Movies like Purgatory (1988)
The best movies like Purgatory (1988) are Battleground (1949), Breaker Morant (1980) and Caged (1950). If Purgatory hooked you with its action and drama, these 30 similar films are what to watch next, and every pick says why it matches.
Quick picks
- Highest ratedThe Great Escape (1963)7.9/10 from 3,008 votes
- NewestPalestine 36 (2025)Released 2025
Battleground (1949)
Members of the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division are fighting for their country amidst the rugged terrain of Bastogne, Belgium, in December 1944. Holley and his American compatriots have already seen one of their own, Roderigues, perish under enemy fire. The men try to rebuff another series of Nazi attacks, but what they really need is a change in the weather. Without clear skies, they'll never get the air support they need.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both action & drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisBreaker Morant (1980)
During the Boer War, three Australian lieutenants are on trial for shooting Boer prisoners. Though they acted under orders, they are being used as scapegoats by the General Staff, who hopes to distance themselves from the irregular practices of the war. The trial does not progress as smoothly as expected by the General Staff, as the defence puts up a strong fight in the courtroom.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisCaged (1950)
A single mistake puts a 19-year old girl behind bars, where she experiences the terrors and torments of women in prison.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisLadies They Talk About (1933)
A moll, imprisoned after participating in a bank robbery, helps with a breakout plot.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisBelle (2013)
Dido Elizabeth Bell, the illegitimate, mixed-race daughter of a Royal Navy admiral, plays an important role in the campaign to abolish slavery in England.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Hill (1965)
North Africa, World War II. British soldiers on the brink of collapse push beyond endurance to struggle up a brutal incline. It's not a military objective. It's The Hill, a manmade instrument of torture, a tower of sand seared by a white-hot sun. And the troops' tormentors are not the enemy, but their own comrades-at-arms.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Last Rifleman (2023)
A WWII veteran escapes his care home in Northern Ireland and embarks on an arduous but inspirational journey to France to attend the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings, finding the courage to face the ghosts of his past.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisTobruk (1967)
In September 1942, the German Afrika Korps under Rommel have successfully pushed the Allies back into Egypt. A counter-attack is planned, for which the fuel dumps at Tobruk are a critical impediment. In order to aid the attack, a group of British commandos and German Jews make their way undercover through 800 miles of desert, to destroy the fuel dumps starving the Germans of fuel.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisExodus (1960)
Ari Ben Canaan, a passionate member of the Jewish paramilitary group Haganah, attempts to transport 600 Jewish refugees on a dangerous voyage from Cyprus to Palestine on a ship named the Exodus. He faces obstruction from British forces, who will not grant the ship passage to its destination.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisThe Colditz Story (1955)
The Germans believed that no man could escape from Colditz Castle, set as it was in the heart of the Reich, 400 miles from any neutral frontier. This film, based on Pat Reid's epic novel, tells the story of how the British, French, Dutch and Polish prisoners of war who were incarcerated in Colditz set out to prove their captors wrong.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisJourney Back to Christmas (2016)
WWII has ended and Hanna is still grieving over her husband's disappearance. When the Christmas Comet appears for the first time in 70 years, Hanna is caught in a terrible storm and knocked unconscious. When she wakes up, she's in 2016.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisPalestine 36 (2025)
Year 1936. As villages across Palestine rise against British colonial rule, Yusuf drifts between his rural home and the restless energy of Jerusalem, longing for a future beyond the growing unrest. But history is relentless. With rising numbers of Jewish immigrants escaping antisemitism in Europe and some arriving with nefarious Zionist-colonial ambitions, and the Palestinian population uniting in the largest and longest uprising against Britain’s 30-year dominion, all sides spiral towards inevitable collision in a decisive moment for the British Empire and the future of the entire region.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Birth of a Nation (1915)
Two families, abolitionist Northerners the Stonemans and Southern landowners the Camerons, intertwine. When Confederate colonel Ben Cameron is captured in battle, nurse Elsie Stoneman petitions for his pardon. In Reconstruction-era South Carolina, Cameron founds the Ku Klux Klan, battling Elsie's congressman father and his African-American protégé, Silas Lynch.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
SnoozefestMovies like thisDog Pound (2010)
Three juvenile delinquents arrive at a correctional center and are put under the care of an experienced guard.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisHow Sarah Got Her Wings (2015)
Good Samaritan Sarah Fitzpatrick has a fatal accident just before Christmas, and finds herself in the lobby before the gates of Heaven. Certain that she will be let in, she is shocked to find that her name is not on the reservation list. However, she is granted the chance to return to Earth as an "angel in training" with the requirement to help a soul in need. Sarah has the 12 days before Christmas to secure her place on the list leaving her in the race for her after-life.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
SnoozefestMovies like thisAct of Violence (1949)
A former prisoner of war, Frank Enley is hailed as a hero in his California town. However, Frank has a shameful secret that comes back to haunt him when fellow survivor Joe Parkson emerges, intent on making Frank pay for his past deeds.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisThe Guns of Navarone (1961)
A team of allied saboteurs are assigned an impossible mission: infiltrate an impregnable Nazi-held island and destroy the two enormous long-range field guns that prevent the rescue of 2,000 trapped British soldiers.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisBabylon 5: The Lost Tales - Voices in the Dark (2007)
This instalment of Babylon 5 is in two parts: the first is about an entity that has possessed a worker. Colonel Lochley prevents a priest from performing an exorcism. The host is returned to Earth. The second has Galen trying to dupe President Sheridan into assassinating the future Centauri emperor to stop him from attacking Earth in around 30 years time.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both action
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisThe Great Escape (1963)
The Nazis, exasperated at the number of escapes from their prison camps by a relatively small number of Allied prisoners, relocate them to a high-security 'escape-proof' camp to sit out the remainder of the war. Undaunted, the prisoners plan one of the most ambitious escape attempts of World War II. Based on a true story.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Absolute CinemaMovies like thisAndersonville (1996)
This lengthy docudrama records the harrowing conditions at the Confederacy's most notorious prisoner-of-war camp. The drama unfolds through the eyes of a company of Union soldiers captured at the Battle of Cold Harbor, VA, in June 1864, and shipped to the camp in southern Georgia. A private, Josiah Day, and his sergeant try to hold their company together in the face of squalid living conditions, inhumane punishments, and a gang of predatory fellow prisoners called the Raiders.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisFirst Blood (1982)
When former Green Beret John Rambo is harassed by local law enforcement and arrested for vagrancy, he is forced to flee into the mountains and wage an escalating one-man war against his pursuers.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both action & drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisBlood Diamond (2006)
An ex-mercenary turned smuggler. A Mende fisherman. Amid the explosive civil war overtaking 1999 Sierra Leone, these men join for two desperate missions: recovering a rare pink diamond of immense value and rescuing the fisherman's son, conscripted as a child soldier into the brutal rebel forces ripping a swath of torture and bloodshed countrywide.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama & action
Worth the HypeMovies like thisChained Heat (1983)
After killing a man in a drunk driving accident, a young woman is sent to a prison where both the inmates and the corrupt leadership are violent and abusive.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both action & drama
SnoozefestMovies like thisThe Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden (TBA)
Nombeko Mayeki is a young woman from Soweto who finds herself caught in an international whirlwind from South Africa to Sweden. A heroine born in the slums of South Africa, she rises from obscurity to become the key player in an international nuclear conspiracy, accidentally saving the Swedish monarchy and averting global catastrophe with her quick-witted resourcefulness.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
Four Minutes (2006)
Jenny is young. Her life is over. She killed someone. And she would do it again. When an 80-year-old piano teacher discovers the girl’s secret, her brutality and her dreams, she decides to transform her pupil into the musical wunderkind she once was.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like this2 or 3 Things I Know About Him (2005)
What would your family reminiscences about dad sound like if he had been an early supporter of Hitler’s, a leader of the notorious SA and the Third Reich’s minister in charge of Slovakia, including its Final Solution? Executed as a war criminal in 1947, Hanns Ludin left behind a grieving widow and six young children, the youngest of whom became a filmmaker. It's a fascinating, maddening, sometimes even humorous look at what the director calls "a typical German story." (Film Forum)
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
Precious Little Hearts (2007)
In hopes of getting her family out of poverty, 17-year-old Mai follows a neighbour's offer and leaves her small fishing village in Central Vietnam to work as a seamstress in Saigon, not knowing her neighbour had sold her into prostitution, and a grisly fate awaits her upon arrival.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
Katakata (2021)
Coerced to foil a terrorist plot against a children's school, two brothers must decide the value of character or risk losing their ultimate reward.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both action
Satan's Harvest (1970)
Cutter Murdock inherits an estate in Africa on which "Satan's Harvest" (heroin and marijuana) is grown. The thugs growing the drugs want him out of the way, so things get messy.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both action
Mr. Kingstreet's War (1973)
A couple sets up an African game preserve, only to have British and Italian armies fight over the waterholes.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
Like Purgatory and something else?
Blend two favourites and we’ll find the films in between.
Frequently asked questions
What are the best movies like Purgatory?
The closest matches to Purgatory are Battleground (1949), Breaker Morant (1980) and Caged (1950). Below are 27 more, each with the reason it matches.
What should I watch after Purgatory?
Start with Battleground (1949), the closest match to Purgatory.
What is the highest-rated movie like Purgatory?
The Great Escape (1963), rated 7.9/10 by 3,008 TMDB users.
What is the newest movie like Purgatory?
Palestine 36 (2025) is the most recent release on this list.
Are there English movies like Purgatory?
Yes: Battleground (1949), Breaker Morant (1980) and Caged (1950).
How are movies similar to Purgatory chosen?
First come films that Trakt’s viewers watch alongside Purgatory, then TMDB’s recommendations and films it rates as similar in story and genre. Each pick says which signal put it there.