20 best movies like A Voluntary Year (2019)

A middle-class family living in Calais deal with a series of setbacks while paying little attention to the grim conditions in the refugee camps within a few miles of their home.

Survivors of a nuclear attack are grouped together for days in the basement of their apartment building, where fear and dwindling supplies wear away at their dynamic.

A divorced writer from the Midwest returns to her hometown to reconnect with an old flame, who's now married with a family.

When his daughter's criminal boyfriend becomes an increasing threat to the family, a father must take action to protect them.

Germany, 1931. The youth novel "Emil and the Detectives" is being filmed, which will make its author, Erich Kästner, world famous. An unusual friendship begins between the childless author and fatherless Hans, the 9-year-old playing the character Little Tuesday. Their friendship is put to the ultimate test in the Third Reich when Kästner's books are banned and little Hans becomes a Hitler Youth. Based on a true story.

Inspired by real events and spanning three eras of German history, film tells the story of Kurt, a young art student who falls in love with fellow student, Ellie. Ellie’s father, Professor Seeband, a famous doctor, is dismayed at his daughter’s choice of boyfriend, and vows to destroy the relationship. What neither of them knows is that their lives are already connected through a terrible crime Seeband committed decades ago.

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.

Without warning a father comes to visit his daughter abroad. He believes that she lost her humor and therefore surprises her with a rampage of jokes.

A man and a woman share their musings on love and freedom one summer night. The couple’s conversation meanders through memories, unspoken desires and passion through poetic dialogue.

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.

How Murat Kurnaz ended up in Guantanamo Bay is a mysterious story. 5 YEARS investigates the psychological aspect of this endless and unjustified "imprisonment" where Kurnaz had to endure never ending physical and psychological torture.

In Stockholm, Sweden, hacker Lisbeth Salander is hired by Frans Balder, a computer engineer, to retrieve a program that he believes it is too dangerous to exist.

Together, a filmmaker and her characters venture into a personal research project about intimacy. On the fluid border between reality and fiction, Touch Me Not follows the emotional journeys of Laura, Tómas and Christian, offering a deeply empathic insight into their lives. Craving for intimacy yet also deeply afraid of it, they work to overcome old patterns, defense mechanisms and taboos, to cut the cord and finally be free. Touch Me Not looks at how we can find intimacy in the most unexpected ways, at how to love another without losing ourselves.

Men & Chicken is a black comedy about two outcast brothers, who by getting to know their unknown family also discover a horrible truth about themselves and their relatives.

Undine works as a historian lecturing on Berlin's urban development. When the man she loves leaves her, the ancient myth catches up with her. But falling in love anew, Undine reworks the myth of the mysterious water spirit as a modern fairy-tale in a disenchanted world.

During the summer of 1937, Emanuel, a young man in his early twenties, is committed to a sanatorium on the Black Sea coast for treatment of his bone tuberculosis. The treatment consists of painful spine punctures that confine him to a plaster on a stretcher-bed. Little by little, as Emanuel gets accustomed to the sadness of his new life, he discovers that inside the sanatorium there is still a life to be lived to the fullest.

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.

A luxury hotel. Steaks frizzle, muffintops getting massaged. Clemens (rare) joins the wellness area as a rookie. Lara (well-done) needs to assert herself in the kitchen pack. The elevator brings the two of them together. They encounter each other, until they clash.

What happens when a 30-something woman allows life's "what ifs" to overwhelm her appreciation for what life actually is. Disregarding her current obligations, she digs into her romantic past in hopes of invigorating her present.

In a future where water is scarce, a farmer defends his land and hopes to rejuvenate his parched soil. However, his daughter's boyfriend schemes to steal the land for himself.

Nikola’s children are taken away from him after social services decide that he is too poor to provide them with a decent living environment. He sets off on foot to lodge a complaint in Belgrade.

The story of four characters whose lives intertwine amid the hustle and bustle of the Coney Island amusement park in the 1950s: Ginny, an emotionally volatile former actress now working as a waitress in a clam house; Humpty, Ginny’s rough-hewn carousel operator husband; Mickey, a handsome young lifeguard who dreams of becoming a playwright; and Carolina, Humpty’s long-estranged daughter, who is now hiding out from gangsters at her father’s apartment.

Based on a true story. 16-year old Steffi just graduated from high school and is very much looking forward to her class trip to Paris where she has promised her boyfriend Fabian the romantic night that she has kept him waiting for since they started dating. Her lifelong plan to join the police forces is already set up which means her adult life is right around the corner. At a routine health check-up, just before the trip to Paris, Steffi and her parents are faced with a shattering diagnosis: Incurable cancer with a life expectancy of less than a year. While her mother Eva immediately tries to helplessly protect Steffi from everything, let alone a school trip to Paris and her father Frank, a protestant priest, questions everything he ever believed in, but Steffi is determined to shake off her doomed destiny.

18th century Vienna. Maria Theresia von Paradis, a gifted piano player and close friend of Mozart's, lost her eye-sight as a child. Desperate to cure their talented daughter, the Paradis entrust Maria to Dr. Mesmer, a forward-thinking-physician who gives her the care and attention that she requires. With the doctor's innovative techniques of magnetism, Maria slowly recovers her sight. But this miracle comes at a price as the woman progressively starts to lose her gift for music.

The story of Henry, a stand-up comedian with a fierce sense of humor and Ann, a singer of international renown. In the spotlight, they are the perfect couple, healthy, happy, and glamourous. The birth of their first child, Annette, a mysterious girl with an exceptional destiny, will change their lives.

Alex, Fedja, Timo and Lara are four troubled teens for whom the upcoming Christmas eve isn't a time of peace and joy: Since they all have a history of escalating family conflicts, they'll be spending the holidays not at home, but in a psychiatric ward. The utterly different adolescents not only have to adjust to one another, but also have to confront themselves in exhausting therapy sessions. Yet thanks to the unorthodox psychiatrist Dr. Wolf, the sessions take a turn for the unexpected - and the four experience a Christmas which they will never forget.

Driss and Manuel both grew up on the same council estate. An estate where the sense of belonging to your patch is much stronger than the sense of belonging to a country, a nation or a culture... Manuel has assimilated this belonging, and he has even benefited from it and built his life on it. Driss, meanwhile, has shunned it. They will both have to face up to the consequences of their decisions – because they will each have a price to pay…

After her husband runs off with his secretary, Terry Wolfmeyer is left to fend for herself -- and her four daughters. As she hits rock bottom, Terry finds a friend and drinking buddy in next-door neighbor Denny, a former baseball player. As the two grow closer, and her daughters increasingly rely on Denny, Terry starts to have reservations about where their relationship is headed.

Touko Laaksonen, a decorated officer, returns home after a harrowing and heroic experience serving his country in World War II, but life in Finland during peacetime proves equally distressing. He finds peace-time Helsinki rampant with persecution of the homosexual and men around him even being pressured to marry women and have children. Touko finds refuge in his liberating art, specialising in homoerotic drawings of muscular men, free of inhibitions. His work – made famous by his signature ‘Tom of Finland’ – became the emblem of a generation of men and fanned the flames of a gay revolution.

A former East German boxing champion reduced to working as a bouncer and debt collector is forced to reflect on his life when he is diagnosed with a fatal disease.

A series of odd coincidences has left Lukas, an interpreter for an OSCE military checkpoint inspection tour, stranded near a small southern Ukrainian steppe town. With nowhere to turn, this city boy finds shelter at the home of a colorful local named Vova. With Vova as his guide, Lukas is confronted by a universe beyond his imagination, one in which life seems utterly detached from any identifiable structure. Fascinated by his host and his host's daughter Marushka, with whom he is rapidly falling in love, Lukas’s contempt for provincial life slowly melts away and sets him on a quest for a happiness he had never known could exist.

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.

A satirical drama reflecting our times — about the sense of community, moral courage and the affluent person’s need for egocentricity in an increasingly uncertain world.

A practical joke ends up very wrong in Nigina Sayfullaevas curious youth drama. Two seventeen year old Moscow girls, Olya and Sasha, are visiting Olya's long lost father who lives in Crimea, when they decide to switch places and pretend to be the other person to the father. Little do they know that their joke comes with consequenses that will change their lives forever.

Favoring pedigree dogs, a new regulation puts a severe tax on mixed breeds. Owners dump their dogs and shelters become overcrowded. 13-year-old Lili fights desperately to protect her pet Hagen, but her father eventually sets the dog free on the streets. Hagen and his master search desperately for each other until Lili loses faith. Struggling to survive, homeless Hagen realizes that not everyone is a dog’s best friend. Hagen joins a gang of stray dogs, but is soon captured and sent to the pound. With little hope inside there, the dogs will seize an opportunity to escape and revolt against mankind. Their revenge will be merciless. Lili may be the only one who can halt this unexpected war between man and dog.

A love triangle forms between post-Enlightenment writer Friedrich Schiller and two sisters -- one who became his wife, and the other, his biographer.

A biographical drama based on the life of fictional Haryana based wrestler & mixed martial arts specialist Sultan Ali Khan.

Oregon, 1851. Hermann Kermit Warm, a chemist and aspiring gold prospector, keeps a profitable secret that the Commodore wants to know, so he sends the Sisters brothers, two notorious assassins, to capture him on his way to California.

Things go awry when an author and his wife welcome a pregnant woman into their home, with plans to adopt her baby.

In a yurt on the snow-covered fields of the North, Nanook and Sedna live following the traditions of their ancestors. Alone in the wilderness, they look like the last people on Earth. Nanook and Sedna's traditional way of life starts changing - slowly, but inevitably. Hunting becomes more and more difficult, the animals around them die from inexplicable deaths and the ice has been melting earlier every year. Chena, who visits them regularly, is their only connection to the outside world - and to their daughter Ága, who has left the icy tundra a long time ago due to family feud. When Sedna's health deteriorates, Nanook decides to fulfill her wish. He embarks on a long journey in order to find Ága.

Inspired by the true events of the infamous 1983 prison breakout of 38 IRA prisoners from HMP Maze, which was to become the biggest prison escape in Europe since World War II.

In remote Western Australia, two estranged farmer brothers, Colin and Les, are at war. But when Les' prize ram is diagnosed with a rare and lethal illness, authorities order a purge of every sheep in the valley - so the brothers must work together to to reunite their family, save their herd, and bring their community back together.

A neo-nazi sentenced to community service at a church clashes with the blindly devotional priest.

Desperate to get out from under her overprotective mother, a home-schooled teen runs off to live with her dad, and forms a bond with his much-younger boyfriend.

Drama about the tragic Nanga Parbat expedition by the two Messner brothers in 1970, on which Reinhold Messners younger brother Günther died.

Margherita, a director in the middle of an existential crisis, has to deal with the inevitable and still unacceptable loss of her mother.

A family vacation is bogged down by unrelenting rain, as a teenage girl and her divorced father try to find common ground.

Heidi, is an eight-year-old Swiss orphan who is given by her aunt to her mountain-dwelling grandfather. She is then stolen back by her aunt from her grandfather to live in the wealthy Sesemann household in Frankfurt, Germany as a companion to Klara, a sheltered, disabled girl in a wheelchair. Heidi is unhappy but makes the best of the situation, always longing for her grandfather.

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An acclaimed novelist struggles to write an analysis of love in one of three stories, each set in a different city, that detail the beginning, middle and end of a relationship.