Movies like The Night of the Shooting Stars (1982)
The best movies like The Night of the Shooting Stars (1982) are The Leopard (1963), Padre Padrone (1977) and Christ Stopped at Eboli (1979). If The Night of the Shooting Stars hooked you with its war and drama, these 30 similar films are what to watch next, and every pick says why it matches.
Quick picks
- Highest ratedRome, Open City (1945)8.0/10 from 1,018 votes
- NewestRainbow: A Private Affair (2017)Released 2017
- In ItalianThe Leopard (1963)Also in Italian
The Leopard (1963)
As Garibaldi's troops begin the unification of Italy in the 1860s, an aristocratic Sicilian family grudgingly adapts to the sweeping social changes undermining their way of life.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisPadre Padrone (1977)
The true story of the life of Gavino Ledda, the son of a Sardinian shepherd, and how he managed to escape his harsh, almost barbaric existence by slowly educating himself, despite violent opposition from his brutal father.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisChrist Stopped at Eboli (1979)
In the fascist Italy of 1935, a painter trained as a doctor is exiled to a remote region near Eboli. Over time, he learns to appreciate the beauty and wisdom of the peasants, and to overcome his isolation.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisSunflower (1970)
After World War II, a woman refuses to believe her husband, missing on the Russian front, is dead. Flashbacks reveal their brief courtship and marriage. Years later, she travels to Russia with his photo, determined to find him. What will she discover?
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama & war
Worth the HypeMovies like thisMany Wars Ago (1970)
Time after time, soldiers of the Italian Army are forced to leave their mountain trenches in attempts to storm an enemy fortress, always with the same disastrous results. As casualties mount, indignation spreads among the rank and file. Disturbed by his superiors' decisions, Lieutenant Sassu is led to question the purpose of war and reconsider where his real duties lie.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama & war
Worth the HypeMovies like thisGood Morning, Babylon (1987)
After the bankruptcy of their father's stonemasonry firm, brothers Nicola and Andrea emigrate to America to restore their fortunes. After many adventures and near-disasters, they end up in Hollywood, designing sets for D.W. Griffith, and marry beautiful actresses. However, tragedy strikes with the arrival of World War I, which finds the brothers fighting on opposite sides...
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Three Brothers (1981)
After their mother's death, three brothers return to their family home in southern Italy: Raffaele, a judge in Rome facing the threat of political violence; Rocco, a counselor for troubled youths in Naples; and Nicola, a factory worker in Turin struggling with labor disputes and a troubled marriage. As the family reunites in mourning, each brother reflects on his past and contemplates an uncertain future.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisPaisan (1946)
Six stories unfold in various regions, from Sicily to the northern Po Valley as American military personnel interact with a variety of Italian locals over eighteen months in the push north during the Italian Campaign of WWII as German forces retreat.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama & war
Worth the HypeMovies like thisRome, Open City (1945)
During the Nazi occupation of 1944 Rome, Resistance leader Giorgio Manfredi is pursued by the Nazis as he seeks refuge and a means of escape.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama & war
Absolute CinemaMovies like thisThe Tin Drum (1979)
In 1924, Oskar Matzerath is born in the Free City of Danzig. At age three, he falls down a flight of stairs and stops growing. In 1939, World War II breaks out.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama & war
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Best of Youth (2003)
After a fateful encounter in the summer of 1966, the lifepaths of two brothers from a middle-class Roman family diverge, intersecting with some of the most significant events of postwar Italian history in the following decades.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Absolute CinemaMovies like thisRainbow: A Private Affair (2017)
Summer 1943, Piedmont, Italy. Milton loves Fulvia who plays with his love: she only likes the depth of his thought and the letters he writes to her. One year later, Milton has joined the Resistance and fights beside other partisans. He learns during a conversation that Fulvia was secretly in love with his best friend Giorgio, a partisan like him. Milton decides to go find Giorgio in the Langhe region of Italy with all its misty hills...But Giorgio has just been arrested by the Fascists.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both war & drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisFrom the Clouds to the Resistance (1979)
Two segments. The first one arranges six stories from Cesare Pavese’s «Dialoghi con Leucò», taken from classical mythology. The second segment is taken from Pavese’s novel «La luna e i falò»: after World War II the emigrant «The Bastard» comes back to his village in the Langhe (northern Italy) to find out that everyone he knew has died, and that the war has deeply changed relationships between people.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Au Revoir les Enfants (1987)
Au revoir les enfants tells a heartbreaking story of friendship and devastating loss concerning two boys living in Nazi-occupied France. At a provincial Catholic boarding school, the precocious youths enjoy true camaraderie—until a secret is revealed. Based on events from writer-director Malle’s own childhood, the film is a subtle, precisely observed tale of courage, cowardice, and tragic awakening.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama & war
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Four Days of Naples (1962)
September 1943. After Italy surrenders to the Allies, people in Naples believe the war is finally over, but soon they realize Germans are still in control — and as ruthless as ever. Armed with makeshift weapons, civilians rise up en masse against the invaders — and overwhelming odds.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama & war
Worth the HypeMovies like thisMiracle in Milan (1951)
Once upon a time a wise and kind old woman discovers a baby in her cabbage patch. She brings up the child and, when she dies, the boy, Totò, enters an orphanage. Totò leaves the orphanage a happy young man, and looks for work in post-war Milan. He ends up with the homeless and organizes them to build a shanty town in a vacant lot. But when greedy developers threaten the community’s land, Totò will need all the help he can get in order to find an impossible way out.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisMan, Woman and Beast (1977)
A small town in Italy is about to celebrate their patron saint. The city is full of people with different problems. A Communist in existentialist crisis that also must take care of his mentally ill wife. A woman who is tired of her husband's inability to show emotions and therefore more and more often slips into the world of dreams. A perverse butcher engaged in sex with the meat he sells when he's not peeping on young girls. A girl who became pregnant after having sex with her father. In this town a mysterious stranger show up and who turns on several of the inhabitants lives.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
1900 (1976)
The epic tale of a class struggle in twentieth century Italy, as seen through the eyes of two childhood friends on opposing sides.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisEscape by Night (1960)
In Nazi-occupied Rome, a beautiful bootlegger, to the chagrin of her lover, gives sanctuary to three escaped POWs: an American pilot, a Russian sergeant and a British major.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama & war
The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978)
On a turn-of-the-20th-century northern Italian farm, a group of sharecroppers eke out a threadbare existence. A priest advises Batisti and his wife Batistina that their young son Minec should be formally educated, so they sacrifice his help in the fields and send him to school. When Minec's wooden shoe breaks one day, Batisti--in an act of desperation--puts the family's future at risk to replace the clog.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisAmarcord (1973)
In an Italian seaside town, young Titta gets into trouble with his friends and watches various local eccentrics as they engage in often absurd behavior. Frequently clashing with his stern father and defended by his doting mother, Titta witnesses the actions of a wide range of characters, from his extended family to Fascist loyalists to sensual women, with certain moments shifting into fantastical scenarios.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Absolute CinemaMovies like thisThe Skin (1981)
Based on the memoirs of author Curzio Malaparte, diplomatic liaison between the Allied and Italian forces after the defeat of the Nazis in Italy, The Skin follows the collapse of Italian society under the US occupation and the desperate measures required for survival.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama & war
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisLa Terra Trema (1949)
In rural Sicily, the fishermen live at the mercy of the greedy wholesalers. One family risks everything to buy their own boat and operate independently.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisForbidden Games (1952)
Orphaned after a Nazi air raid, Paulette, a young Parisian girl, runs into Michel, an older peasant boy, and the two quickly become close. Together, they try to make sense of the chaotic and crumbling world around them, attempting to cope with death as they create a burial ground for Paulette's deceased pet dog. Eventually, however, Paulette's stay with Michel's family is threatened by the harsh realities of wartime.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama & war
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Mass Is Ended (1985)
Young Father Giulio returns to Rome, where he was born and raised, to replace a priest who has left the clergy to start a family. He is delighted to reunite with his loved ones, especially his mother, sister, and old friends. Once radical leftists like Giulio himself, the latter are now each coping in their own way with the defeat of the revolution. Soon, however, Giulio realizes that despite his best efforts, he seems unable to solve the problems troubling those around him.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisLamerica (1994)
In post-communist Albania, two Italian con artists establish a fictitious shoe factory to embezzle government funds. When their elderly Albanian figurehead disappears, the younger accomplice sets out to find him, embarking on a journey that confronts him with the country's poverty and troubled past.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe One That Got Away (1957)
Based on the true story of Oberleutnant Franz von Werra, the only German prisoner of war captured in Britain to escape back to Germany during the Second World War.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both war & drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisMen in War (1957)
In Korea, on 6 September 1950, Lieutenant Benson's platoon finds itself isolated in enemy-held territory after a retreat. Soon they are joined by Sergeant Montana, whose overriding concern is caring for his catatonic colonel. Benson and Montana can't stand each other, but together they must get the survivors to Hill 465, where they hope the division is waiting. It's a long, harrowing march, fraught with all the dangers the elusive enemy can summon.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both war & drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisField of Lost Shoes (2015)
A group of teenage cadets sheltered from war at the Virginia Military Institute must confront the horrors of an adult world when they are called upon to defend the Shenandoah Valley.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both war & drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisAttack and Retreat (1964)
Chronicle of the unheralded and unsuccessful invasion of the Soviet Union by the Italian army during World War II.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama & war
Popcorn FlickMovies like this
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Frequently asked questions
What are the best movies like The Night of the Shooting Stars?
The closest matches to The Night of the Shooting Stars are The Leopard (1963), Padre Padrone (1977) and Christ Stopped at Eboli (1979). Below are 27 more, each with the reason it matches.
What should I watch after The Night of the Shooting Stars?
People who watched The Night of the Shooting Stars most often go on to The Leopard (1963), Padre Padrone (1977) and Christ Stopped at Eboli (1979).
What is the highest-rated movie like The Night of the Shooting Stars?
Rome, Open City (1945), rated 8.0/10 by 1,018 TMDB users.
What is the newest movie like The Night of the Shooting Stars?
Rainbow: A Private Affair (2017) is the most recent release on this list.
Are there Italian movies like The Night of the Shooting Stars?
Yes: The Leopard (1963), Padre Padrone (1977) and Christ Stopped at Eboli (1979).
How are movies similar to The Night of the Shooting Stars chosen?
First come films that Trakt’s viewers watch alongside The Night of the Shooting Stars, then TMDB’s recommendations and films it rates as similar in story and genre. Each pick says which signal put it there.