Highest-Rated Movies about 'Year 1940'

The Pianist (2002), Dunkirk (2017), Notorious (1946), Never Look Away (2018), La Vie en Rose (2007), Watchmen (2009), The Time Machine (1960), Foreign Correspondent (1940) ... Let's take a look at the ranked list of the best Year 1940 movies.

#16. Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971)

Storyline: During WWII in England, Charlie, Carrie, and Paul Rawlins are sent to live with Eglantine Price, who it turns out is an apprentice witch. Charlie blackmails Miss Price that if he is to keep her practices a secret, she must give him something, so she takes a bed knob from her late father's bed and places the "famous magic traveling spell" on it, and only Paul can activate it. Their first journey is to a street in London where they meet Emelius Browne, former headmaster of Miss Price's witchcraft training correspondence school. Miss Price tells him of a plan to find the magic words for a spell known as Substitutiary Locomotion, which brings inanimate objects to life. This spell will be her work for the war effort.

Plot Keywords: retreat, fishing, trophy, punched in the face, beach, fear, juggling ...

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#17. The King's Choice (2016)

Storyline: April 1940. Norway has been invaded by Germany and King Haakon VII, the royal family and government have fled into the interior of the country. The German envoy to Norway, Curt Brauer, tries to negotiate a peace. Ultimately, the decision on Norway's future will rest with the King.—grantss

Plot Keywords: world war two, wehrmacht, year 1940, nazi germany, king, parliament, prime minister ...

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#18. Katyn (2007)

Storyline: When the Soviet Union on 17 September 1939 invades Poland, Anna Aleksandrowna leaves her home in Krakow to search for her husband, the Polish captain Andrzej. She finds him together with other officers captured by the Red Army, but some minutes later he is pushed into a train, which will take all the Polish officers to a prison camp in Kozelsk in Russia. Anna and her daughter Nika is now stuck in the Soviet occupied zone, unable to go back to Krakow in the German zone, not until a brave Russian captain helps them to flee. 3 April 1940 Andrzej is transported from the prison camp in Kozelsk to the Katyn Forest, where thousands of Polish officers are killed. In 1943 the Germans capture this area and find the mass graves. 13 April 1943 they start announcing the names of the identified corpses through loudspeakers in Krakow. Anna is happy that Andrzej is not in any of the Katyn lists, which gives her some hope. 18 January 1945 the Red Army liberates Krakow from the Nazis. The Russians ...

Plot Keywords: 1940s, red army, nazi officer, ss, prisoner of war camp, prisoner of war, nonlinear timeline ...

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#19. Suite Française (2014)

Storyline: France, 1940. In the first days of occupation, beautiful Lucile Angellier (Michelle Williams) is trapped in a stifled existence with her controlling mother-in-law (Kristin Scott Thomas) as they both await news of her husband: a prisoner of war. Parisian refugees start to pour into their small town, soon followed by a regiment of German soldiers who take up residence in the villagers' own homes. Lucile initially tries to ignore Bruno von Falk (Matthias Schoenaerts), the handsome and refined German officer staying with them. But soon, a powerful love draws them together and leads them into the tragedy of war.

Plot Keywords: france, world war two, based on novel, french resistance, forbidden love, nazi occupation, 1940s ...

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#21. Dunkirk (1958)

Storyline: Two stories in one, an easygoing British Corporal in France finds himself responsible for the lives of his men when their officer is killed. He has to get them back to Britain somehow. Meanwhile, British civilians are being dragged into the war with Operation Dynamo, the scheme to get the French and British forces back from the Dunkirk beaches. Some come forward to help, others are less willing.—Paul Galpin <galpinp@sabc.co.za>

Plot Keywords: seaside, year 1940, english channel, escape, evacuation, shore, death ...

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#22. The Captive Heart (1946)

Storyline: After the evacuation at Dunkirk, June 1940, some thousands of British prisoners are sent to German P.O.W. camps. One such group includes "Capt. Geoffrey Mitchell," a concentration-camp escapee who assumed the identity of a dead British officer. To avoid exposure, "Mitchell" must correspond with the dead man's estranged wife Celia. But eventual exposure seems certain, and the men must find a way to get him out. If he reaches England, though, what will his reception be?—Rod Crawford <puffinus@u.washington.edu>

Plot Keywords: assumed identity, impersonation, world war two, one armed man, loss of eyesight, nazi occupied france, fiance fiancee relationship ...

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#23. Their Finest (2016)

Storyline: During the London Blitz of World War II, Catrin Cole is recruited by the British Ministry of Information to write scripts for propaganda films that the public will actually watch without scoffing. In the line of her new duties, Cole investigates the story of two young women who supposedly piloted a boat in the Dunkirk Evacuation. Although it proved a complete misapprehension, the story becomes the basis for a fictional film with some possible appeal. As Cole labors to write the script with her new colleagues such as Tom Buckley, veteran actor Ambrose Hilliard must accept that his days as a leading man are over as he joins the project. Together, this disparate trio must struggle against such complications such as sexism against Cole, jealous relatives, and political interference in their artistic decisions even as London endures the bombs of the enemy. In the face of those challenges, they share a hope to contribute something meaningful in this time of war and in their own lives.

Plot Keywords: triple f rated, workplace romance, film studio, air raid, world war two, based on novel, actor ...

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#24. The Good Shepherd (2006)

Storyline: Laconic and self-contained, Edward Wilson (Matt Damon) heads C.I.A. covert operations during the Bay of Pigs. The agency suspects that Fidel Castro was tipped, so Wilson looks for the leak. As he investigates, he recalls, in a series of flashbacks, his father's death, student days at Yale (poetry; Skull and Bones), recruitment into the fledgling O.S.S., truncated affairs, a shotgun marriage, cutting his teeth on spy craft in London, distance from his son, the emergence of the Cold War, and relationships with agency, British, and Soviet counterparts. We watch his idealism give way to something else: disclosing the nature of that something else is at the heart of this movie's narration as he closes in on the leak.

Plot Keywords: cia, year 1961, year 1939, year 1940, year 1944, year 1945, year 1947 ...

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#26. The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001)

Storyline: CW Briggs is a veteran insurance investigator, with many successes. Betty Ann Fitzgerald is a new employee in the company he works for, with the task of reorganizing the office. They don't like each other - or at least that's what they think. During a night out with the rest of the office employees, they go to watch Voltan, a magician who secretly hypnotizes both of them, in order to use them for his dirty schemes. The next evening already, Briggs makes his first robbery, and when he wakes up in the morning he has no memory of it. Things get really complicated when he starts investigating the case. Will he be able to uncover... himself?

Plot Keywords: suicide attempt, hypnotism, burglary, tequila, new york city, blonde, card trick ...

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#27. Things to Come (1936)

Storyline: A global war begins in 1940. This war drags out over many decades until most of the people still alive (mostly those born after the war started) do not even know who started it or why. Nothing is being manufactured at all any more and society has broken down into primitive localized communities. In 1966 a great plague wipes out most of what people are left but small numbers still survive. One day a strange aircraft lands at one of these communities and its pilot tells of an organization which is rebuilding civilization and slowly moving across the world re-civilizing these groups of survivors. Great reconstruction takes place over the next few decades and society is once again great and strong. The world's population is now living in underground cities. In the year 2035, on the eve of man's first flight to the moon, a popular uprising against progress (which some people claim has caused the wars of the past) gains support and becomes violent.—Kevin Steinhauer <K.Steinhauer@BoM.GOV.AU>

Plot Keywords: 21st century, 1960s, 1970s, 20th century, low budget sci fi movie, christmas, sculpture ...

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#28. Back to School (1986)

Storyline: Millionaire businessman Thornton Melon is upset when his son Jason announces that he is not sure about going to college. Thornton insists that college is the best thing he never had for himself, and to prove his point, he agrees to enroll in school along with his son. Thornton is a big hit on campus: always throwing the biggest parties, knowing all the right people, but is this the way to pass college?

Plot Keywords: college, father son relationship, clothing store, cleavage, scantily clad female, breasts, female nudity ...

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#29. Alone in Berlin (2016)

Storyline: In 1940, German soldier Hans Quangel (Louis Hofmann) is killed in action during the French campaign. His parents, Otto (Brendan Gleeson) and Anna (Dame Emma Thompson), are devastated by the loss and their bereavement is unmollified by the joyful hysteria at Germany's victory. Deciding that Führer Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime are responsible for this tragedy and much more, Otto cannot stand by any longer. As such, Otto begins to create handwritten cards denouncing the regime's abuses and lies, which he secretly deposits throughout Berlin while a disillusioned Anna insists on helping him. As the subversive cards pile up over the years, Police Detective Escherich (Daniel Brühl) is tasked to track down the leafleteer while being pressured by his increasingly impatient S.S. superior for an arrest for this "treason", regardless of actual guilt. As the stakes rise even as Nazi Germany's day of reckoning approaches, Otto and Anna are determined to spread the truth regardless of the odds, even as their opposition awaits the fatal mistake that could doom them.—Kenneth Chisholm (kchishol@rogers.com)

Plot Keywords: berlin germany, man hits a woman, bloody mouth, blood, hit in the face, policeman, kiss ...

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#30. Red Joan (2018)

Storyline: English-born Joan Stanley (Dame Judi Dench), a Soviet and Communist Party sympathizer, becomes employed as a British government civil servant, and gets recruited by the K.G.B. in the mid 1930s. She successfully transfers nuclear bomb secrets to Soviet Russia, which enables them to keep up with the west in the development of atomic weapons, and remains undetected as a spy for over a half a century.—Unknownian

Plot Keywords: russophobia, title spoken by character, female scientist, title appears in writing, color in title, bare breasts, prison ...

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