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Through the Olive Trees poster

Movies that feel likeThrough the Olive Trees (1994)

When the actor in a scene for his film Life And Nothing More… has to quit, a film director casts another man for the part. However, complications arise since the man and the woman who was cast for the scene know each other.

If you loved Through the Olive Trees, the closest films we have are The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), Ulee's Gold (1997) and Brainstorm (2001). All three share Through the Olive Trees' contemplative feel, which is what we rank on before quality.

Seen the big three already? The under-the-radar pick below is Treeless Mountain (2009).

🍅 89% Rotten Tomatoes★ 7.7 IMDb ↗TMDB ↗dir. Abbas Kiarostamicontemplative
7 of 12 streaming nowAmazon Prime Video · Paramount Plus Premium · Criterion Channel

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If Through the Olive Trees hit the spot, these will too

Looking for the series itself? Also in this series: Where Is The Friend's House? (1987)

The Wind Will Carry Us poster
The Wind Will Carry Us
1999 · dir. Abbas Kiarostami
🍅 97%★ 7.4drama

Both are Abbas Kiarostami's work, and they rhyme

Irreverent city engineer Behzad comes to a rural Kurdish village in Iran to keep vigil for a dying relative. In the meanwhile the film follows his efforts to fit in with the local community and how he changes his own attitudes as a result.

Ulee's Gold poster
Ulee's Gold
1997 · dir. Victor Nuñez
🍅 94%★ 7drama

Contemplative drama, and it commits to that

Third-generation Florida beekeeper Ulee Jackson may have gotten out of Vietnam alive, but he left a part of himself behind. Now he methodically tends his bees, carefully provides for his two grandchildren and keeps his emotions at bay. But when a long-buried secret threatens Ulee's business and family, he is forced to break through his emotional walls and confront the terror of his wounded spirit.

Brainstorm poster
Brainstorm
2001 · dir. Laís Bodanzky
★ 7.7drama

Drama with a pulse of stillness, in both cases

Neto is a middle class teenager living a normal life. After his father finds a marijuana cigarette on his pocket, he is sent to a mental institution, where he gets to know a completely absurd and inhumane reality in which people are devoured by a corrupt and cruel system.

Blind Chance poster
Blind Chance
1987 · dir. Krzysztof Kieślowski
🍅 73%★ 7.7drama

Both lean on stillness more than on drama

Witek runs after a train. Three variations follow on how such a seemingly banal incident could influence the rest of Witek's life.

The Whales of August poster
The Whales of August
1987 · dir. Lindsay Anderson
🍅 64%★ 7.1drama

The same drama instincts

The difference: The scrappier of the two with critics

Two aged sisters reflect on life and the past during a late summer day in Maine.

The Trip to Bountiful poster
The Trip to Bountiful
1985 · dir. Peter Masterson
🍅 100%★ 7.4dramaPrime Video

Both working the same drama territory

Carrie Watts is living the twilight of her life trapped in an apartment in 1940s Houston, Texas with a controlling daughter-in-law and a hen-pecked son. Her fondest wish – just once before she dies – is to revisit Bountiful, the small Texas town of her youth which she still refers to as "home."

Overnight poster
Overnight
2003 · dir. Mark Brian Smith
🍅 78%★ 7.1documentary

The same preoccupation in both: filmmaking

The difference: Leans harder into documentary than Through the Olive Trees does

Alternately hilarious and horrifying, Overnight chronicles one man's misadventures of making a Hollywood movie. It starts out as a rags to riches story as Troy Duffy, a Boston-bred bartender, sells his first screenplay for The Boondock Saints.

You Can Count on Me poster
You Can Count on Me
2000 · dir. Kenneth Lonergan
🍅 95%★ 7.5dramaParamount+

Both know what they want from drama

A single mother's life is thrown into turmoil after her struggling, rarely-seen younger brother returns to town.

Summer Hours poster
Summer Hours
2008 · dir. Olivier Assayas
🍅 94%★ 7.1drama

Both are drama through and through

After the death of a septuagenarian woman, her three children deliberate over what to do with her estate.

Close-Up poster
Close-Up
1990 · dir. Abbas Kiarostami
🍅 89%★ 8.2crime · drama

The same hand behind both of them: Abbas Kiarostami

This fiction-documentary hybrid uses a sensational real-life event—the arrest of a young man on charges that he fraudulently impersonated the well-known filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf—as the basis for a stunning, multilayered investigation into movies, identity, artistic creation, and existence, in which the real people from the case play themselves.

Treeless Mountain poster
Treeless Mountain
2009 · dir. So Yong Kim
🍅 86%★ 7drama

Drama in the same key

A Korean woman leaves her two young daughters with her sister-in-law to search for their estranged father.

Stand and Deliver poster
Stand and Deliver
1988 · dir. Ramón Menéndez
🍅 89%★ 7.3drama

Both play drama straight

Jaime Escalante is a mathematics teacher in a school in a hispanic neighbourhood. Convinced that his students have potential, he adopts unconventional teaching methods to try and turn gang members and no-hopers into some of the country's top algebra and calculus students.

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The best-reviewed films that share Through the Olive Trees’ defining feeling.