Best movies like The Second Circle

Shortly after World War II an American soldier (Norman) and a Polish refugee (Emilia) fall in love. Eventually he will return to the U.S. and both expect that she will soon follow him with her mother. Emilia's mother is sick, but will recover with the right medicine. But the mother, and not Emilia, knows that there will only be one ticket...

Ilya Semenovich Melnikov is a history teacher in an ordinary Soviet high school. He is a very good teacher and his students and colleagues treat him with a great deal of respect. However, Melnikov faces a lot of difficulties in his work. In particular, everybody at school is spreading rumors about Natalya Sergeyevna, an Enlish language teacher and a former student of Melnikov, being in love with him. Exhausted by his mental suffering, Melnikov asks the principal to allow him to quit his job. At the end of the week that is to become the last week of Melnikov's teaching career the students of his class write an in-class essay on how they understand happiness. Svetlana Mikhailovna, their Russian teacher, is shocked by what one of the students wrote in her essay, nevertheless, she allows her to read it in front of the class. The other students express support of their classmate. Melnikov gets involved in the conflict, after which he reconsiders his decision to quit...

The tale of a ten-year-old boy in a Catholic school who, following the death of his beloved grandfather, embarks on a quest to discover the meaning of life.

Marita arrives at a small village in Georgia to live with her aunt. She meets a poor young lad, Gedia, and falls in love with him. But her relatives are determined to marry the girl off to a local rich man…

A Russian poet and his interpreter travel to Italy to research the life of an 18th-century composer.

An expansive Russian drama, this film focuses on the life of revered religious icon painter Andrei Rublev. Drifting from place to place in a tumultuous era, the peace-seeking monk eventually gains a reputation for his art. But after Rublev witnesses a brutal battle and unintentionally becomes involved, he takes a vow of silence and spends time away from his work. As he begins to ease his troubled soul, he takes steps towards becoming a painter once again.

The plot of the film is the love of a married woman, Anna Karenina, and a young officer, Aleksei Vronsky. Anna leaves the family in search of happiness to her beloved person. She has to take a very serious step in her life - to part with her son. The attitude of the high society towards her is changing. All this brings a lot of pain and humiliation to the main character. The tragic story of love and betrayal, the fate of a woman, for the sake of passion who decided to change her life irrevocably.

Two Soviet partisans leave their starving band to get supplies from a nearby farm. The Germans have reached the farm first, so the pair must go on a journey deep into occupied territory, a voyage that will also take them deep into their souls.

A rich woman who uses meditation to deal with pain is visited by her niece who returns from Paris. The woman can be a handful and one of her employees suggests to her husband that he kill her freeing them both. When an affair starts between the husband and the niece murder becomes a real possibility. However some people won't stay dead.

In a world after the nuclear apocalypse a scholar helps a small group of children and adults survive, staying with them in the basement of the former museum of history. In his mind he writes letters to his son — though it is obvious that they will never be read.

A young idealist takes a job at a local state run winery only to discover and become disillusioned by the corruption of the Soviet State.

Old Prof. Preobrazhensky and his young colleague Dr. Bormental inserted the human's hypophysis into a dog's brain. A couple of weeks later, the dog became "human looking". The main question is "Is anybody who is looking like a man, A REAL MAN?"

Henry Poole abandons his fiancée and family business to spend what he believes are his remaining days alone. The discovery of a 'miracle' by a nosy neighbor ruptures his solitude and restores his faith in life.

Dr. Reineger, a famous neuro-psychologist, has become convinced that a twin girl named Anna has a rare form of Autism called Asperger's Syndrome, rendering her unable to cope with reality. As for her blind sister, Sarah, the doctor cannot say for sure why her imaginary visions map so close to Anna's. At home, unable to face reality, their father leaves the family. To escape the pain, the girls sink deeper and deeper into their imagination. When a major earthquake takes their mother's life, Reineger gets more involved with helping the now-orphaned twins, while struggling with his realization that the girls seem to be capable of prophetic visions. The girls escape the doctor's institution and a subsequent search finds no trace of them. Have they transcended the physical realm? A mixture of live action, stop motion animation and other techniques makes this film a fantastic journey into the realm of imagination.

Benjamin, the local doctor is a soul of a local society, the educated, friendly, democratic person who often treats the poor for free. It makes him very popular with the locals but most certainly does not help with his bank account. He is in love with a beautiful Manette who is also crazy about him but is being watched closely by her father who called his daughter "his small capital" and is determined to protect her virginity until the moment the marriage contract has been signed...

A dramatization of the relationship between heart surgery pioneers Alfred Blalock and Vivien Thomas.

Seven year old Sasha practices violin every day to satisfy the ambition of his parents. Already withdrawn as a result of his routines, Sasha quickly regains confidence when he accidentally meets and befriends worker Sergei, who works on a steamroller in their upscale Moscow neighborhood.

Set in the early 1920s after the end of the Russian Civil War, Red Army soldier Nikita returns to his hometown to see his partner Lyuba, both of whom are scarred by the trauma of the Russian Empire of yesteryear.

Martia, an experienced shepherd together with others is moving his herd to the winter pastures. The life of the shepherds is mundane and complex to the extent that even a minor mistake is fraught with serious consequences. Martia’s older son forsakes the herd for good and moves to the city in quest of easy money. In his attempt to save the herd scattered by the storm, Martia dies. Martia’s son, who returns home from the city blames himself for the accident and is profoundly repentant.

The legend of the Suram Fortress.

Highlander Vepkhia khalibauri steel melting study with other young people in the Urals, which will leave the profession with friends to buy. Three years after returning Vepkhia Lela's looking forward to the meeting, but finds out that the village of Lela mgelikas gaqolia married. Vephkhia discouraged friends convinced him to deception Lela married one day and have not lived with her husband. Vepkhia and Lela married.

A hospital nurse becomes an "international girl" — a prostitute who caters to foreigners with hard currency.

Two young scientists are exploring new fields of nuclear physics. Dmitry Gusev and Ilya Kulikov are good friends, but rivals in love. Dmitry marries Lyolya and they live happily together. Luck has it that he makes an important discovery. Unfortunately he exposes himself to radioactivity during the experiments. As a result he falls seriously ill. However Dmitry has a strong spirit. His will to live, the deep passion for his work and his strong love for mankind makes it possible for him to recover.

Old college chums get together for a weekend reunion that is bound to open old wounds and perhaps heal them. New romances find a spark while old ones rekindle.

A young couple faces the realities of life with their child who is diagnosed with AIDS.

A thief named Egor, having served a term in prison, goes to the country to meet his pen-friend Lyuba, a kind genial village woman. Egor comes to love Lyuba sincerely. Now he has friends, work and a beloved woman, he decides to break with his criminal past and start a new life. However, his former criminal associates interfere brutally.

When Steve Dallas, a womanizing local weatherman, hears that his off-the-grid best friend Ben Baker has lost his estranged father, the two return to Ben's childhood home. Once there, they discover Ben has inherited the family fortune, and the ill-equipped duo must battle Ben's formidable sister and deal with his father's gorgeous 25-year old widow.

In the old days it was called hypochrondria, or black melancholia. Now, apparently, it's termed the Asthenic Syndrome. Whatever it is, Nikolai, a teacher of epicly indifferent pupils, has got it, and it's not much fun.

Serebryakov, a retired professor and his beautiful, much younger second wife, Yeléna, visit their country estate, which funds their urban lifestyle. Vanya, brother of the Professor's first wife, who manages the farm estate, and the local Doctor Astrov, both fall under Yelena's spell, while complaining of the endless ennui of their provincial existence. Astrov is an experienced physician who performs his job conscientiously, but has lost all idealism and spends much of his time drinking. Sofya, the Professor's daughter by his first wife, who works to keep the estate going with her uncle Vanya, meanwhile suffers from lack of esteem over what she sees as her own lack of beauty, and from an unrequited love for Dr. Astrov. Matters are brought to a head when the Professor announces his intention to sell the estate, Vanya and Sofya's home, to achieve a higher income for himself and his wife.

Inspired by Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Sokurov’s Save and Protect recalls the most crucial events of Emma’s decline and fall: affairs with the aristocratic Rodolphe and the student Leon, the humiliation that follows her husband’s botching of the operation on the stable boy’s clubfoot. The universality of the theme of eternal struggle between the soul and the flesh is conveyed through the absence of specific reference to time or place: although the film seems to begin in 1840, its surreal mode effortlessly accommodates an automobile and the strains of “When the Saints Go Marching In” on an off-screen radio. Focusing on passion from a woman’s perspective and downplaying plot, Sokurov explores his subject in exquisite detail, capturing not only the heat of passion but also the quiet moments before and after and the innocent sensuousness of the body.

Dyuishen is assigned to the mountainous Kirghiz region of Central Asia by the Young Communist League after he is discharged from the Red Army. It is 1923 and the Civil war has ended. The former soldier becomes a teacher, bringing the Leninist doctrine to the remote Moslem area where elders did not allow children to go to school. He falls in love with one of his students, but the young woman is sold by her father to a wealthy chieftain. When the school is burned down, the majestic poplar trees that are a source of local pride are cut down to rebuild the new structure.

This bleak late soviet-era drama follows the career of Malyanov, a young medical school graduate who has been sent to work in Turkmenia. Here he runs into a hodge-podge of people of differing ethnicities, all of them victims of the government's earlier mania for relocating and eliminating whole ethnic groups and classes of people. These desperately unhappy people are unable to find any pleasure in this diverse companionship, but instead are antagonistic to it, and often resort to desperate measures in their doomed attempts to ease their pain.

Two young talented neurosurgeons — Pyotr and Sasha — are enthusiastically working on a complex medical experiment. But in search of stability and a better life, Pyotr goes to work in Stockholm, Sasha becomes a major official. Pyotrr's overseas life does not add up, and he returns to Moscow. Realizing that his friend has a completely different life, Pyotr goes to Siberia, where he works on an ambulance. There he meets a girl with a brain disease, the study of which he had once been involved in, but did not finish the job. Feeling in vain of a lived, failed life, a sense of professional guilt in front of this sick girl, whom no one can help, torment him, and he again recalls his true destiny.

In the mountain village comes a group of young musicians in Tbilisi. Here they are going to relax and rehearse. Sad story about the final rupture occurred, the peasants do not sing beautiful old songs, the musicians play music incomprehensible to them ... Far from the idyllic image of rural life.

Varden, a poor peasant decides to find a rich fiancée but in vain. Following Galaktion, his rich neighbor’s advice, he attempts a horse theft but fails and nearly escapes death. Thanks to Jujuna, his other neighbor, he finds job at the village’s blacksmith.