20 best movies like The Vertical Ray of the Sun (2000)

Zhenya and Boris are going through a vicious divorce marked by resentment, frustration and recriminations. Already embarking on new lives, each with a new partner, they are impatient to start again, to turn the page – even if it means threatening to abandon their 12-year-old son Alyosha. Until, after witnessing one of their fights, Alyosha disappears...

Toma and Ana meet as students in the literature faculty, and quickly fall in love. But, because of Ana's mental illness, their relationship slowly collapses.

When Baldwin and Inga's next door neighbours complain that a tree in their backyard casts a shadow over their sundeck, what starts off as a typical spat between neighbours in the suburbs unexpectedly and violently spirals out of control.

A coming-of-age story about an eleven-year-old girl who idolizes her troubled sixteen-year-old neighbor.

Araf is the story of Zehra and Olgun whose lives are caught in a vacuum. The world in which they live and work is a place of throwaway culture and constant change. They too are waiting for a chance to change and escape from their empty, monotonous lives.

Longing for a baby, a stripper pursues another man in order to make her boyfriend jealous.

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 man is reluctant to tell his fiancee that his parents, uncle and brother are dwarfs.

Marion and Mingus both come from failed relationships but, by bringing their children together, they've managed to form a small yet happy family. Tensions in their household soon begin to spike when Marion's jovial father shows up on their doorstep with his randy daughter and her peculiar boyfriend in tow. As the motor-mouthed houseguests shatter every taboo imaginable, the happy couple begin to question their commitment.

The Sheffield family reveal and go through some home truths as their middle child inherits the Foxworth mansion. The family's ghosts looming over, and more tragedies are in store as the curse lives on.

After 11-year-old Zachary Cowan strikes his classmate across the face with a stick after an argument, the victim's parents invite Zachary's parents to their Brooklyn apartment to deal with the incident in a civilized manner.

When an aging matriarch starts showing signs of dementia, her dysfunctional family in Istanbul must navigate a minefield of unresolved issues to care for her.

Thomas, a father in his fifties, returns by chance to the town where he grew up. He collapses and wakes up forty years earlier in the body of his teenage self. Thrown back into his past, Thomas will not only have to re-live his first love, but also try to understand the reasons for his father’s mysterious departure. Can you change the past by living it again?

When Michèle, the CEO of a gaming software company, is attacked in her home by an unknown assailant, she refuses to let it alter her precisely ordered life. She manages crises involving family, all the while becoming engaged in a game of cat and mouse with her stalker.

Lisa and Marine live a life of relative companionship together, where the only man permitted into the equation is Lisa’s young son, Leo. However, their simple existence is thrown into disarray when Marie meets and falls in love with Alex, a customer at her bookshop. Lisa is left feeling excluded, and tension develop. But soon an unexpected accident forces all of those involved to reassess the situation and adopt a different position in each other’s lives.

Lu and Feng are a devoted couple forced to separate when Lu is arrested and sent to a labor camp as a political prisoner during the Cultural Revolution. He finally returns home only to find that his beloved wife no longer remembers him.

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.

François van Heerden, a mid-40's, white, Afrikaans-speaking family man, has become devoid of any care or concern for his own measure of happiness, and so convinced of his ill-fated existence, that he is wholly unprepared when a chance encounter unravels his clean, controlled life.

The story of a Jewish family living in Hungary—through three generations—rising from humble beginnings to positions of wealth and power in the crumbling Austro-Hungarian Empire. The patriarch becomes a prominent judge but is torn when his government sanctions anti-Jewish persecutions. His son converts to Christianity to advance his career as a champion fencer and Olympic hero, but is caught up in the Holocaust. Finally, the grandson, after surviving war, revolution, loss and betrayal, realizes that his ultimate allegiance must be to himself and his heritage.

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Juan and his urban family live in the Mexican countryside, where they enjoy and suffer a world apart. And nobody knows if these two worlds are complementary or if they strive to eliminate one another.

Hanna and Simon are in a 20 year marriage with an unexiting relationship. By chance, they both meet and start separate affairs with Adam. Adam has no idea that his two lovers are married, until they are all found out when Hanna becomes pregnant, with the natural doubts stemming from their situation.

After his wife died a man refuses to go out and doesn't want to talk to his only son. Life has no meaning for him. One day his son finds a baby pelican and decides to leave the bird at home. Pelican helps the boy find his father again and revive him back to life ...

In a village on the Hungarian border, two young brothers grow up during war time with their cruel grandmother and must learn every trick of evil to survive in the absurd world of adults.

A rancher, his clairvoyant wife and their family face turbulent years in South America.

Christmas, family, and infidelity. Yvette's husband has died, and her grown daughters join her at the grave: Sonia, wealthy, bourgeois, and generous; Louba, living with their dad Stanislas, singing at a Russian restaurant, penniless, the mistress for the past 12 years of a man who will never leave his wife; Milla, the youngest, acerbic, lonesome. Christmas was when they learned their parents were divorcing 25 years ago. Over the next few days, yuletide depression, Louba's pregnancy, Sonia's crumbling marriage, Stanislas's overtures to Yvette, and Milla's attraction to the man who's her father's rent-free lodger lead each one to re-examine self, family, and hopes. Is renewal possible?

After the death of her mother, a woman returns home to care for her sister.

The director Daniel Sánchez Arévalo ('Azuloscurocasinegro', 'Cousins​​'), he embarks on a new comedy that has as a backdrop the World Cup in South Africa and the setting is a wedding that takes precisely the day of the final. This will be the occasion in which five brothers, all with biblical names, Adam, Daniel, Caleb, Benjamin and Ephraim, gather to celebrate the engagement of Ephraim, the youngest of them, who marries his pregnant girlfriend. Will hours of uncertainty, joy and euphoria back, but it's time to unite for a common good. Can all together to face the situation and erected winners heading?

A man's (Hugh Laurie) affair with his friend's much-younger daughter (Leighton Meester) throws two neighboring families into turmoil.

A woman embarks on a journey alone across the United States after fleeing from her violent husband.

On the way to meet with an independent artist in the South, newlywed art dealer Madeleine is convinced by her husband, George, that they should stop to meet his family in North Carolina. Madeleine's affluent lifestyle clashes with the family, but she befriends George's wide-eyed and pregnant sister-in-law, Ashley, who is nearing her due date. Through the family, Madeleine gains greater insight into George's character.

Prime numbers are divisible only by one and themselves. These numbers are solitary and incomprehensible to others. Alice and Mattia are both "prime", both haunted by the tragedies that have marked them in childhood: a skiing accident for Alice which has caused a defect in her leg, and the loss of his twin sister for Matthew.

On the request of his mother Gitte, Marko, who has been living in Berlin for years, drives off to the countryside to visit his parents. His hopes of spending a quiet and relaxing time with his family fall short when Gitte surprises everyone by revealing that she has recovered after a long mental illness. Marko is the only one who respects her wish from now on to be treated as a full member of this family and, as a result, ends up tipping more than just the delicate balance of his parent’s seemingly harmonious relationship.

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.

In 1914 on a family estate, Oda helps a wounded anarchist, and as their illicit friendship deepens, a family turmoil erupts as the war closes in.

Angie lives in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, N.Y. and dreams of a better life than everyone she knows. When she finds that she is pregnant by her boyfriend Vinnie, she decides that she will have the baby, but not Vinnie as a husband. This turns the entire neighborhood upside down and starts her on a journey of self discovery. This journey includes her family, a new lover and her life. Even her best friend Tina has trouble understanding Angie. Written by Tony Fontana

Germany director Dani Levy filmed this comedy about Jewish life in today’s Germany along side the familiar east-west conflict. With it great success this film is a joyful comedy of humor and knowledge.

Old woman Berthe leaves her house to live in her daugter Emilie's one. Emilie and her brother Antoine have fallen out three years ago and have not seen each other since, but Emilie invites him for Christmas. Memories will come up, and will be depicted both Berthe's destiny and the strange relationship between Emilie and Antoine.

François, a young thirty-year-old Asian, has not been back in his family for 10 years after a violent dispute with his father Meng. Since then, he has always tried to avoid questions about his origins, until he lies to believe that he has been adopted. But when he learns that he is going to be a father, he realizes that he will have to reconnect with his past and his origins. Pushed by his companion Sophie, he decides to reconnect with his family and returns to his XIIIth native district to announce the good news, accompanied by his best friend Bruno. François is welcomed with open arms by his family, with the exception of his father and his younger brother. The return to his community is not going to be so simple .

María, a 17-year-old Kaqchikel Maya, lives with her parents on a coffee plantation at the foot of an active volcano. She is set to be married to the farm's foreman. But María longs to discover the world on the other side of the mountain, a place she cannot even imagine. And so she seduces a coffee-harvester who wants to escape to the USA. When this man leaves her behind, María discovers her own world and culture anew.

Romantic comedy from Academy Award winner Susanne Bier (Brothers, In a Better World), about two very different families brought together for a wedding in a beautiful old Italian villa.

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.

While on a Mediterranean vacation, a seemingly happy boyfriend and girlfriend find their connection to one another tested as they bond with another couple.

A fairy godmother helps a princess disguise herself so she won't have to marry her father.

A comedy-drama about best friends - one a straight woman, Abbie, the other a gay man, Robert - who decide to have a child together. Five years later, Abbie falls in love with a straight man and wants to move away with her and Robert's little boy Sam, and a nasty custody battle ensues.

The head of a failing French family thinks that fate has smiled down on him when the daughter of a wealthy man agrees to be married to his son. The daughter and her aunt then travel out to the French countryside to meet with the family, unaware that a mysterious 'beast' is stalking the vicinity.

Eliane Devries is the seemingly repressed owner of a prosperous rubber plantation in French Indochina, circa 1930. Her steely exterior, however, is only a mask intended to hide her torrid love affairs from upper class society

26 year-old Karl Marx embarks with his wife, Jenny, on the road to exile. In 1844 in Paris, he meets Friedrich Engels, an industrialist’s son, who has been investigating the sordid birth of the British working class. Engels, the dandy, provides the last piece of the puzzle to the young Karl Marx’s new vision of the world. Together, between censorship and the police’s repression, riots and political upheavals, they will lead the labor movement during its development into a modern era.

In a Turkish village, five orphaned sisters live under strict rule while members of their family prepare their arranged marriages.

Abortionist Vera Drake finds her beliefs and practices clash with the mores of 1950s Britain – a conflict that leads to tragedy for her family.