20 best movies like A French Woman (1995)

Germany, 1944. Leyna, the 15-year old daughter of a white German mother and a black African father, meets Lutz, a compassionate member of the Hitler Youth whose father is a prominent Nazi soldier, and they form an unlikely connection in this quickly changing world.

The story of Aung San Suu Kyi as she becomes the core of Burma's democracy movement, and her relationship with her husband, writer Michael Aris.

Two people, a Frenchman Julien Maroyeur and a Jewish German woman (Anna Kupfer) met on a train while escaping the German army entering France.

An Hungarian youth comes of age at Buchenwald during World War II. György Köves is 14, the son of a merchant who's sent to a forced labor camp. After his father's departure, György gets a job at a brickyard; his bus is stopped and its Jewish occupants sent to camps. There, György find camaraderie, suffering, cruelty, illness, and death. He hears advice on preserving one's dignity and self-esteem. He discovers hatred. If he does survive and returns to Budapest, what will he find? What is natural; what is it to be a Jew? Sepia, black and white, and color alternate to shade the mood.

Lt. Franta Slama is a top pilot in the Czech Air Force who is assigned to train a promising young flier, Karel Vojtisek, and they soon become friends. When Nazi Germany invades Czechoslovakia in 1939, they both reject the authority of their new leaders and escape to England where they join other Czech exiles in the RAF. While flying a mission over England, Karel crash lands and happens upon the farmhouse of Susan, a young woman whose husband is in the Navy. Karel soon falls head over heels for Susan but, while they enjoy a brief fling, in time Susan decides she prefers the company of the older and more worldly Franta. As Franta and Karel struggle to maintain their friendship despite their romantic rivalry.

A story set in the former Yugoslavia and centered on a guy who returns to Herzegovina from Germany with plenty of cash and hopes for a good new life.

In 1914, World War I, the bloodiest war ever at that time in human history, was well under way. However on Christmas Eve, numerous sections of the Western Front called an informal, and unauthorized, truce where the various front-line soldiers of the conflict peacefully met each other in No Man's Land to share a precious pause in the carnage with a fleeting brotherhood.

France, 1940. In the first days of occupation, beautiful Lucile Angellier is trapped in a stifled existence with her controlling mother-in-law 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, 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.

Kena and Ziki long for something more. Despite the political rivalry between their families, the girls resist and remain close friends, supporting each other to pursue their dreams in a conservative society. When love blossoms between them, the two girls will be forced to choose between happiness and safety.

The true story of an 84 year-old Kenyan villager and ex Mau Mau freedom fighter who fights for his right to go to school for the first time to get the education he could never afford.

Georges and Anne are in their eighties. They are cultivated, retired music teachers. Their daughter, who is also a musician, lives abroad with her family. One day, Anne has a stroke, and the couple's bond of love is severely tested.

The story of a man whose love for football, for England and for the love of his life, Margaret, saw him rise from Nazi 'villain' to British hero. Bert Trautmann, the German goalkeeper won over even his harshest opponents by winning the FA Cup Final for Manchester City in 1956 - playing on with a broken neck to secure victory.

While James More is held captive by terrorists in Somalia, thousands of miles away on the Greenland Sea, his lover Danny Flinders prepares to dive herself in a submersible into the deep bottom of the ocean, tormented by the memories of their brief encounter in France and her inability to know his whereabouts.

In December 1941, Czech soldier Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš parachute into their occupied homeland to assassinate Nazi officer Reinhard Heydrich

Director Jean Renoir’s entrancing first color feature—shot entirely on location in India—is a visual tour de force. Based on the novel by Rumer Godden, the film eloquently contrasts the growing pains of three young women with the immutability of the Bengal river around which their daily lives unfold. Enriched by Renoir’s subtle understanding and appreciation for India and its people, The River gracefully explores the fragile connections between transitory emotions and everlasting creation.

In a small town in occupied France in 1941, the German officer, Werner Von Ebrennac is billeted in the house of the uncle and his niece. The uncle and niece refuse to speak to him, but each evening the officer warms himself by the fire and talks of his country, his music, and his idealistic views of the relationship between France and Germany. That is, until he visits Paris and discovers what is really going on...

It's the beginning of the WWII. South of France. Patricia, 18, is the oldest daughter of a well-digger, Pascal, who considers her a princess because of her moral qualities. She's kind, devoted. One day, she briefly meets a young man, Jacques, the son of Mazel, owner of the shop where her father buy his material. He's handsome and teasing. Her father's friend, Felipe, would love to marry her, and he invites her to an aviation show. She accepts his invitation only because she knows Jacques is a pilot and will be there. Soon, she'll carry his child, and he'll be gone, and the family will have to deal with this out-of-wedlock pregnancy...

Returning home from a shopping trip to a nearby town, bored suburban housewife Laura Jesson is thrown by happenstance into an acquaintance with virtuous doctor Alec Harvey. Their casual friendship soon develops during their weekly visits into something more emotionally fulfilling than either expected, and they must wrestle with the potential havoc their deepening relationship would have on their lives and the lives of those they love.

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.

France, World War II. In order to somehow make ends meet, the mother of two children, Marie Latour, does underground abortions and rents a room to a familiar prostitute. She doesn't pay any attention to her husband, who returned from the war because of his injury and lives her own life. Abortions gradually begin to bring a good income, and boredom can be easily dispelled by starting a young lover ...

Jessica knows exactly what her life is supposed to look like and where it takes her. But then she meets Danny. He has a complicated past and could confuse all their plans. Jessica has to decide.

A, an American film director of Greek ancestry, is making a film that tells his story and the story of his parents. It is a tale that unfolds in Italy, Germany, Russia, Kazakhstan, Canada and the USA. The main character is Eleni, who is claimed and claims the absoluteness of love. At the same time the film is a long journey into the vast history and the events of the last fifty years that left their mark on the 20th century. The characters in the film move as though in a dream. The dust of time confuses memories. A searches for them and experiences them in the present.

Jean Valjean, a Frenchman imprisoned for stealing bread, must flee a police officer named Javert. The pursuit consumes both men's lives, and soon Valjean finds himself in the midst of the student revolutions in France.

During the Blitz of World War II, a female screenwriter (Gemma Arterton) works on a film celebrating England's resilience as a way to buoy a weary populace's spirits. Her efforts to dramatise the true story of two sisters (Lily Knight and Francesca Knight) who undertook their own maritime mission to rescue wounded soldiers are met with mixed feelings by a dismissive all-male staff.

Free-spirited writer Juliet Ashton forms a life-changing bond with the delightful and eccentric Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, when she decides to write about the book club they formed during the occupation of Guernsey in WWII.

Scandal erupts over a famous bullfighter's affair with a left-wing actress.

Fleeing the June 1940 arrival of Hitler's army in Paris, a young war widow and her two children are rescued from dive-bombing German fighters by a cocky, reckless teenager. He finds them refuge in an abandoned house, but despite the fact that the family quickly comes to be depending much on his cunning and survival abilities, their cohabitation proves uneasy.

Henry and Nicky are small town pals from blue collar families with only a short time before they ship off to World War II. Henry begins romancing new-to-town Caddie Winger, believing her to be wealthy. Mischievious and irresponsible, Nicky gets into trouble which forces the other two to become involved, testing their relationship, as well as the friendship between the boys.

Stingo, a young writer, moves to Brooklyn in 1947 to begin work on his first novel. As he becomes friendly with Sophie and her lover Nathan, he learns that she is a Holocaust survivor. Flashbacks reveal her harrowing story, from pre-war prosperity to Auschwitz. In the present, Sophie and Nathan's relationship increasingly unravels as Stingo grows closer to Sophie and Nathan's fragile mental state becomes ever more apparent.

Spirited New Yorker Linda Voss goes to work for international lawyer and secret Office of Strategic Services operative Ed Leland just before World War II. As they fall in love, the United States enters the fight against Hitler, and Linda volunteers to work for Ed spying undercover behind Nazi lines. Assigned to uncover information about a German bomb, Linda also has personal motives to fulfill: discovering the fate of her Jewish family members in Berlin.

Iin 1930s Shanghai, 'The White Countess' is both Sofia—a fallen member of the Russian aristocracy—and a nightclub created by a blind American diplomat, who asks Sofia to be the centerpiece of the world he wants to create.

Budapest in the thirties. The restaurant owner Laszlo hires the pianist András to play in his restaurant. Both men fall in love with the beautiful waitress Ilona who inspires András to his only composition. His song of Gloomy Sunday is, at first, loved and then feared, for its melancholic melody triggers off a chain of suicides. The fragile balance of the erotic ménage à trois is sent off kilter when the German Hans goes and falls in love with Ilona as well.

During Nazi occupation, red-headed Bent Faurschou-Hviid ("Flame") and Jørgen Haagen Schmith ("Citron"), assassins in the Danish resistance, take orders from Winther, who's in direct contact with Allied leaders. One shoots, the other drives. Until 1944, they kill only Danes; then Winther gives orders to kill Germans. When a target tells Bent that Winther's using them to settle private scores, doubt sets in, complicated by Bent's relationship with the mysterious Kitty Selmer, who may be a double agent. Also, someone in their circle is a traitor. Can Bent and Jørgen kill an über-target, evade capture, and survive the war? And is this heroism, naiveté, or mere hatred?

In 1942, an intelligence officer in North Africa encounters a female French Resistance fighter on a deadly mission behind enemy lines. When they reunite in London, their relationship is tested by the pressures of war.

The story of a normal Italian family in which come out the dreams of those who have lost their possibilities and of those who want to realize them. Carlo and Giulia are a married couple who have each given up their aspirations in order to live an average life. Their 19-year-old son, Paolo, is having trouble finding an identity, while their 18-year-old daughter, Valentina, has already figured out how to use sex to her advantage. The family goes through a crisis when Carlo begins having an affair, Giulia attempt to seduce the director of a local stage production she is in, and Valentina does what she does best to land an audition for a TV show

Based on Evelyn Waugh's 1945 classic British novel, Brideshead Revisited is a poignant story of forbidden love and the loss of innocence set in England prior to the Second World War.

A young woman finds out that her mother worked as a spy for the British Secret Service during World War II and has been on the run ever since.

The story follows the social intercourse between a cameraman, Masaya, with a visual impairment, and Misako who disconnects from the world.

A woman's consuming love forces her to bear the clone of her dead beloved. From his infancy to manhood, she faces the unavoidable complexities of her controversial decision.

In 1966, Dieter Dengler was shot down over Laos, captured, and, down to 85 pounds, escaped. Barefoot, surviving monsoons, leeches, and machete-wielding villagers, he was rescued. Now, near 60, living on Mt. Tamalpais, Dengler tells his story: a German lad surviving Allied bombings in World War II, postwar poverty, apprenticed to a smith, beaten regularly. At 18, he emigrates and peels potatoes in the U.S. Air Force. He leaves for California and college, then enlistment in the Navy to learn to fly. A quiet man of sorrows tells his story: war, capture, harrowing conditions, escape, and miraculous rescue. Where did he find the strength; how does he now live with his memories?

A mistaken delivery in Mumbai's famously efficient lunchbox delivery system (Mumbai's Dabbawallahs) connects a young housewife to a stranger in the dusk of his life. They build a fantasy world together through notes in the lunchbox. Gradually, this fantasy threatens to overwhelm their reality.

A girl dying of leukemia compiles a list of things she'd like to do before passing away. Topping the list is her desire to lose her virginity.

Two doctors in Victorian England use manual stimulation of female genitalia to cure their patients' ills, leading to the invention of the vibrator.

The tale of an individualist proletarian in a time marked by the rise of mass political movements. In early 20th-century Italy, illiterate sailor Martin Eden seeks fame as a writer while torn between the love of a bourgeois girl and allegiance to his social class.

A star is born in a time of both celebration and instability in this historical drama with music from director Christophe Barratier. In the spring of 1936, Paris is in a state of uncertainty; while the rise of the Third Reich in Germany worries many, a leftist union-oriented candidate, Léon Blum, has been voted into power, and organized labor is feeling its new power by standing up to management.

On a trip to Paris Sally meets Pablo, a tango dancer. He starts teaching her to dance then she returns to London to work on some "projects". She visits Buenos Aires and learns more from Pablo's friends. Sally and Pablo meet again but this time their relationship changes, she realises they want different things from each other. On a trip to Buenos Aires they cement their friendship.

Fourteen years after the events of the first film, a series of encounters between people in Britain reminds us that in these different times Love, actually exists.

The O'Neills lived happily in their house in the Australian countryside. That was until one day fate struck blindly, taking the life of Peter, the father, leaving his grief-stricken wife Dawn alone with their four children. Among them, eight-year-old Simone denies this reality. She is persuaded that her father still lives in the giant fig tree growing near their house and speaks to her through its leaves. But the tree becomes more and more invasive and threatens the house. It must be felled. Of course, Simone won't allow it.

In the short break between performances in Calais, stage actress Alix makes a quick escape to Paris. On the train she meets a mysterious English stranger and, for the most fleeting of afternoons, imagines what the future could hold down a different road.

The story of a long-lost book that mysteriously reappears and connects an old man searching for his son with a girl seeking a cure for her mother's loneliness.