20 best movies like Angels of the Universe (2000)

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.

The true story about legendary explorer Thor Heyerdahl and his epic crossing of the Pacific on a balsa wood raft in 1947, in an effort to prove it was possible for South Americans to settle in Polynesia in pre-Columbian times.

Knut Hamsun is Norway's most famous and admired author. Ever since he was young he has hated the English for the starvation they caused Norway during WWI. When the Germans occupy Norway 9 April 1940 he welcomes them and the protection they can give from Great Britain. He supports the national socialist ideals, but opposes the way these ideals are turned into action - that Norwegians are jailed and executed. His wife Marie travels in Germany during the war as a sign of support from Knut and herself.

On 9 April 1940, German soldiers arrive in the city of Oslo. The King of Norway faces a choice that will change his country forever. The King's Choice is a story about the three most dramatic days in Norway's history, the royal family's escape and King Haakon's difficult choice after Nazi Germany's invasion of Norway.

A young queen falls in love with her physician, and they start a revolution that changes their nation forever.

The Shamer's Daughter, Dina, with the magical power of compelling people to admit their most secret shame, must save her family with her newly found father. But he is a Blackmaster, with the power to make people see and believe things that aren't true, so Dina must deal with having inherited this horrible power, while forging a relationship with a father she fears and mistrusts.

A portrait of the brilliant, extravagant Kristina of Sweden, queen from age six, who fights the conservative forces that are against her ideas to modernize Sweden and who have no tolerance for her awakening sexuality.

The story of the world's greatest tennis icons – Björn Borg and his biggest rival, the young and talented John McEnroe – and their legendary duel during the 1980 Wimbledon tournament.

Summer 1962 and Olli Mäki has a shot at the world championship title in featherweight boxing. From the Finnish countryside to the bright lights of Helsinki, everything has been prepared for his fame and fortune. All Olli has to do is lose weight and concentrate. But there is a problem – he has fallen in love with Raija.

Epic story about two families and their friendship and common destiny in Sweden's Gothenburg in the 1940s and 1950s. Told from the perspective of young Simon Larsson, who learns that he's an adopted child who has a Jewish father from Germany. After WWII Simon travels to explore his roots - a journey that leads to the basic mysteries of the human life. After the bestselling novel by Marianne Fredriksson.

Max Manus is a Norwegian 2008 biographic war film based on the real events of the life of resistance fighter Max Manus (1914–96), after his contribution in the Winter War against the Soviet Union. The story follows Manus through the outbreak of World War II in Norway until peacetime in 1945.

When Gerda Wegener asks her husband Einar to fill in as a portrait model, Einar discovers the person she's meant to be and begins living her life as Lili Elbe. Having realized her true self and with Gerda's love and support, Lili embarks on a groundbreaking journey as a transgender pioneer.

This film is about an elderly lady (Gogo) who is diagnosed with Alzheimer disease. It looks at her son and her family's reaction to her illness.

The 1992 Danish football team competes for the European Championship.

A family lives in the Mexican countryside raising fighting bulls. Esther is in charge of running the ranch, while her husband Juan, a world-renowned poet, raises and selects the beasts. Although in an open marriage, their relationship begins to crumble when Esther falls in love with an American horsebreaker and Juan is unable to control his jealousy.

After taking a bullet to the head, Salander is under close supervision in a hospital and is set to face trial for attempted murder on her eventual release. With the help of journalist Mikael Blomkvist and his researchers at Millennium magazine, Salander must prove her innocence. In doing this she plays against powerful enemies and her own past.

With his first Dogma-95 film director Lars von Trier opens up a completely new film platform. With a mix of home-video and documentary styles the film tells the story of a group of young people who have decided to get to know their “inner-idiots” and thus not only facing and breaking their outer appearance but also their inner.

Marie Krøyer is hailed as “the most beautiful woman in Europe” and leads a happy marriage life with her husband the great Danish painter P.S. Krøyer and an adorable daughter. However, not everything in her world is as perfect as it seems, and Marie’s life is crumbling as her dreams of a beloved wife, good mother and successful artist are unfulfilled. After hospitalizing her mentally ill husband Marie leaves for vacation, and in search for peace and comfort she finds herself falling in love with the young composer Hugo Alfven. Once again, internationally acclaimed Bille August exhibits the weaknesses of human beings in comparison to the ruthless nature. The grandeur scenery of deserted Scandinavian oceans speaks in volumes for the protagonists living in silence despite their lives being full of pains.

Members of a devout Christian congregation try to start a new life in Palestine.

A teenager's quest to launch Norwegian Black Metal in Oslo in the 1990s results in a very violent outcome.

In a time of social change and unrest, war and poverty, a young working class woman, Maria, wins a camera in a lottery. The decision to keep it alters her whole life.

Sixteen year-old Nisha lives a double life. At home with her family she is the perfect Pakistani daughter, but when out with her friends, she is a normal Norwegian teenager. When her father catches her in bed with her boyfriend, Nisha's two worlds brutally collide. To set an example, Nisha's parents decide to kidnap her and place her with relatives in Pakistan. Here, in a country she has never been to before, Nisha is forced to adapt to her parents' culture.

When Astrid Lindgren was very young something happened that affected her profoundly, and this combination of both miracle and calamity came to shape her entire life. It was an event that transformed her into one of the most inspiring women of our age and the storyteller a whole world would come to love. This is the story of when a young Astrid, despite the expectations of her time and religious upbringing, decided to break free from society's norms and follow her heart.

In 1933, after leaving Dogville, Grace Margaret Mulligan sees a slave being punished at a cotton farm called Manderlay. Officially slavery is illegal and Grace stands up against the owners of the farm. She stays with some gangsters in Manderlay and tries to influence the situation. But when harvest time comes Grace sees the social and economic reality of Manderlay.

A country romance about the human streak in the horse and the horse in the human. Love and death become interlaced and with terrible consequences. The fortunes of the people in the country through the horses' perception.

London, England, April 2015. Brian Reader, a retired thief, gathers an unlikely gang of burglars to perpetrate the biggest and boldest heist in British history. The thieves assault the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Company and escape with millions in goods and money. But soon the cracks between the gang members begin to appear when they discuss how to share the loot.

Insurance broker Max's life is about one thing - keeping his walnut brain tumour in check. He eats properly, exercises and lives properly, but all of this self-consciousness makes him more and more depressed. When he realises that his beloved wife plans to leave him, he decides to take his own life.

JW now lives in exile and is more than ever determined to find out what happened to his missing sister Camilla. Every trace leads him to the world of organized crime in Stockholm. Jorge is about to do his last score - the largest robbery in Swedish history. But during the complicated preparations he meets a woman from his past - Nadja. Martin Hägerström is chosen to go undercover into the Serbian mafia, in order to get its notorious boss Radovan Krajnic behind bars. When an assassination attempt is made on Radovan, his daughter Natalie is pulled into the power struggle within the Serbian mafia.

Professor James Murray begins work compiling words for the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary in the mid 19th century, and receives over 10,000 entries from a patient at Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, Dr. William Minor.

Hypnotic, perturbing, and utterly enthralling, The Untamed combines a suspenseful family drama with truly bizarre elements of science fiction and horror. Desperate to flee but consumed by fear, Alejandra, a young mother and working housewife, is trapped in a violent and unsatisfying relationship with her husband, Angel. She leans on her brother Fabián for support, but he has secrets of his own. All of their lives are turned upside down by the arrival of the mysterious Veronica. She convinces them that in the nearby woods, inside an isolated cabin, dwells something not of this world that could be the answer to all of their problems... something whose force they cannot resist and with whom they must make peace or suffer its wrath.