20 best movies like Pleasure (2021)

Stockholm, late 1970s. Within a stone’s throw of government buildings and juvenile homes lies the seductive world of sex clubs, discotheques and private residences. Call Girl tells the story of how young Iris is recruited from the bottom of society into a ruthless world where power can get you anything.

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.

Tom (8) and Benjamin (11) travel to Stockholm to spend the summer with their father, whom they have barely seen since he divorced their mother. Tom, in particular, knows next to nothing about this strange, solitary man who seems never to sleep. When he suggests they spend a few days at his cabin in the country, the boys are delighted. But the cabin is totally isolated in the middle of a huge forest, a place both beautiful and troubling.

In the menacing inferno of the old American West, Liz is a genuine survivor who is hunted by a vengeful preacher for a crime she didn’t commit.

Pio Amato, a 14 year-old member of a small Romani community in southern Italian town of Gioia Tauro in Calabria, is in a hurry to grow up. Pio follows his older brother Cosimo everywhere and from him he learns how to hustle and how to navigate the streets of his hometown. One night Pio sets out to prove to his brother that he is as good or better than him but, when things go wrong, a series of events will forever change the way he sees the world.

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.

An absurdist, surrealistic and shocking pitch-black comedy, which moves freely from nightmare to fantasy to hilariously deadpan humour as it muses on man’s perpetual inhumanity to man.

Inspired by “One Thousand and One Nights,” the celebrated collection of Middle Eastern and Indian folk tales, “About Endlessness,” in its juxtaposition of tableaux capturing moments in life, explores the preciousness and beauty of our existence, awakening in us the wish to maintain this eternal treasure and pass it on.

Clara and her two sons escape from her abusive husband with little more than their car and plan to start over in New York. After the car towed away, the family meets Alice, who gets them into an emergency shelter. While stealing food at a Russian restaurant called ‘Winter Palace’, Clara meets Marc, who has been given the chance to help the old eatery regain its former glory. The ‘Winter Palace’ soon becomes a place of unexpected encounters between people who are all undergoing some sort of crisis and whom fate has now brought together.

Hoping to earn his mother's respect, a young hustler-turned-businessman tries to open a brothel with his two useless buddies.

Kahina Zadi, 32, a French police officer travels to Kiruna in Sweden to investigate the bestial murder of a French citizen. Together with Anders, a Swedish prosecutor of Sami origin, she begins an investigation. Soon new killings start to happen and the first victim turns out to be the tip of a very dark iceberg. The victims seemingly have nothing in common more than that they are all being killed in a well-planned and vicious manner. In their hunt for the truth, both Kahina and Anders are forced to deal with their own past that they have repressed. A personal journey through a painful past becomes the key to succeed in preventing the violent killings that affects the small mining community of Kiruna.

With Masculin féminin, ruthless stylist and iconoclast Jean-Luc Godard introduces the world to "the children of Marx and Coca-Cola," through a gang of restless youths engaged in hopeless love affairs with music, revolution, and each other. French new wave icon Jean-Pierre Leaud stars as Paul, an idealistic would-be intellectual struggling to forge a relationship with the adorable pop star Madeleine. Through their tempestuous affair, Godard fashions a candid and wildly funny free-form examination of youth culture in throbbing 1960s Paris, mixing satire and tragedy as only Godard can.

Selma, a Czech immigrant on the verge of blindness, struggles to make ends meet for herself and her son, who has inherited the same genetic disorder and will suffer the same fate without an expensive operation. When life gets too difficult, Selma learns to cope through her love of musicals, escaping life's troubles - even if just for a moment - by dreaming up little numbers to the rhythmic beats of her surroundings.

In central Gothenburg, Sweden, a group of boys, aged 12-14, robbed other children on about 40 occasions between 2006 and 2008. The thieves used an elaborate scheme called the 'little brother number' or 'brother trick', involving advanced role-play and gang rhetoric rather than physical violence.

Lilya lives in poverty and dreams of a better life. Her mother moves to the United States and abandons her to her aunt, who neglects her. Lilya hangs out with her friends, Natasha and Volodya, who is suicidal. Desperate for money, she starts working as a prostitute, and later meets Andrei. He offers her a good job in Sweden, but when Lilya arrives her life quickly enters a downward spiral.

On a faraway mountaintop, eight kids with guns watch over a hostage and a conscripted milk cow.

The President is the story of a dictator of an imaginary country in the Caucasus, who is forced to escape following a coup d’état, and begins a journey to discover his country in the company of his five-year-old grandson. The two travel across the lands that the President once governed. Now, disguised as a street musician to avoid being recognized, the former dictator comes into contact with his people, which he comes to know from a different point of view.

An old man and a young woman meet in Tokyo. She knows nothing about him, he thinks he knows her. He welcomes her into his home, she offers him her body. But the web that is woven between them in the space of twenty four hours bears no relation to the circumstances of their encounter.

A film about Rikard, age 30. He is autistic and severely disfigured. He lives in a home for disabled people. He was separated from his mother as a three-year-old, and this continues to torment him today. To deal with life's trials, Rikard escapes into a fantasy world in which he's a 50-meter-tall giant.

Seventeen-year-old Sangaile is fascinated by stunt planes. She meets a girl her age at the summer aeronautical show, nearby her parents' lakeside villa. Sangaile allows Auste to discover her most intimate secret and in the process finds in her teenage love, the only person that truly encourages her to fly.

Failed architect, engineer and vicious murderer Jack narrates the details of some of his most elaborately orchestrated crimes, each of them a towering piece of art that defines his life's work as a serial killer for twelve years.

In the midst of the Balkan wars, a squad of Navy SEALs attempts to unravel a long-forgotten mystery after discovering an enormous treasure trove hidden at the bottom of a lake in Serbia.

A lonely construction worker from China goes missing at a Singapore land reclamation site, and a sleepless police investigator must put himself in the mind of the migrant to uncover the truth beneath all that sand.

The story of two lovers and their attempts to save their relationship in a near-future world on the brink of cosmic collapse. John, and world-famous ice skating star, Elena, are about to sign divorce papers when they realise that, in spite of everything happening around them, their love is worth fighting for. It's All About Love is a fresh take on modern love and future life as two lovers struggle in a conspiracy of epic proportions.

It’s not easy to rebel when your dad wants to join the party... One day (in 1979), Magnus and his son Nikolaj hit the wall in their new terrace house in Rykkinn. Magnus is an architect, hippie and free spirit, a glaring exception in a community where equality and conformity is the norm. He always stands up for his son, supporting him unconditionally, even when Nikolaj decides to stop giving a damn. Sons of Norway is a film about rebellion, punk rock, suburban hell and the struggle between freaks and punks. But most of all, it’s the story of an unusual father-son relationship, and about the strength of the bonds we sometimes do our best to rip apart.

In November 2009, French security van driver Toni Musulin makes off with nearly 12 million euros, then turns himself over to the authorities a week later.

A man's obsession with owning the designer deerskin jacket of his dreams leads him to turn his back on his humdrum life in the suburbs, blow his life savings, and even turn him to crime.

An American filmmaking couple retreat to the island for the summer to each write screenplays for their upcoming films in an act of pilgrimage to the place that inspired Bergman. As the summer and their screenplays advance, the lines between reality and fiction start to blur against the backdrop of the Island's wild landscape.

Jennifer, an Australian girl on the run from her past, turns up in Amsterdam and, in a desperate attempt to blend in, joins a coach-load of tourists on a tour of Holland's old windmills. When the bus breaks down in the middle of nowhere, she and the other tourists are forced to seek shelter in a disused shed beside a sinister windmill where a devil-worshiping miller once ground the bones of locals instead of grain. As members of the group start to disappear, Jennifer learns that they all have something in common – a shared secret that seems to mark them all for doom.

Aglaé, a young factory worker, has only one focus in life: her job at a car crash test site. When she learns that the factory is going to be relocated abroad, she accepts, to everyone's surprise, to go to India in order to hold on to her job. Accompanied by two colleagues, she sets out on a perilous road trip to the other side of the world.