Movies like Burnt by the Sun (1994)
The best movies like Burnt by the Sun (1994) are The Promised Land (1975), The Thief (1997) and The Emigrants (1971). If Burnt by the Sun hooked you with its drama, these 30 similar films are what to watch next, and every pick says why it matches.
Quick picks
- Highest ratedSatantango (1994)8.1/10 from 329 votes
- NewestThe Wizard of the Kremlin (2026)Released 2026
The Promised Land (1975)
At the turn of the century, Lodz, Poland, was a quick-paced manufacturing center for textiles, replete with cutthroat industrialists and unsafe working conditions. Three young friends, a Pole, a Jew, and a German, pool their money together to build a factory.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Thief (1997)
Katya and her 6-year-old son Sanya, who, in 1952, meet a veteran Soviet officer named Tolyan. Katya falls in love with Tolyan, who turns out to be a small time criminal, but who also becomes a father figure to Sanya ...
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Emigrants (1971)
Karl and Kristina Nilsson work on a farm in a cold and desolate area of 19th century rural Sweden. Growing privations, combined with increasing social and religious persecution, motivate the Nilssons and many of their neighbors to strike out for the United States. Following a treacherous ocean crossing and an equally grueling land passage, the emigrants find themselves in seemingly idyllic Minnesota.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisMan of Marble (1977)
A young Polish filmmaker sets out to find out what happened to Mateusz Birkut, a bricklayer who became a propaganda hero in the 1950s but later fell out of favor and disappeared.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisTaurus (2001)
Unfolding over two days in 1924, the film depicts the dying Lenin, world revolutionary and father of the USSR, now powerless and isolated at his Gorki estate. Cared for by his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaia, sister Maniasha, his German doctor and several attendants, Lenin raves about his diminishing faculties, discusses the deaths of great figures (including Marx), rides a car to a picnic in a meadow and ponders his historic legacy.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Dear Comrades! (2020)
When the communist government raises food prices in 1962, rebellious workers from the small industrial town of Novocherkassk go on strike. The massacre that ensues is seen through the eyes of a devout party activist.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisIda (2013)
In 1960s Poland, young novitiate Anna is on the verge of taking her vows when she discovers a family secret dating back to the years of the German occupation.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Red Snowball Tree (1974)
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.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisSunstroke (2014)
In a Crimean filtration camp, after the evacuation of the White Army, an unnamed captain is haunted by memories of a brief romance as he tries to understand how the Russian Empire fell apart and who is to blame.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
The Barber of Siberia (1998)
Douglas is a foreign entrepreneur, who ventures to Russia in 1885 with dreams of selling a new, experimental steam-driven timber harvester in the wilds of Siberia. Jane is his assistant. On her travels, she meets two men who would change her life forever: a handsome young cadet Andrej Tolstoy with whom she shares a fondness for opera, and the powerful General Radlov who is entranced by her beauty and wants to marry her.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisRepentance (1987)
The day after his funeral, the corpse of Varlam Aravidze, the mayor of a small Georgian town, turns up in his son's garden. Although it is secretly reburied, the corpse keeps returning until the police capture the local woman who is responsible. This woman says that Varlam should never be laid to rest since his Stalin-like reign of terror led to the disappearance of her family and friends.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Wizard of the Kremlin (2026)
In the chaos of post-Soviet Russia, rising KGB officer Vladimir Putin joins forces with master manipulator Vadim Baranov to reshape life behind the Iron Curtain, using violence and deception to change the world forever.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisThe Sacrifice (1986)
Alexander, a journalist, philosopher and retired actor, celebrates a birthday with friends and family when it is announced that nuclear war has begun.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisSatantango (1994)
Inhabitants of a small village in Hungary deal with the effects of the fall of Communism. The town's source of revenue, a factory, has closed, and the locals, who include a doctor and three couples, await a cash payment offered in the wake of the shuttering. Irimias, a villager thought to be dead, returns and, unbeknownst to the locals, is a police informant. In a scheme, he persuades the villagers to form a commune with him.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Absolute CinemaMovies like thisReds (1981)
An account of the revolutionary years of the legendary American journalist John Reed, who shared his adventurous professional life with his radical commitment to the socialist revolution in Russia, his dream of spreading its principles among the members of the American working class, and his troubled romantic relationship with the writer Louise Bryant.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisLeviathan (2014)
In a Russian coastal town, Kolya is forced to fight the corrupt mayor when he is told that his house will be demolished. He recruits a lawyer friend to help, but the man's arrival brings further misfortune for Kolya and his family.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Postman's White Nights (2014)
The film represents life in a godforsaken Russian village. The only way to reach the mainland is to cross the lake by boat and a postman became the only connection with the outside world. A reserved community has been set up here. Despite the modern technologies and a spaceport nearby the people of the village live the way they would in the Neolithic Era. There is neither government nor social services or jobs. The postman's beloved woman escapes the village life and moves to the city. Postman's outboard engine gets stolen and he can no longer deliver mail. His normal pattern of life is disrupted. The postman makes a decision to leave for the city too but returns before long with no certain reason. The script is based on real characters' stories. People from the village play their own parts in the film. The search for the protagonist lasted for over a year.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisThe Return (2003)
Two young brothers in contemporary Russia are reunited with a father they know only from an old photograph after his sudden return from a long absence. With their mother’s reluctant consent, they set out on a remote trip that quickly becomes an uneasy test of authority, trust, and masculinity. As the journey moves deeper into the wilderness, the fragile bonds between father and sons are pushed to their limits.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Cold Summer of 1953 (1988)
In 1953, the year Stalin died, many prisoners (some political, but mostly common criminals) were released from the Soviet Gulags. This is the story of a remote settlement which was under attack by a bunch of these recently-released blood-thirsty thugs in the summer of 1953, and the townspeople, along with a two political prisoners, who try to stop them.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Edge (2010)
The action takes place shortly after the end of the Second World War in the Siberian hinterland, among Russians and Germans with damaged personal stories and a strange transformation: the victors seem to be crawling into the skins of the defeated, and vice versa. Ignat, is the embodiment of the larger-than-life image of the Soviet victorious warrior who, in fact, proves to be shell-shocked, sick and broken, although not completely destroyed. Trains become fetish for the heroes of the film, and speed becomes a mania; they virtually become one with their steam engines, while the machines take on human names. The heroes set up an almost fatal race in the Siberian forest, risking their own lives and those of others.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
SnoozefestMovies like thisTsar (2009)
In 16th-century Russia in the grip of chaos, Ivan the Terrible strongly believes he is vested with a holy mission. Believing he can understand and interpret the signs, he sees the Last Judgment approaching. He establishes absolute power, cruelly destroying anyone who gets in his way. During this reign of terror, Philip, the superior of the monastery on the Solovetsky Islands, a great scholar and Ivan's close friend, dares to oppose the sovereign's mystical tyranny. What follows is a clash between two completely opposite visions of the world, smashing morality and justice, God and men. A grand-scale film with excellent leading roles by Mamonov and Yankovsky. An allegory of Stalinist Russia
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisDovlatov (2018)
Dovlatov charts six days in the life of a brilliant, ironic writer who saw far beyond the rigid limits of 70s Soviet Russia. Sergei Dovlatov fought to preserve his own talent and decency with poet and writer Joseph Brodsky, while watching his artist friends got crushed by the iron-willed state machinery.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
SnoozefestMovies like thisChekist (1992)
Srubov is a part of CHEKA, the secret police Lenin established after the Bolshevik Revolution. They arrest, interview for a minute, try in ten seconds, and execute intellectuals, aristocrats, Jews, clergy, and their families. In the building basement, five people at a time are shot as they stand naked facing wooden doors. No one to remember their last words; no martyrs, just anonymous bodies. Daily, the kangaroo court, the executions, the loading of bodies onto wagons. Srubov is cold, distant, sexually dysfunctional, and a deep thinker, hated by former friends and his family. As he tries to reason the nature of revolution and the purpose of CHEKA, he slowly goes mad.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Loveless (2017)
Zhenya and Boris are going through a vicious divorce marked by resentment, frustration and recriminations. Already embarking on new lives, each with a new partner, they are impatient to start again, to turn the page – even if it means threatening to abandon their 12-year-old son Alyosha. Until, after witnessing one of their fights, Alyosha disappears.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisDAU. Natasha (2021)
Natasha runs the canteen at a secret 1950s Soviet research institute. This is the beating heart of the DAU universe, everyone drops in here: the institute's employees, scientists and visiting foreign guests. Natasha's world is a small one, split between the demands of the canteen during the day and alcohol fuelled nights with her younger colleague Olga, during which the two confide their hopes of romance and for a different future. At a party one evening Natasha becomes close to a visiting French scientist Luc Bige and the two sleep together. The following day her life takes a dramatic turn when she is summoned to an interrogation by the KGB's General Vladimir Azhippo who questions the nature of her relationship with the foreign guest.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
The Conformist (1971)
A weak-willed Italian man becomes a fascist flunky who goes abroad to arrange the assassination of his old teacher, now a political dissident.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisOno (1989)
The bureaucratic epos on the dialogues and plots of Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin "The History of a Town". In a metaphorical and grotesque form, the film conveys the history of Russia from the calling of the Varangians until the end of the 20th century. The film traces the change of the “chiefs” of the county town of Glupov, which differ in varying degrees of tyranny and the corresponding total number of “killed” city residents. The heads of the city easily guess the former heads of the Russian state and the USSR.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
The Lives of Others (2006)
In 1984 East Berlin, dedicated Stasi officer Gerd Wiesler begins spying on a famous playwright and his actress-lover Christa-Maria. Wiesler becomes unexpectedly sympathetic to the couple, and faces conflicting loyalties when his superior takes a liking to Christa-Maria.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Absolute CinemaMovies like thisKhrustalyov, My Car! (1999)
Military doctor General Klenski is arrested in Stalin's Russia in 1953 during an anti-Semitic political campaign accused of being a participant in so-called "doctors' plot".
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisMy Friend Ivan Lapshin (1985)
Russian provincial town in the middle of the 1930s Stalin's Great Purge. Ivan Lapshin, the head of the local police, does what he has to do. And he does it well.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like this
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Frequently asked questions
What are the best movies like Burnt by the Sun?
The closest matches to Burnt by the Sun are The Promised Land (1975), The Thief (1997) and The Emigrants (1971). Below are 27 more, each with the reason it matches.
What should I watch after Burnt by the Sun?
People who watched Burnt by the Sun most often go on to The Promised Land (1975), The Thief (1997) and The Emigrants (1971).
What is the highest-rated movie like Burnt by the Sun?
Satantango (1994), rated 8.1/10 by 329 TMDB users.
What is the newest movie like Burnt by the Sun?
The Wizard of the Kremlin (2026) is the most recent release on this list.
How are movies similar to Burnt by the Sun chosen?
First come films that Trakt’s viewers watch alongside Burnt by the Sun, then TMDB’s recommendations and films it rates as similar in story and genre. Each pick says which signal put it there.