Neorealism as an artistic movement originated in Italy after World War II, as a need for a realistic depiction of everyday life after the reign of fascism. The paper analyzes the movies of Krešo Golik in order to prove the influence of Italian neorealism in his work. The beginning of the paper explains the term neorealism, its main features and the most important Italian representatives of neorealism: Vittorio De Sica, Roberto Rossellini and Luchino Visconti, as well as their important neorealist achievements. Then, a historical overview of Croatian cinematography from the middle of the 20th century is presented, when the first center for film production in Croatia, Jadran film in Zagreb, was founded and a kind of classical period of Croatian film began. In that period, we noticed that Croatian directors were looking for inspiration in foreign cinematography. By analyzing the works of directors Veljko Bulajić and Šime Šimatović, we notice some of the key elements of neorealism. The last part of the paper is dedicated to the director Krešo Golik and his greatest movies achievements. An analysis of his most famous movies: Plavi 9, Djevojka i hrast, Imam dvije mame i dva tate, Od 3 do 22 and Tko pjeva zlo ne misli, proved the influence of Italian neorealism on his work, but differences were also found, such as hiring professional actors in most movies, alleviating the division into positive and negative characters and implementing a different form of realism into the movie, for example – the folklore realism, which we see in the movie Djevojka i hrast. These differences point to Golik’s propensity to find his own style that is slowly turning to contemporary movie.