20 Best Foreign Movies on Pluto TV Right Now

20 Best Foreign Movies on Pluto TV Right Now

April 18, 2025

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When you can stream movies for free, all in exchange for a few ads, it can be hard to believe that the streaming service in question would have a great selection. Yet, for some reason, Pluto TV is able to stream thousands of movies, some of which are hidden gems made available to viewers for free. This makes the site a great place to start if you want to watch underrated classics not only from American independent film productions, but also from all over the world. Here’s some of the best foreign movies available on Pluto TV:

1. Shoplifters (2018)

best

9.1

Genres

Crime, Drama, Family

Director

Hirokazu Kore-eda, Hirokazu Koreeda

Actors

Aju Makita, Akira Emoto, Chizuru Ikewaki, Hajime Inoue

Moods

Heart-warming, Smart, Sunday

The title of this 2018 Palme D’or winner is not to be taken metaphorically: Shoplifters is about a marginalized family of day workers, crooks, and small-time outlaws, who live on the fringes of Japanese society. Osamu (Lily Franky) and Nobuyo (Sakura Andô) both have jobs but spruce up their low-wage income by committing petty crimes. One day in winter, Osamu takes in a bruised girl he finds outside in the cold and introduces her to the family in his ramshackle house. But when the second-youngest member of the family, Shota (Kairi Jyo), finds himself teaching her how to shoplift, he faces a moral dilemma that threatens to unravel the family’s fabric. If you were hitherto unfamiliar with the unique storytelling and social realism of Hirokazu Koreeda, we really recommend checking it out—as well as his other movies, namely, Still Walking, Like Father, Like Son, I Wish, and After the Storm. His 2018 outing features the last ever performance of Kirin Kiki, who plays the elderly matriarch and passed away that same year. Like many of Koreeda’s works, Shoplifters is an understated, beautiful, and mysterious study of the effects of poverty and trauma and a delicate portrait of a family in Japan’s urban underbelly.

2. BPM

best

8.9

Genres

Drama

Director

Robin Campillo

Actors

Adèle Haenel, Aloïse Sauvage, Antoine Reinartz, Arnaud Valois

Moods

Character-driven, Instructive, True-story-based

Autobiographical in nature, 120 BPM is French screenwriter Robin Campillo’s first feature film. It revolves around the Parisian chapter of the AIDS advocacy group ACT UP, which Campillo was a member of in the early 1990s, and the love between Nathan, the group’s newest member, who is HIV negative, and Sean, one of its founding and more radical members, who is positive and suffers the consequences of contracting AIDS. Using fake blood and spectacular direct action, ACT UP advocated more and better research of treatment, prevention, and awareness. This was at a time when many, implicitly or explicitly, viewed AIDS as a gay disease, even as a punishment for the gay community’s propensity to pleasure and partying. The latter is reflected by the film’s title, 120 bpm being the average number of beats per minute of a house track. Arnaud Rebotini’s original score echoes the ecstasy-driven house music hedonism of the time with some effective original cuts, albeit with a melancholic streak. Because, for all the love, friendship, and emotion of the ACT UP crew that BPM so passionately portrays, anger and sadness pervade the lives of these young people as the lack of effective treatment threatens to claim the lives of their loved ones.

3. Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011)

best

8.8

Genres

Documentary

Director

David Gelb

Actors

Daisuke Nakazama, David Gelb, Hachiro Mizutani, Harutaki Takahashi

Moods

Feel-Good, Inspiring

This surprising documentary follows Jiro, an 85 year old Japanese chef, his Michelin-starred restaurant in the Tokyo underground, and his eager sons. While ostensibly about sushi – and believe me, you’ll learn about sushi and see absolutely gorgeous images of the raw-fish creations – the film’s dramatic impetus is carried by the weight of tradition, the beauty of a labor of love, obsession, and the relationship between father and son. Truly a must-watch.

4. Ip Man (2008)

best

8.2

Genres

Action, Drama, History

Director

Wilson Yip

Actors

Chen Zhi Hui, Donnie Yen, Gordon Lam, Hiroyuki Ikeuchi

Moods

Action-packed

It’s been acclaimed as one the best Kung Fu movies ever made. You are probably wondering why this contemporary movie made that short list when its genre had its peak decades ago: it is visually striking and at the same time surprisingly story-oriented. As you would expect of course, there is quite a fair amount of action scenes, but the characters are also brilliant which is very uncommon in this type of movie. It is an exciting movie, and worthy of any compliment or good rating it may get.

5. Penguin Highway (2018)

best

8.2

Genres

Adventure, Animation, Comedy

Director

Hiroyasu Ishida

Actors

Hidetoshi Nishijima, Kana Kita, Landen Beattie, Mamiko Noto

Moods

Quirky, Sweet, Warm

Surreal, strange, yet wondrous, Penguin Highway never takes a straightforward approach to its story. Penguins pop up out of nowhere, leading the nerdy and precocious Aoyama to study them via empirical observation and logical deduction. These studies don’t end up with a feasible explanation– in fact, by the final act, the film abandons all laws of physics. But the journey to that act feels intuitively right. This journey feels like an indescribable formative experience. Aoyama may be obsessed with growing up and committing to the reasonable adult mindset, but he is still a child. From fending off bullies to forming connections with others, his childhood imagination served him better than science could. The film reveres this discovery as well as it should.

6. House of Hummingbird (2018)

best

8.0

Genres

Drama

Director

Female director, Kim Bora

Actors

In-gi Jeong, Jeong In-gi, Jung In-gi, Kil Hae-yeon

Moods

Lovely, Slice-of-Life, Slow

It’s 1994, and Seoul is facing massive, rapid changes. The unrest is reflected by a lot of its residents, including Eun-hee, a disaffected teen with a less-than-stellar home and school life. She manages to get by with the help of friends and lovers, that is until they change too, and Eun-hee is forced to grapple with the volatility of it all. 

Sensitively told and genuinely captivating, House of Hummingbird is a stellar debut by writer-director Kim Bo-ra. Her command shines in how young actress Park Ji-hoo dynamically portrays Eun-hee, in how the story meanders but never loses footing, and in how each frame displays a quiet gorgeousness as the primary colors of her youth pop against the faded backdrop of urbanized Seoul. The delicate balance of all these elements is sure to evoke a sincere, profound feeling in every viewer. 

7. Shadow (2018)

best

8.0

Genres

Action, Drama, War

Director

Yimou Zhang, Zhang Yimou

Actors

Chao Deng, Deng Chao, Feng Bai, Guan Xiaotong

Moods

Action-packed, Mind-blowing, Thrilling

Director Zhang Yimou, who already has remarkable wuxia films like Hero and House of Flying Daggers under his belt, delivers another exceptional epic. Set during China’s Three Kingdoms era (220–280 AD), Shadow revolves around a great king and his people, who are expelled from their homeland but will aspire to reclaim it. The story requires a fair amount of patience at first, as it slowly builds a world consisting of various characters with different motives, before the real action begins. The journey through Shadow is visually pleasing thanks to its stunning cinematography, impressively choreographed combat, and overall brilliant production design. Packed with sequences that will take your breath away, it is an inventive martial arts epic with one amazing scene after another.

8. Argentina, 1985 (2022)

7.9

Genres

Crime, Drama, History

Director

Santiago Mitre

Actors

Agustín Rittano, Alejandra Flechner, Alejo Garcia Pintos, Antonia Bengoechea

Moods

Discussion-sparking, Dramatic, Smart

Argentina, 1985 is a legal drama about how a prosecutor and his young team were able to mount evidence—despite all threats and odds—against the officials behind a brutal military dictatorship. The public trial is supposedly the first of its kind in Latin America, a marker of true democracy that made a hero out of Julio Strassera and Moreno Ocampo, who both led the case.

Despite the presence of very serious themes, there are moments of lighthearted humor here that work to stress the film’s underlying message of goodwill and perseverance. Argentina, 1985 competed at major festivals this 2022, and it’s Argentina’s official entry at the 2023 Academy Awards.

9. Last Film Show (2022)

7.8

Genres

Drama

Director

Pan Nalin

Actors

Bhavesh Shrimali, Bhavin Rabari, Dipen Raval, Rahul Koli

Moods

Character-driven, Emotional, Lovely

Like many coming-of-age films about films, it’s easy to assume that Last Film Show would be a derivative of all-time film classic Cinema Paradiso. Both films from opposite corners of the world, separated by more than three decades, do share that awe of cinema from a projection booth. However, unlike Paradiso, the awe of Last Film Show is also tempered by the rural poverty its young protagonist faces. Samay learns projection from a film booth, and learns community is formed through the screen, but he also learns it through snatching the few reels that passes through their village, manually experimenting with scrap material, and recreating the same light and shadows through its fundamentals. These scenes are precocious because of the children, but it makes for a more interesting take, because Samay’s journey proves that cinema truly is worth saving, even without the money. It’s undeniably awe-inducing with Pan Nalin’s stunning shots and semi-autobiographical story.

10. Cairo Conspiracy (2022)

7.7

Genres

Drama, Thriller

Director

Tarik Saleh

Actors

Fares Fares, Jalal Altawil, Makram J. Khoury, Mehdi Dehbi

Moods

Dramatic, Intense, Original

When he’s accepted into the prestigious Islamic university Al-Azhar, fisherman’s son Adam (Tawfeek Barhom) gets an eye-opening education — but not the kind he expected. A place associated with notions of purity is imagined as a hotbed of hypocrisy and corruption here, as naive young Adam finds himself unwittingly embroiled in a state plot to seize control of Al-Azhar (because, as one government official puts it, “We can’t accept having two pharaohs in the land”). Cairo Conspiracy’s intricate plot confronts monsters in government and strips away religious leaders’ veneer of divinity as a reminder that they’re merely fallible men. What’s more, the film grapples with the knotty mess of politics raging inside the institution’s walls in such a way that even its palatial courtyard feels claustrophobic. Rife with paranoia and subterfuge, Cairo Conspiracy feels utterly unique thanks to this skillful transposing of the shadowy machinations of courtly intrigue dramas and ’70s paranoid thrillers into a very contemporary Egyptian setting.

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