Best movies like The Red Shade

A unique, carefully handpicked, selection of the best movies like The Red Shade Starring Claude Brasseur, Jacques Dutronc, Nathalie Baye, Andréa Ferréol, and more. If you liked The Red Shade then you may also like: The Serpent, Red Monarch, The Living Daylights, Back in the USSR, Billion Dollar Brain 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.

The time is the 1930s and two Soviet spies (both Frenchmen by nationality) have been helping Communist factions during the Civil War in Spain. It is the time of Stalin's iron rule in the USSR, and the two agents are suddenly called to Moscow by the KGB. Knowing that they are in trouble for no fault of their own, fear drives one of them to suicide while the other gets his lover and her child and begins a run for his life, knowing that the KGB will never let him go free.

selected filters: Sort: Default

You may filter the list of movies on this page for a more refined, personalized selection of movies.

Still not sure what to watch click the recommend buttun below to get a movie recommendation selected from all the movies on this list

Know any good movies to watch like The Red Shade 1981. With a similar plot or stoyline. Suggest it.

The Serpent

Vlassov is a Soviet spy who defects in France. He is whisked to the U.S, where Allan Davies takes over the case. After polygraph tests and cross-examinations, Vlassov names several Western European agents who are also spying for the Soviets. Davies wants to take the listed agents into custody; meanwhile, those on the list start dying under mysterious circumstances.

Red Monarch

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!"

The Living Daylights

After a defecting Russian general reveals a plot to assassinate foreign spies, James Bond is assigned a secret mission to dispatch the new head of the KGB to prevent an escalation of tensions between the Soviet Union and the West.

Back in the USSR

During Gorbachev's perestroika, a Chicago student, visits Moscow while the Soviet Union is changing from Communist to Wild West capitalist society. Purely by bad luck, he becomes a pawn in a dangerous cat and mouse game for a precious icon.

Billion Dollar Brain

A former British spy stumbles into in a plot to overthrow Communism with the help of a supercomputer. But who is working for whom?

Burnt by the Sun

Russia, 1936: revolutionary hero Colonel Kotov is spending an idyllic summer in his dacha with his young wife and six-year-old daughter Nadia and other assorted family and friends. Things change dramatically with the unheralded arrival of Cousin Dmitri from Moscow, who charms the women and little Nadia with his games and pianistic bravura. But Kotov isn't fooled: this is the time of Stalin's repression, with telephone calls in the middle of the night spelling doom - and he knows that Dmitri isn't paying a social call...

Deadly Harvest

An Iron Curtain defector who has been living for years as a California winegrower learns that Soviet agents are stalking him.

Gorky Park

Police Inspector Renko tries to solve the case of three bodies found in Moscow's Gorky Park but finds his attempts to solve the crime impeded by his superiors. Working on his own, Renko seeks out more information and stumbles across a conspiracy involving the highest levels of the government.

Despite the Falling Snow

New York, 1961. Alexander Ivanov, a high-ranked Soviet bureaucrat, reluctantly defects to the West while is part of a diplomatic mission, feeling the grief of being unable to know the fate of his wife Katya, whom he has had to leave behind in Moscow. Only many years later, in 1991, he will finally find out the truth when his niece Lauren travels to Moscow to participate in a painting exhibition.

East/West

June 1946: Stalin invites Russian emigres to return to the motherland. It's a trap: when a ship-load from France arrives in Odessa, only a physician and his family are spared execution or prison. He and his French wife (her passport ripped up) are sent to Kiev. She wants to return to France immediately; he knows that they are captives and must watch every step.

Farewell

An intricate thriller about an ordinary man thrust into the biggest theft of Soviet information of the Cold War. Right after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. A French businessman based in Moscow, Pierre Froment, makes an unlikely connection with Grigoriev, a senior KGB officer disenchanted with what the Communist ideal has become under Brezhnev. Grigoriev begins passing Froment highly sensitive information about the Soviet spy network in the US.

Icon

A former US Operative, who lived in Russia in his earlier years and had been married there with a child, comes out of retirement to face down a former enemy, now running as a candidate for President in modern Russia. Working with a Russian policewoman, they work to uncover a plot to use biological weapons against certain factions of the Russian people to commit genocide. The virus would also be released in other populations, but would be treated making the candidate a hero. A side plot has the agent being reunited with his long lost daughter.

Land and Freedom

David Carr is a British Communist who is unemployed. In 1936, when the Spanish Civil War begins, he decides to fight for the Republican side, a coalition of liberals, communists and anarchists, so he joins the POUM militia and witnesses firsthand the betrayal of the Spanish revolution by Stalin's followers and Moscow's orders.

Teheran '43

This story starts in 1980 in Paris as the memories of Andrei Borodin, a Soviet agent, take the action back to 1943 during the Teheran meetings of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill. A high-ranking Nazi officer developed a plan to assassinate the three world leaders in order to undermine the Allied forces. He commissioned the German agent Max Richard to carry out his plan, but it failed miserably due to the quick action and thinking of Andrei. While in Teheran, Andrei met a French woman, Marie Louni, living in the city and they had a brief but intense affair. Nearly four decades later, the Nazi officer has been captured - but not for long. Freed by terrorists, the officer is hunting down the German agent who failed to carry out the planned assassinations. Max lives at Françoise, a young French woman, who hides him.

Confidential Agent

During the Spanish Civil War, an agent on a mission to purchase coal meets with murder and counterspies.

A Different Loyalty

In January 1963, British journalist Leo Cauffield suddenly disappears from his home in Beirut. His wife Sally knew that he was working part-time for British intelligence, but was not prepared to be told by the British embassy that they suspect he has defected to Communist Russia. As his wife puts together the pieces of the mysterious jigsaw of the past, tracking her passionate relationship with her husband and his history as former head of MI6’s counter-espionage section, her relentless search for the truth takes her to London, New York and finally Moscow.

Triple Agent

The Popular Front wins elections, the Spanish Civil War begins, and Hitler and Stalin are manipulating and spying. The brilliant exile, Fiodor Voronin, a general at 20, is the deputy at the White Russian Military Union, probably slated to replace the aging Général Dobrinsky soon. Fiodor's Greek wife, Arsinoé, paints and stays away from politics, befriending Communist neighbors. Her health declines; the attentive Fiodor arranges care and, against the backdrop of Stalin's Great Purge, considers his options. He plays a chess game in which love of country, love of Arsinoé, ideology, petty jealousies, and the machinations of power roil in matters of life and death.

The Iron Curtain

The Iron Curtain is based on the actual 1945 case of Soviet cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko, (Dana Andrews), who, after careful training, was assigned to the U.S.S.R. Embassy in Ottawa, Canada in the midst of World War II. Eventually, Gouzenko defected with 109 pages of material implicating several high level Canadian officials, outlined the steps taken to secure information about the the details of the nuclear bomb via numerous sleeper cells established throughout North America. The scandal that resulted when details of this case were publicized by American columnist Drew Pearson in early 1946 involved Canada, Britain and the United States.

Man on a String

U.S. spies catch a Moscow-born U.S. citizen helping spies, and they force him to counterspy.

Hide and Seek

A professor of astronomy helping on a missile development program. An old friend of his is a Russian chess champion. The Russian is working with shady businessman Marek and they plan to kidnap the professor and make it look as though he has defected to the Soviet Union.

Pack of Lies

A British couple are shocked out of their suburban malaise when British intelligence agent Stewart shows up at their door and wants to use their house for a stakeout. Stewart reveals that their neighbors are undercover Russian KGB spies, part of a Soviet espionage network.

Mr. Jones

In 1933, Welsh journalist Gareth Jones travels to Ukraine, where he experiences the horrors of a famine. Everywhere he goes he meets henchmen of the Soviet secret service who are determined to prevent news about the catastrophe from getting out. Stalin’s forced collectivisation of agriculture has resulted in misery and ruin—the policy is tantamount to mass murder.

The Endless Trench

A small village in Huelva, Andalusia, Spain, 1936. Higinio and Rosa have been married only for a few months when the Civil War breaks out. Higinio, being afraid of possible reprisals from the rebel faction, decides to use a hole dug in his own house as a temporary hideout.

My Perestroika

Tells the story of five people from the last generation of Soviet children who were brought up behind the Iron Curtain. Just coming of age when the USSR collapsed, they witnessed the world of their childhood crumble and change beyond recognition. Through the lives of these former schoolmates, this intimate film reveals how they have adjusted to their post-Soviet reality in today's Moscow.

Red Joan

London, England, May 2000. The peaceful life of elderly Joan Stanley is suddenly disrupted when she is arrested by the British Intelligence Service and accused of providing information to communist Russia during the forties.

Moscow Skyscraper

Through a first-person narrator, archival footage and photographs, and a contemporary camera, Pavel Lounguine uses the Moscow skyscraper where he grew up as a touchstone for looking back to Stalin and then examining today's Russia. This is Stalin's pyramid, his immortality. We visit people who have lived there for 50 years, see their flats (some modernized, others decaying), and listen to their histories: the son of a KGB man, a retired rocket scientist, a sculptor's son. an actor, seamstresses at a uniform shop, an ex-pat, and two artists. We see a kindergarten and remember marching; we watch parades and discuss surveillance. The commentary is wry: Putin emerges as Stalin's heir.

Song of Russia

American conductor John Meredith and his manager, Hank Higgins, go to Russia shortly before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Meredith falls in love with beautiful Soviet pianist Nadya Stepanova while they travel throughout the country on a 40-city tour. Along the way, they see happy, healthy, smiling, free Soviet citizens, blissfully living the Communist dream. This bliss is destroyed by the German invasion.

Twist Again in Moscow

Igor, who manages a fancy hotel and is on the take, has to juggle several problems at once. He has a two-hour window to get his ill-got gain out of the hotel, he must misdirect and obstruct the inquiries of a Party auditor who suspects that all is not above board, and he must keep out of sight and out of trouble his interloping and troublesome young brother-in-law, who arrives unannounced with barrels of rotten herring.

The Secret KGB UFO Files

For five decades, American agencies have stockpiled information on UFOs. So did their counterparts behind the iron curtain. Soldiers, scientists and spies all paint a disturbing picture of the KGB's secret campaign. The UFO encounter that almost sparked a nuclear war. The pair of MiG fighters that tried to shoot down a UFO - both jets blown out of the sky! Stunning proof that the Soviets recovered something not from this earth! Amazing film footage smuggled out of Russia. This exclusive investigation into one of the most compelling events of our time is hosted by Roger Moore.

1983: The Brink of Apocalypse

This programme recalls the events that led up to one of the most dangerous moments in the entire history of the Cold War: a NATO command post exercise, code named Able Archer 83, which caused the USSR to believe that NATO was planning a genuine nuclear attack.

Staline: Le tyran rouge

French television documentary film by Mathieu Schwartz, Serge de Sampigny, Yvan Demeulandre and the historic consultant Nicolas Werth about the government of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union.

The Black Book

The Black Book, drafted during World War II, gathers numerous unique historical testimonies, in an effort to document Nazi abuses against Jews in the USSR . Initially supported by the regime and aimed at providing evidence during the executioners’ trials in the post-war era, the Black Book was eventually banned and most of its authors executed on Stalin’s order. Told through the voices of its most famous instigators, soviet intellectuals Vassilli Grossman, Ilya Ehrenburg and Solomon Mikhoels, the documentary, provides a detailed account of the tragic destiny of this cursed book and puts the Holocaust and Stalinism in a new light.

The Devil's Agent

German actor Peter van Eyck stars as Droste, a mild-mannered businessman who was an intelligence expert during World War II. When Droste runs into his old friend Baron Von Straub (Christopher Lee), the two rekindle a friendship that was interrupted by the war. However, when Von Straub asks Droste to deliver a small package to a friend in West Germany, the befuddled Droste is set up for a series of complicated spy games.

Lost in Siberia

The political drama is set in the Stalin's Soviet Union after the Second World War. A British archaeologist Andrei Miller is working in Iran. He is mistakenly kidnapped and arrested by the KGB. He is falsely accused of spying and wrongfully sentenced to a Gulag prison-camp in Siberia.

Rocket Attack U.S.A.

It's the height of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union with the Communists launching a spy satellite that has the Free World leaders in a panic. Fears about the nature of the satellite force the United States to send an agent undercover behind the Iron Curtain to discover what the Soviets have learned. What he finds is the Communists have used the information acquired from their spy satellite to help them perfect a new and even more deadly nuclear weapon.

More related lists

Sort results by:

X close
Default
Clear filters
...