradually becomes clear that Sabrina is a victim of incest.
What Time Is It?
A father and his son who lived seperated for some time meet each other one day and try to talk their problems over and understand their diametrical differences.
The Revolving Doors
A quiet painter, separated from his wife for a year, receives a suitcase in the mail from his mother, whom he hasn't seen since infancy. He believes she abandoned him to his wealthy, paternal grandparents. The suitcase contains mementos and a diary, a long letter to him, written over the years, with details of her youth, her first job as a pianist at a cinema, the coming of talkies, her marriage, and how he came to live with his grandparents. As he reads through the materials and her story comes to life, his son Antoine, who's about 10 or 12, tries to break through his father's silence and sorrow by taking matters into his own hands.
The Empty Canvas
An aspiring young artist breaks from his wealthy, possessive mother to live a bohemian existence in the artist's section of Rome and falls in love with a beautiful model who wants an uncommitted relationship.
Conversation Piece
A retired professor of American origin lives a solitary life in a luxurious palazzo in Rome. He is confronted by a vulgar Italian marchesa and her lover, her daughter and her daughter's boyfriend, and forced to rent to them an apartment on the upper floor of his palazzo. From this point on his quiet routine is turned into chaos by his tenants' machinations, and everybody's life takes an unexpected but inevitable turn.
Antonia
Distinguished Italian poet Antonia Pozzi (1912–1938) was among those women who were at odds with the times in which they lived. Her poems record her inability to adapt to social norms and her desire to live fully, and in poetry she sought an escape from reality and from her own complex soul and emotional life.
L'immensità
Set in 1970s Rome, the fiction tracks the plight of a nuclear family, consisting of an unhappy married couple: Clara (a deeply dissatisfied expatriate Spaniard) and Felice (an abusive businessman cheating on Clara with his secretary) and their children Adriana, Gino, and Diana. Their eldest child, 12-year-old Adriana, experiences gender dysphoria; he rejects girlhood and instead goes by the name of Andrea (a primarily masculine name in Italian). Andrea develops a crush for Sara, a Roma girl who knows him as a boy. Upon a shared sense of being outsiders, Andrea and Clara grow closer.
Shun Li and the Poet
A study of the friendship between a Chinese woman and a fisherman who came to Italy from Yugoslavia many years ago, who live in a small city-island in the Veneto lagoon.
Family Diary
Enrico is a struggling journalist in the Rome of 1945. He receives a phone call informing him that his younger brother Lorenzo has died. Enrico recalls their long and difficult relationship; he was brought up by their poor but warm-hearted grandmother, Lorenzo was raised as a gentleman by a wealthy local aristocrat. Reunited in the Florence of the 1930s, Enrico becomes his spoilt brother's keeper, forever haunted by a sense of guilty responsibility towards a man he both hates and loves.
Escalation
1968, London. Luca is living his 'swinging' years away from duties and responsibilities while his father wants him to be introduced to the family business at any cost. Luca is first forced to return to Italy, then kidnapped by his father's collaborators, placed in a sanitarium and put through electroshock therapy and other torments. Once 'normalised' Luca marries a woman who is in reality a psychologist paid by his father to brainwash him and turn him into a perfect businessman.
Everybody's Fine
Matteo Scuro is a retired Sicilian bureaucrat, a widower with five children, all of whom live on the mainland and hold responsible jobs. He decides to surprise each with a visit and finds none as he imagined.
Down the Ancient Stairs
A mental hospital somewhere in Tuscany during the thirties. Far away from fascism, this closed world is rules over by Dr. Bonaccorsi, a passionate benevolent psychiatrist whose dream is to isolate the germ of madness. He is also a very active ladies'man and makes three women benefit from his sexual itch: Francesca the hospital manager's wife, Bianca, his devoted nurse and Carla, a nymphomaniac doctor's wife. His well-ordered universe starts being challenged with the coming of Anna, a trainee psychiatrist, who disapproves of his theory on the origin of madness. Worse, she resists his advances. As Bonaccorsi is more insecure than he looks, what will become of him?
The Time of Indifference
A screen adaptation of the novel of the same name by Alberto Moravia. Rome, our days. Mariagration Ardengo and her children Michele and Carla are left without a livelihood. Mariagration's money-hungry lover Leo develops a plan to take the last property from the family - the attic in which they live. Michele tries to thwart Leo's plans, but when his attempts fail, young Carla takes over.
Land in Between
SILHOUETTE: Nigerian prostitutes dealing with miscellaneous customers EUGLEN & GERTIAN: Daily recruitment of Albanian immigrants seeking work but without working residency permit. SELF SERVICE: a night with Ahmed, egyptian illegal gas station attender, who has been living in italy for many years
I piccoli maestri
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.
Dead at the Box Office
After finding a mysterious film reel hidden in their ceiling, the well-meaning staff of a struggling movie theater assume that the film is an old B-movie preview trailer and play it before a midnight screening of the timeless George A. Romero masterpiece, 'Night of the Living Dead'. When the film is revealed to be a long-dead Nazi scientist's mind control experiment, their audience of horror movie fanatics is transformed into a mob of mindless zombies with a fierce hunger for the flesh of the living! Ten survivors struggle to stay alive as the cinema is overrun by shambling hordes of the undead, while outside, ruthless government agents plot to halt the spread of the mysterious outbreak by any means necessary. Sometimes creepy, sometimes campy, 'Dead at the Box Office' pays tribute to the low budget horror films of the '70s and '80s. Combining the elements of these "B" classics with a fresh twist on the zombie origin, 'Dead at the Box Office' is a tongue-in-cheek salute to horror fans.
Unfair Competition
Two linen fabric dealers with their shops close to one another, battle against each other for more and more costumers. Umberto constantly loses clients because of the tough competition brought by Leone, who offers the best prices in the neighborhood. But they leave differences aside when the rise of Fascism places Anti-Semitic politics which rigidly control business like the one conducted by the Jewish Leone, and those new regulations are viewed by Umberto as completely unfair. The long rivalry soon becomes a great friendship.