Best movies like The Afternoon of a Torturer

George Orwell's novel of a totalitarian future society in which a man whose daily work is rewriting history tries to rebel by falling in love.

British comedy satirising Stalin's inner circle as an absolute monarchs court. In the face of rampant abuse of power and poisonous distrust some still manage to keep faith with the Bolshevist creed until the very end. In front of the firing squad a stalwart bolshevist of the first hour exclaims: "Even in the best democracy errors are being made!"

In 2009, Iranian Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari was covering Iran's volatile elections for Newsweek. One of the few reporters living in the country with access to US media, he made an appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, in a taped interview with comedian Jason Jones. The interview was intended as satire, but if the Tehran authorities got the joke they didn't like it - and it would quickly came back to haunt Bahari when he was rousted from his family home and thrown into prison.

Stacy Keach narrates this documentary that chronicles the abbreviated life and career of iconic brooding bad boy James Dean, from his obscure early days working in television to his rise to stardom in films such as Rebel Without a Cause. Clips from Dean's movies are intermingled with candid interviews with the star's friends and Hollywood colleagues, including Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo, Sammy Davis Jr. and Dennis Hopper.

Three young man run in the rain with a borrowed car. The first accident, whose victim is a girl, gives the signal for a race through the city to escape the police crews. Race ends tragically, with another serious incident, even one victim is involved. The only way out is escape. The film shows the psychological transformation of fugitives, in their desperate attempt to evade the consequences and pressures of their conscience.

A Romanian police officer teams up with a small crew of bank robbers to pull off a heist by convincing everyone at the scene of the crime that they are only filming a movie.

When dictator Joseph Stalin dies, his parasitic cronies square off in a frantic power struggle to become the next Soviet leader. As they bumble, brawl and back-stab their way to the top, the question remains — just who is running the government?

While fully enjoying the life of the 70's, in communist Romania, a young man is arrested and accused of a terrible crime. Freed a few years later and deeply affected by his sinister experience, he tries to find out what had really happened.

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.

In London, after investigating crack addicted junkies for an article in her newspaper, Amy Klein watches a bizarre videotape where an underground group of youngsters in Bucharest apparently become zombies. Amy finds Marla dead with a puzzle cube in her hands. She brings the object to her hotel room, and opens it, beginning her journey to hell.

The surprising and entertaining life of renowned film critic and social commentator Roger Ebert (1942-2013): his early days as a freewheeling bachelor and Pulitzer Prize winner, his famously contentious partnership with Gene Siskel, his life-altering marriage, and his brave and transcendent battle with cancer.

When the Soviet Army marched into Romania in 1944, a part of the Romanian population went “into the mountains” – a diverse assortment of nationalists and fascists, liberals, apolitical farmers and members of the middle-class, who were affected by the Communists’ expropriations. Over a thousand armed resistance groups took refuge in the inaccessible forests of the Carpathian Mountains where they waited in vain for the support of the Western Allies. One of them was led by Ion Gavrilă-Ogoranu, who managed to remain undetected until 1976 when he was arrested. This film depicts the daily existence of this group. It tells the story of a struggle that became an end in itself, as the enemy was constantly in pursuit and arrest meant torture and often liquidation. Hungry and emotionally withdrawn, the group of young men got entangled in a partisan war that could not be won, lost in the landscape of the South Carpathians, accompanied by a vigilant secret police, the Securitate.

Early 1960s Haiti during 'Papa Doc' Duvalier's dictatorship seen through the eyes of a young girl whose family has suffered heavily.

A study of the underground music scene in the former Eastern Bloc city of Timisoara, Romania, in the first decade following the fall of the Communist regime.

26 year-old Karl Marx embarks with his wife, Jenny, on the road to exile. In 1844 in Paris, he meets Friedrich Engels, an industrialist’s son, who has been investigating the sordid birth of the British working class. Engels, the dandy, provides the last piece of the puzzle to the young Karl Marx’s new vision of the world. Together, between censorship and the police’s repression, riots and political upheavals, they will lead the labor movement during its development into a modern era.

It's the 22nd of December. Sixteen years have passed since the revolution, and in a small town Christmas is about to come. Piscoci, an old retired man is preparing for another Christmas alone. Manescu, the history teacher, tries to keep up with his debts. Jderescu, the owner of a local television post, seems not to be so interested in the upcoming holidays. For him, the time to face history has come. Along with Manescu and Piscoci, he is trying to answer for himself a question which for 16 years has not had an answer: "Was it or wasn't it a revolution in their town?"

A documentary about the life and films of director John Ford.

Historical movie based on the "fratii Jderi" book. The movie is in the top 20 most watched Romanian movies.

The destiny of the man who led the gendarme team after a LGBT film screening in Bucharest, revealed through an investigation by Liliana Calomfir, a young journalist known for her daring reporting.

In 1959, in Romania, six former members of the nomenklatura and the secret police organize a hold up of the National Bank. After their arrest, the state forces them to play themselves in a film which reconstitutes the crime and the investigation. At the end of their trial, filmed live, they are sentenced to death and executed. A month later, the film Reconstitution was released and became a sensation throughout the country. - Written by giolgaudaniel

Two college roommates have 24 hours to make the ultimate choice as they finalize arrangements for a black market abortion.

An optician grapples with the Indonesian mass killings of 1965-1966, during which his older brother was exterminated.

A story of transformation and hope in a time of turmoil and terror

The Voice of the Martyrs presents the inspiring new movie Tortured for Christ, a cinematic retelling of the testimony of VOM founder Pastor Richard Wurmbrand as written in his international bestseller Tortured for Christ. This movie was produced to honor the 50th anniversary of the book’s 1967 release. Filmed entirely in Romania, including in the very prison where Pastor Wurmbrand endured torture and solitary confinement, this powerful film uniquely presents the story with live action rather than interviews. The dialogue is presented in English, Romanian and Russian (with English subtitles) to hold to the authenticity of this true story.

In the fifties, the leaders of the Greek-Catholic church are arrested and sent to the Sighet prison.The soviet regime has banned any church except the orthodox. Tortured and dehumanized, the only choices are conversion or death. The bishop Iuliu Hossu stands up in front of the torturers and through courage and stature becomes an inspiration for the other priests.

On Valentines Day, 1931, Universal Pictures released the film Dracula - the first true horror movie. Its worldwide success catapulted the film's lead actor, Romanian-born Bela Lugosi, to overnight stardom. "Bela Lugosi: The Fallen Vampire" traces the life and career of this mysterious man whose name became synonymous with the evil, yet magnetically compelling Count Dracula. Using archival still and film clips as well as interviews with film historians, actors and Lugosi himself, the special chronicles the meteoric rise and then precipitous decline of a talented yet tragic man who forever changed the face of horror films.

A portrait of Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo (1955-2017), a witness of the Tiananmen Square massacre (1989), a dissident, a woodpecker who tirelessly pecked the putrid brain of the Communist regime for decades, demanding democracy loudly and fearlessly. Silenced, arrested, convicted, imprisoned, dead. Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2010, alive forever. These are his last words.

Tales from the Golden Age is composed of 6 unconventional short stories, each one dealing with the late communist period in Romania, told through its urban myths from the perspective of ordinary people. The title of the film refers to the alluded "Golden Age" of the last 15 years of Ceauşescu's regime.

A former political police agent that has left communist Romania decades ago in search of freedom has to go back to find it.

Andrei Blaier's film catches the last days of The Stone Cross a low class brothels area that became some kind of an institution in the landscape of Bucharest before the Communist period, doomed to destruction under the new rules of proletarian morals that the Communists were trying to impose. The idea could be the start of a great film, with the prostitution being seen not so much from its destructive and exploitation perspective, but rather as a form of freedom in a time when the whole society was falling under the rule of propaganda, hypocrisy, and repression. In a world due to fall under tyranny for the coming decades prostitution becomes a metaphor of the old more free way of life.

This Romanian dramatic comedy offers metaphorical commentary on life after Ceausescu's reign as it tells the story of a rural community turned topsy-turvy in their mad quest for the snails a prominent senator has requested for his dinner. The trouble begins when a rather imposing, pompous senator comes to visit a small rural Romanian town for a ribbon-cutting ceremony for their new hydro-electric dam. After he finishes his speech, the senator is accosted by a Swiss film crew eager to interview him. The senator is inordinately concerned with presenting a positive image of Romania to the world at large and so when he learns that he and the journalists are to stay at the same villa, does everything he came to make sure that they see nothing scandalous.

After WWII Comisarul Moldovan spent years as a political prisoner of the communist regime. The favorite entertainment of the Russian Colonel in charge of the prison was to have the inmates play Russian Roulette. Only his unbelievable luck and survivor spirit helped Moldovan live through his detention. Out of the prison the ex-policeman joins an international Russian Roulette illegal gaming circuit. In late 70's faith brings him to a Central European town where Goldberg, an old acquaintance of his is organizing an "improved" version of the game where two opponents are shooting each other. Step by step Moldovan meets lots of familiar faces, both friends and enemies. It looks like the whole Bucharest's underworld from the 40's chose to meet here.

Giani is a pimp who preys on the naïve, ‘just off the bus’ young women who come to post-war London for fortune.

Bucharest 1989 - the last year of Ceausecu's dictatorship. Eva lives with her parents and her 7 year old brother, Lalalilu. One day at school, Eva and her boyfriend accidentally break a bust of Ceausescu. They are forced to confess their crime before a disciplinary committee and Eva is expelled from school and transferred to a reformatory establishment. There she meets Andrei, and decides to escape Romania with him. Lalalilu becomes convinced that Ceausescu is the main reason for Eva's decision to leave. So with his friends from school he devises a plan to kill the dictator.

Romanian-born Radu Patru is a trainee at a prestigious French news network. Serving as a translator and general problem solver, or "fixer," for the headlining journalists during his trial period, he's looking to make his big break. He sees his opportunity when two underage Romanian prostitutes are repatriated from France, creating an international scandal. Taking advantage of his language skills and local connections, Radu is prepared to do whatever it takes to interview one of the young girls. But as he ventures into tricky moral ground, he must stop to ask himself if, as an aspiring journalist, he can live with the consequences of his actions, and if, as a father, he's setting a good example for his son.

Inspired by historical facts, this film is a story of love and survival against the background of the 1951 Communist ordered deportation of 40,000 landowners and people of non-Romanian origins to the Baragan Plain, the "Romanian Siberia".

32 years after the fall of communism and one hundred years after the founding of the Romanian Communist Party, three young independent filmmakers set out to make their feature film debut with a film about an invisible enemy, the radioactive cloud since 1986. Although a large part of the artistic team of the film The Lost Year 1986 was born after the 1989 Revolution, they will tell with humor and sincerity the story of a family from a village in communist Romania, affected by the Chernobyl nuclear accident.

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.

American soldiers, captured by North Korean's, are periodically brainwashed into giving up their capitalist ways to join the communist movement.

In the harbor city of Le Havre, France, a woman is stabbed during the night, just below the windows of her neighborhood. Pierre (Yvan Attal) has witnessed the murder, and heard the wails of the women crying for help. So have the neighbors, certainly. But at the end, nobody called the police. Nevertheless, sorrows are too heavy for Pierre, which feel the needs to tell everything to his wife (Sophie Quinton), and to the police. During the investigation, it appears that 38 people witnessed the murdering, and none reacted...

In 1946, Northern Transylvania, an armed band is annihilated by the local communist organization, which manages to rally the locals on they side.

The film shows that Romanian peasants were divided between those opposing and those embracing collectivization. The heated debates between the pro and con camps would ultimately lead to murder.

A witty and cheerful musical comedy made under the Communist regime.

1957. For several months, Henri Charlègue, the ex-director of the newspaper "Alger democratic", banned, has been living in hiding. Suspected of belonging to the FLN, he is actively sought by paratroopers.

During the summer of 1944, while Romanians turn weapons against Nazis, Mihai, an orphan teenager whose parents died in a bombing, tries to enlist in order to fight in the front line but he discovers that former police commissioner Potra tortured and beaten prisoners, including his father, who was political detained. Mihai will fight to bring Potra in front of the justice.

Per IMDB: A young officer of the Romanian Army performs a sabotage mission against the Nazi regime. Seriously wounded, the officer can not reach the fixed place and finds shelter in a surgeon's home.

An uncompromising journalist obsessed with the idea of absolute justice ends up committing suicide after reading his father's biography. Based on three novels by Camil Petrescu.

After an illustrious special ops career ends in disaster, Alexander goes off the grid and attempts to lead a quiet life as a handyman at an apartment complex. But when one of his tenants and her family fall under the thumb of a Russian gangster, Alexander is dragged into an all-out war between rival Chinese and Russian gangs; forcing him to not only defend the family, but bringing him face to face with an old foe, and giving him one more chance to reconcile his past.

A unique documentary that looks at the political activities of the American Communist Party in the early to mid-twentieth century.