Every historical drama movie streaming on MUBI in the US right now — 19 films ranked by rating, checked against MUBI’s live catalog.
Updated July 2026 · Availability refreshed from MUBI US
Directed by Chen Kaige
✦ MovieMuse AI takeOperatic mise-en-scène mirrors historical rupture: theater's rigid traditions crumble alongside China's political upheaval, each betrayal choreographed like a classical performance.
In an epic tale of theater, gender, love and class, two Beijing opera actors navigate political turmoil as their friendship evolves over decades.
Directed by Magnus von Horn
✦ MovieMuse AI takeHandheld realism denies period glamorization: the camera's anxious movement mirrors a woman's powerlessness within historical systems designed against her.
Struggling to survive in post-WWI Copenhagen, a newly unemployed and pregnant young woman is taken in by a charismatic elder to help run an underground adoption agency. The two form an unexpected bond, until a sudden discovery changes everything.
Directed by Sebastian Meise
✦ MovieMuse AI takeAnchors abstract history in bodily repetition: identical prison cells across decades visualize how legal persecution outlasted Nazi defeat, a subtle formal argument.
In post-war Germany, liberation by the Allies does not mean freedom for everyone. Hans Hoffmann is repeatedly imprisoned under Paragraph 175, which criminalizes homosexuality. Nevertheless, over the decades, he continues his quest for freedom and love, even if he finds it in the most unusual places.
Directed by Paweł Pawlikowski
✦ MovieMuse AI takeUses architecture as memory: the convent's austere spaces suddenly crack open to reveal buried genocide, collapsing temporal distance through spatial revelation.
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.
Directed by Audrey Diwan
✦ MovieMuse AI takeBlack-and-white cinematography strips away period romance: handheld realism transforms reproductive rights into urgent bodily autonomy, not nostalgic intrigue.
France, 1963. Anne is a bright young student with a promising future ahead of her. But when she falls pregnant, she sees the opportunity to finish her studies and escape the constraints of her social background disappearing. With her final exams fast approaching and her belly growing, Anne resolves to act, even if she has to confront shame and pain, even if she must risk prison to do so.
Directed by Peter Weir
✦ MovieMuse AI takeLandscape becomes antagonist: five-country escape forces viewers to feel geography as historical obstacle, rejecting comfortable linear narratives of survival.
A small band of multicultural convicts stages a daring escape from a WWII-era Siberian gulag, and embarks on a treacherous journey across five countries in a desperate race for freedom and survival.
Directed by Takashi Miike
✦ MovieMuse AI takeVisual geometry—rigid compositions, stark framing—transforms samurai honor codes into brutal mathematics, exposing feudal system's dehumanizing arithmetic.
A tale of revenge, honor and disgrace, centering on a poverty-stricken samurai who discovers the fate of his ronin son-in-law, setting in motion a tense showdown of vengeance against the house of a feudal lord.
Directed by Lars von Trier
✦ MovieMuse AI takeVon Trier's Brechtian staging transforms moral intervention into theatrical spectacle, exposing historical drama's complicity in benevolent Western narratives.
In 1933, a young woman and her father discover an Alabama plantation whose inhabitants live as if slavery had never been abolished. Feeling a sense of duty to those behind the heavy gates, she stays to liberate the people and see them through their first harvest. With four of her father's colleagues and a lawyer, she faces the daunting task of resurrecting the place known as Manderlay.
Directed by Cao Hamburger
✦ MovieMuse AI takeArchival ambition becomes character: explorers' masculine conquest narrative disintegrates when indigenous lands resist colonization, deconstructing imperial historiography.
In the '40s, three brothers decide to live a great adventure and enlisting in the Roncador-Xingu Expedition, which has a mission to tame the Central Brazil. The Villas Boas brothers: Orlando, 27, Claudius, 25, and Leonardo, 23, engage in a fantastic and incredible saga. Soon start to lead the expedition that opens new paths 1,500 km, navigates over 1,000 miles of unspoilt rivers, opens 19 airfields for airplanes Army, gives rise to the creation of 43 towns and 14 make contact with wild Indian tribes, unknown, as the Xavante, courageous and feared warriors, no casualties on both sides. This adventure allows the Villas Boas brothers the creation of the Xingu National Park, the first major Amerindian reservation in Brazil, the size of Belgium, transforming them into true contemporary heroes.
Directed by Paul Dano
✦ MovieMuse AI takeWildfire serves as historical metaphor: uncontainable natural force exposes Cold War-era suburban myth-making as fragile masculine fantasy.
14-year-old Joe is the only child of Jeanette and Jerry — a housewife and a golf pro — in a small town in 1960s Montana. Nearby, an uncontrolled forest fire rages close to the Canadian border, and when Jerry loses his job (and his sense of purpose) he decides to join the cause of fighting the fire, leaving his wife and son to fend for themselves.
Directed by Alice Rohrwacher
✦ MovieMuse AI takeNeorealist texture interrogates religious inheritance: grainy film stock and documentary-style casting make institutional indoctrination uncomfortably tangible.
After growing up in Switzerland, 13-year-old Marta returns to a city in southern Italy with her mother and older sister. Independent and inquisitive, she joins a catechism class at a local church. However, the games and religious pop songs she encounters there do not nearly satisfy her interest in faith. Struggling to find her place, Marta pushes the boundaries of the class, the priest, and the church.
Directed by Albert Serra
✦ MovieMuse AI takeReal-time decay—Louis XIV's body failing across unbroken takes—transforms grandeur into anatomical fact, stripping monarchy of mystique through duration.
August 1715. After going for a walk, Louis XIV feels a pain in his leg. The next days, the king keeps fulfilling his duties and obligations, but his sleep is troubled and he has a serious fever. He barely eats and weakens increasingly. This is the start of the slow agony of the greatest king of France, surrounded by his relatives and doctors.
Directed by Paul Verhoeven
✦ MovieMuse AI takeBaroque visual excess becomes feminist language: period opulence allows forbidden desire to flourish in margins, queering ecclesiastical authority through sensuality.
A 17th-century nun becomes entangled in a forbidden lesbian affair with a novice. But it is Benedetta's shocking religious visions that threaten to shake the Church to its core.
Directed by Bertrand Bonello
✦ MovieMuse AI takeClosed-set technique traps viewers in dying institution: Belle Époque brothel becomes temporal tomb, mourning modernity's arrival through architectural claustrophobia.
The dawn of the 20th century: L’Apollonide, a luxurious and traditional brothel in Paris, is living its last days. In this closed world, where some men fall in love and others become viciously harmful, the women share their secrets, their fears, their joys and their pains.
Directed by Cyril Schäublin
✦ MovieMuse AI takeIndustrial machinery's rhythmic visual assault captures labor's dehumanization: mechanized aesthetics weaponized against workers' revolutionary consciousness.
New technologies are transforming a 19th-century watchmaking town in Switzerland. Josephine, a young factory worker, produces the unrest wheel, swinging in the heart of the mechanical watch. Exposed to new ways of organizing money, time and labor, she gets involved with the local anarchist movement.
Directed by Oscar Micheaux
✦ MovieMuse AI takeSilent-film urgency—rapid editing, stark contrast—documents Black institutional survival as radical act within hostile legal systems.
Abandoned by her fiancé, an educated black woman with a traumatizing past dedicates herself to helping a near bankrupt school for impoverished black children.
Directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien
✦ MovieMuse AI takeElliptical editing fractures linear time: martial arts choreography becomes visual historiography, refusing Western narrative conventions for ninth-century Chinese consciousness.
9th century China. Ten year old general’s daughter Nie Yinniang is abducted by a nun who initiates her into the martial arts, transforming her into an exceptional assassin charged with eliminating cruel and corrupt local governors. One day, having failed in a task, she is sent back by her mistress to the land of her birth, with orders to kill the man to whom she was promised – a cousin who now leads the largest military region in North China. After 13 years of exile, the young woman must confront her parents, her memories and her long-repressed feelings.
Directed by Marco Bellocchio
✦ MovieMuse AI takeMedieval skepticism about female power: witchcraft accusations indict patriarchal institutions through ecclesiastical documents and bodily testimony.
In the Middle Ages, Federico, a soldier, visits the convent in Bobbio, where Sister Benedetta is facing charges of witchery for seducing Fabrizio, Federico’s twin brother, and making him betray his priestly mission. Federico hopes to secure his brother a burial on consecrated grounds. In modern times, Federico Mai, a Minister inspector, knocks on the doors of the very same convent, in order to broker a sale of the property to a Russian millionaire. Unbeknownst to him, a mysterious "Count" lives there.
Directed by Albert Serra
✦ MovieMuse AI takePre-Revolutionary libertinism becomes political statement: sexual transgression functions as coded resistance to ancien régime constraint and hypocrisy.
1774, shortly before the French Revolution, somewhere between Potsdam and Berlin. Madame de Dumeval, the Duke de Tesis and the Duke de Wand, libertines expelled from the puritanical court of Louis XVI, seek the support of the legendary Duc de Walchen, German seducer and freethinker, lonely in a country where hypocrisy and false virtue reign. Their mission is to export libertinage, a philosophy of enlightenment founded on the rejection of moral boundaries and authorities, but moreover to find a safe place to pursue their errant games, where the quest for pleasure no longer obeys laws other than those dictated by unfulfilled desires.
MovieMuse finds the perfect movie for tonight across your streaming services —
swipe through historical drama picks matched to your taste.
Founding period: everything is free — early members keep Premium free for a year.