The Quiet AmericanMovies like The Quiet American
- Key Features:
- Political intrigue, Love triangle, Cynicism, Moral ambiguity, Historical context, Betrayal, Colonialism, War, Journalism, Ideological conflict, Suspense, Romance, Vietnam War
- Tone:
- serious, restrained, dramatic
- Target Audience:
- Drama lovers, Historical fiction enthusiasts, Intrigue seekers, Cerebral viewers
- Emotional Arc:
- Infatuation → Disillusionment
The Quiet American

Cynical British journalist Fowler falls in love with a young Vietnamese woman but is dismayed when a naïve U.S. official also begins vying for her attention. In retaliation, Fowler informs the communists that the American is selling arms to their enemy.
The Quiet American
An American man returns to the village of his birth in Ireland, where he finds love and conflict.

Dispatched to a small Italian town to await further orders, assassin Jack embarks on a double life that may be more relaxing than is good for him.

John Cassellis is the toughest TV news reporter around. After extensively reporting about violence and racial tensions in poor communities, he discovers that his network is helping the FBI by granting them access to his footage to find suspects.

A poor French teenage girl engages in an illicit affair with a wealthy Chinese heir in 1920s Saigon. For the first time in her young life she has control, and she wields it deftly over her besotted lover throughout a series of clandestine meetings and torrid encounters.

John, a disillusioned Vietnam War journalist, turns to heroin smuggling. He cons Ray, an equally burnt out veteran into delivering the drugs stateside to his wife. Everything soon falls apart and Ray ends up on the run with John's wife trying to evade crooked narcotics agents.

An American man returns to a corrupt, Japanese-occupied Shanghai four months before Pearl Harbor and discovers his friend has been killed. While he unravels the mysteries of the death, he falls in love and discovers a much larger secret that his own government is hiding.

Set in a small politically unstable Latin American country, the story follows the half English and half Latino Dr. Eduardo Plarr, who left his home to find a better life. Along the way he meets an array of people, including British Consul Charley Fortnum, a representative in Latin America who is trying to keep Revolution from occurring. He is also a remorseful alcoholic. Another person the doctor meets is Clara, whom he immediately falls in love with, but there is a problem: Clara is Charley's wife.

New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg is on assignment covering the Cambodian Civil War, with the help of local interpreter Dith Pran and American photojournalist Al Rockoff. When the U.S. Army pulls out amid escalating violence, Schanberg makes exit arrangements for Pran and his family. Pran, however, tells Schanberg he intends to stay in Cambodia to help cover the unfolding story — a decision he may regret as the Khmer Rouge rebels move in.

In 1980, an American journalist covering the Salvadoran Civil War becomes entangled with both the leftist guerrilla groups and the right-wing military dictatorship while trying to rescue his girlfriend and her children.

Irish Republican Army member Fergus forms an unexpected bond with Jody, a kidnapped British soldier in his custody, despite the warnings of fellow IRA members Jude and Maguire. Jody makes Fergus promise he'll visit his girlfriend, Dil, in London, and when Fergus flees to the city, he seeks her out. Hounded by his former IRA colleagues, he finds himself increasingly drawn to the enigmatic, and surprising, Dil.

In the near future, a group of war journalists attempt to survive while reporting the truth as the United States stands on the brink of civil war.

Set in colonial French Indochina during the 1930s to 1950s, this is the story of Éliane Devries, a French plantation owner, and of her adopted Vietnamese daughter, Camille, set against the backdrop of the rising Vietnamese nationalist movement.

When a young soldier in Vietnam gets dumped by his hometown girl, he and his best friend decide to go AWOL and return to the States to win her back.

A widowed doctor of both Chinese and European descent falls in love with a married American correspondent in Hong Kong during China's Communist revolution.

While recording sound effects for a slasher flick, Jack Terry stumbles upon a real-life horror: a car careening off a bridge and into a river. Jack jumps into the water and fishes out Sally from the car, but the other passenger is already dead — a governor intending to run for president. As Jack does some investigating of his tapes, and starts a perilous romance with Sally, he enters a tangled web of conspiracy that might leave him dead.

The Middle Eastern oil industry is the backdrop of this tense drama, which weaves together numerous story lines. Bennett Holiday is an American lawyer in charge of facilitating a dubious merger of oil companies, while Bryan Woodman, a Switzerland-based energy analyst, experiences both personal tragedy and opportunity during a visit with Arabian royalty. Meanwhile, veteran CIA agent Bob Barnes uncovers an assassination plot with unsettling origins.

A British mercenary arrives in pre-Revolution Cuba to help train the corrupt General Batista's army against Castro's guerrillas while he also romances a former lover now married to an unscrupulous plantation owner.

A cover-up that spanned four U.S. Presidents pushed the country's first female newspaper publisher and a hard-driving editor to join an unprecedented battle between journalist and government. Inspired by true events.

In a small Vietnamese village torn apart by war, a young woman faces unimaginable horrors before deciding to escape to the city. There, she encounters a compassionate Marine who offers her hope and a chance at a new life, igniting the possibility of a future together.

A devoted wife and mother leads a secret life as a CIA agent until her husband’s article exposes a scandal, putting her identity and loved ones at risk. As her world crumbles, she must navigate the fallout of her double life.

A high-strung news producer finds herself in a love triangle between a talented but self-doubting reporter and a charming new anchor, who embodies the growing trivialization of news that she is determined to fight against.

When CIA Analyst Jack Ryan interferes with an IRA assassination, a renegade faction targets Jack and his family as revenge.

During the Vietnam War, a soldier finds himself the outsider of his own squad when they unnecessarily kidnap a female villager.

Three stories told simultaneously in ninety minutes of real time: a Republican Senator who's a presidential hopeful gives an hour-long interview to a skeptical television reporter, detailing a strategy for victory in Afghanistan; two special forces ambushed on an Afghani ridge await rescue as Taliban forces close in; a poli-sci professor at a California college invites a student to re-engage.

Set during the last days of the Ottoman Empire, a love triangle develops between Mikael, a brilliant medical student, the beautiful and sophisticated artist Ana, and Chris, a renowned American journalist based in Paris.

Set in postwar America, a man watches his seemingly perfect life fall apart as his daughter's new political affiliation threatens to destroy their family.

With the world under attack by deadly creatures who hunt by sound, a teen and her family seek refuge outside the city and encounter a mysterious cult.

Wealthy American widower Adam Verver and his daughter Maggie live a refined life in Europe, surrounded by art. Maggie marries impoverished Italian Prince Amerigo, while Adam marries Maggie's friend Charlotte Stant. The Prince and Charlotte are having an affair, which Maggie discovers and navigates through a silent, psychological battle of wills, ultimately using her cunning to preserve her marriage and protect her father.

An other-worldly story, set against the backdrop of Cold War era America circa 1962, where a mute janitor working at a lab falls in love with an amphibious man being held captive there and devises a plan to help him escape.

A quiet, neglected girl is sent away from her dysfunctional family to live with relatives for the summer. She blossoms in their care, but in this house where there are meant to be no secrets, she discovers one.

In a war-ridden country, a woman watches over her husband, comatose from a bullet in the neck and abandoned by Jihad companions and brothers. One day, the woman decides to say things to him she could never have done before.

Northern Spain, October 1944. Several groups of guerrilla fighters, former Republican soldiers exiled in France after the end of the Spanish Civil War, infiltrate the country in order to provoke a popular uprising against General Franco's dictatorship.

A group of working-class friends decide to enlist in the Army during the Vietnam War and finds it to be hellish chaos -- not the noble venture they imagined. Before they left, Steven married his pregnant girlfriend -- and Michael and Nick were in love with the same woman. But all three are different men upon their return.

During World War II, a secret agent must seduce and assassinate an official who works for the Japanese puppet government in Shanghai.

The story of a man who murdered thirty-two people, gained power, and then got afraid because too many people wanted to kill him. One August morning, he disappeared. For fifteen years, everyone believed him dead.

A young Australian reporter tries to navigate the political turmoil of Indonesia during the rule of President Sukarno with the help of a diminutive photographer.

Lt. Col. Iceal "Ham" Hambleton is a weapons countermeasures expert and when his aircraft is shot over enemy territory the Air Force very much wants to get him back. Hambleton knows the area he's in is going to be carpet-bombed but a temporary shortage of helicopters causes a delay. Working with an Air Force reconnaissance pilot, Capt. Bartholomew Clark, he maps out an escape route.

Against the backdrop of a military dictatorship, Eugenia is reunited with her estranged family following her father’s stroke and is forced to confront dark secret.

Based on the real-life experiences of Ed Horman. A conservative American businessman travels to Chile to investigate the sudden disappearance of his son after a military takeover. Accompanied by his son's wife he uncovers a trail of cover-ups that implicate the US State department which supports the dictatorship.

Alex Cutter is a boozy, belligerent and deeply cynical Vietnam veteran whose encounter with a landmine during the war has left him minus an eye, a leg and an arm. When his drifter playboy friend Richard Bone is falsely accused of murder, Cutter sets out for revenge in his own inimitable style.

Paralyzed in the Vietnam war, Ron Kovic becomes an anti-war and pro-human rights political activist after feeling betrayed by the country he fought for.

Two warriors in pursuit of a stolen sword and a notorious fugitive are led to an impetuous, physically-skilled, teenage nobleman's daughter, who is at a crossroads in her life.

The story of the first major battle of the American phase of the Vietnam War and the soldiers on both sides that fought it.

During WWII, the United States set up army bases in Great Britain as part of the war effort. Against their proper sensibilities, many of the Brits don't much like the brash Yanks, especially when it comes to the G.I.s making advances on the lonely British girls. One relationship that develops is between married John, an Army Captain, and the aristocratic Helen, whose naval husband is away at war. Helen loves her husband, but Helen and John are looking for some comfort during the difficult times.

When the CIA discovers one of its agents leaked information that cost more than 100 people their lives, veteran operative Henry Pelham is assigned to root out the mole with his former lover and colleague Celia Harrison.

A Marine Colonel is brought to court-martial after ordering his men to fire on demonstrators surrounding the American embassy in Yemen.

A young journalist, an experienced cameraman and a discredited reporter find their bold plan to capture Bosnia's top war criminal quickly spiraling out of control when a UN representative mistakes them for a CIA hit squad.

Margaret is a nurse in England during WW2, and married to a secret agent. Things get complicated when she falls for David, an American pilot.

A celebrated military contractor returns to the site of his greatest career triumphs and re-connects with a long-ago love while unexpectedly falling for the hard-charging Air Force watchdog assigned to him.

A private security contractor in Iraq rejects the official explanation of his friend's death and decides to investigate.

When intelligence agent Kathryn Woodhouse is suspected of betraying the nation, her husband – also a legendary agent – faces the ultimate test of whether to be loyal to his marriage, or his country.

A retired professor of American origin lives a solitary life in a luxurious palazzo in Rome. He is confronted by a vulgar Italian marchesa and her lover, her daughter and her daughter's boyfriend, and forced to rent to them an apartment on the upper floor of his palazzo. From this point on his quiet routine is turned into chaos by his tenants' machinations, and everybody's life takes an unexpected but inevitable turn.

After losing their spouses in a plane crash, an internal affairs cop and a congresswoman find each other's keys in each other's loved ones' possessions and discover that the two were having an affair.

Irene is a magazine editor living under the shadow of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Francisco is a handsome photographer and he comes to Irene for a job. As a sympathizer with the underground resistance movement, Francisco opens her eyes and her heart to the atrocities being committed by the state.

Pierre, a devoted father in his 50s, raises his two sons alone. When Louis, the youngest, leaves home to attend the Sorbonne in Paris, Fus, slightly older and not as successful academically, becomes more and more secretive. Driven by a fascination for violence, he gets entangled in far-right extremist groups, at the very opposite of his father’s values. Between them, there is love and hate, until tragedy happens.

A mute man with a violent past is forced to take on the teeming underworld of a near-future Berlin as he searches for his missing girlfriend.

A paranoid, secretive surveillance expert has a crisis of conscience when he suspects that the couple he is spying on will be murdered.

A conflict develops between a troubled Vietnam veteran and the sister he lives with when she becomes involved romantically with the army buddy who reminds him of the tragic battle they both survived.

In 1968 California, a Marine officer's wife falls in love with a former high school classmate who suffered a paralyzing combat injury in the war.

Famed Canadian-American leftist documentary filmmaker Leonard Fife was one of sixty thousand draft evaders and deserters who fled to Canada to avoid serving in Vietnam. Now in his late seventies, Fife is dying of cancer in Montreal and has agreed to a final interview in which he is determined to bare all his secrets at last, to demythologize his mythologized life.

1991. Harrison Lloyd, a renowned photojournalist covering the war in Yugoslavia, is reported missing. Sarah, his wife, convinced that he is not dead, decides to go to Bosnia to find him.

Will believes his wife Rosalind is innocent of their son's suspected murder, only to discover the devastating truth behind her past links her to another unsolved crime.

A Japanese photojournalist revisits Vietnam after the liberation to document the nation, and begins following and documenting the young children from a poor Vietnamese family.

Tokyo, Japan, 1989. Lucy Fly, a foreigner who works as a translator, begins a passionate relationship with Teiji, a mysterious man obsessed with photography.

Air America was the CIA's private airline operating in Laos during the Vietnam War, running anything and everything from soldiers to foodstuffs for local villagers. After losing his pilot's license, Billy Covington is recruited, and ends up in the middle of a bunch of lunatic pilots, gun-running by his friend Gene Ryack, and opium smuggling by his own superiors.

Wounded in Africa during World War II, Nazi Col. Claus von Stauffenberg returns to his native Germany and joins the Resistance in a daring plan to create a shadow government and assassinate Adolf Hitler. When events unfold so that he becomes a central player, he finds himself tasked with both leading the coup and personally killing the Führer.

Young businessman Thomas Crown is bored and decides to plan a robbery and assigns a professional agent with the right information to the job. However, Crown is soon betrayed yet cannot blow his cover because he’s in love.

American sailor Charlie Madison falls for a pretty Englishwoman while trying to avoid a senseless and dangerous D-Day mission concocted by a deranged admiral.

A US soldier suffers a traumatic brain injury while fighting in Afghanistan and struggles to adjust to life back home in New Orleans. When she meets local mechanic James, the pair begin to forge an unexpected bond.

Ann, a frustrated wife, enters into counseling due to a troubled marriage. Unbeknownst to her, her husband John has begun an affair with her sister. When John’s best friend Graham arrives, his penchant for interviewing women about their sex lives forever changes John and Ann’s rocky marriage.

Two top CIA operatives wage an epic battle against one another after they discover they are dating the same woman.

Set in the glamour of the New York and Paris art scenes, gallery owner Brooke Gatwick and her newscaster husband Owen Shore, face temptation, jealousy, twists and mystery when two seductive newcomers enter their lives.

Investigative journalist, Jeremy Scahill is pulled into an unexpected journey as he chases down the hidden truth behind America's expanding covert wars, and examines how the US government has responded to international terrorist threats in ways that seem to go against the established laws of the land.

An American journalism student in London scoops a big story, and begins an affair with an aristocrat as the incident unfurls.

Alan Clay, a struggling American businessman, travels to Saudi Arabia to sell a new technology to the King, only to be challenged by endless Middle Eastern bureaucracy, a perpetually absent monarch, and a suspicious growth on his back.

Career criminal Johnny Clay recruits a sharpshooter, a crooked police officer, a bartender and a betting teller named George, among others, for one last job before he goes straight and gets married. But when George tells his restless wife about the scheme to steal millions from the racetrack where he works, she hatches a plot of her own.

An American journalist arrives in Berlin just after the end of World War Two. He becomes involved in a murder mystery surrounding a dead GI who washes up at a lakeside mansion during the Potsdam negotiations between the Allied powers. Soon his investigation connects with his search for his married pre-war German lover.

Two young men are seriously affected by the Vietnam War. One of them has always been obsessed with birds - but now believes he really is a bird, and has been sent to a mental hospital. Can his friend help him pull through?

Murphy is an American living in Paris who enters a highly sexually and emotionally charged relationship with the unstable Electra. Unaware of the seismic effect it will have on their relationship, they invite their pretty neighbor into their bed.

An American tourist in Greece finds himself on the run after a tragic accident plunges him into a political conspiracy that makes him a target for assassination.

As a young and naive recruit in Vietnam, Chris Taylor faces a moral crisis when confronted with the horrors of war and the duality of man.

Nebraska cop Kathryn Bolkovac discovers a deadly sex trafficking ring while serving as a U.N. peacekeeper in post-war Bosnia. Risking her own life to save the lives of others, she uncovers an international conspiracy that is determined to stop her, no matter the cost.

On the day of his retirement, a veteran CIA agent learns that his former protégé has been arrested in China, is sentenced to die the next morning in Beijing, and that the CIA is considering letting that happen to avoid an international scandal.

Helene, a pill-addicted anesthesiologist, is mourning the death of her boyfriend when, through a car accident she causes, she chances to meet the lethargic Gilles, a young man who lives for free at his mother's hotel. Gilles pursues Helene romantically, and she eventually softens up. Gilles, however, is also devoted to Bernard, a petty crook who revels in mugging gay men. All three struggle with relationships that seem to be going nowhere.

Recently divorced career woman Alex Greville begins a romantic relationship with glamorous mod artist Bob Elkin, fully aware that he's also intimately involved with middle-aged doctor Daniel Hirsh. For both Alex and Daniel, the younger man represents a break with their repressive pasts, and though both know that Bob is seeing both of them, neither is willing to let go of the youth and vitality he brings to their otherwise stable lives.

Though only 14 years old, May is selected to be the third wife of a wealthy landowner. Her new home seems idyllic, her husband favours her, and she quickly becomes pregnant with what she is certain will be the desired male progeny. But trouble is quietly brewing: she witnesses a forbidden tryst that will spark a chain reaction of misfortunes — and stir in May urges that until now had been dormant.

After proving himself on the field of battle in the French and Indian War, Benjamin Martin wants nothing more to do with such things, preferring the simple life of a farmer. But when his son Gabriel enlists in the army to defend their new nation, America, against the British, Benjamin reluctantly returns to his old life to protect his son.

The story of American poet Emily Dickinson from her early days as a young schoolgirl to her later years as a reclusive, unrecognized artist.

Twenty years after their notorious tabloid romance gripped the nation, a married couple buckles under the pressure when an actress arrives to do research for a film about their past.

When Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi disappears after entering Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul, his fiancée and dissidents around the world are left to piece together the clues to a brutal murder and expose a global cover up perpetrated by the very country he loved.

After being a victim of rape within their own home, Diana chooses to keep the trauma secret. Mario, her husband, also has something to hide. The silence takes the couple's account over the day turns gradually into a peculiar form of violence.

George Orwell's novel of a totalitarian future society in which a man whose daily work is rewriting history tries to rebel by falling in love.

When an arranged marriage brings Ada and her spirited daughter to the wilderness of nineteenth-century New Zealand, she finds herself locked in a battle of wills with both her controlling husband and a rugged frontiersman to whom she develops a forbidden attraction.

A reporter, fired after refusing to give names to a 1951 House Un-American Activities Committee, takes a part-time job as companion to an old lady. While working she overhears a noisy argument in the neighboring house, being conducted largely in German and involving her HUAC prosecutor. She begins to investigate, enlisting the help of the FBI Agent initially detailed to surveil her.

A mute gunslinger fights in the defense of a group of outlaws and a vengeful young widow, against a group of ruthless bounty hunters.

A sheriff sees his state senate bid slide out onto the ice when his daughter begins to date the son of a charming but psychologically disturbed woman with whom the sheriff has engaged in a two-decade-long affair.

In Ireland, American lawyer Ingrid Jessner and her activist partner, Paul Sullivan, struggle to uncover atrocities committed by the British government against the Northern Irish during the "Troubles." But when Sullivan is assassinated in the streets, Jessner teams up with Peter Kerrigan, a British investigator acting against the will of his own government, and struggles to uncover a conspiracy that may even implicate one of Kerrigan's colleagues.

Justin Quayle is a low-level British diplomat who has always gone about his work very quietly, not causing any problems. But after his radical wife Tessa is killed he becomes determined to find out why, thrusting himself into the middle of a very dangerous conspiracy.

