50 Best Foreign Movies on Roku TV Right Now

Films about drug dealing aren’t particularly new, but the way Pusher delves into their lives feels different– more realistic than glamorous, somewhat like a guerrilla documentary, with the handheld camera as a silent, unnamed witness. As the camera follows low-level dealer Frank through the course of a week, Kim Bodnia skillfully garners empathy with the way he holds himself through the pressure, and does the opposite when he does the same wrongs that were done to him. The story itself may be simple, but writer-director Nicolas Winding Refn made his mark through this debut, inadvertently creating a franchise and influencing Danish cinema.

The subject of the Catholic Pieta– the Virgin Mary cradling the corpse of Jesus– has captivated plenty of artists, most famously in the sculpture by Michelangelo in St. Peter’s Basilica. This time, however, director Kim Ki-duk twists the image into modern day Seoul, with a mourning mother and a loan shark in place of their more innocent inspirations. Though with more dialogue than his other works, Kim delves into this crime thriller with his signature slow burn, crafting an intense, emotional healing for the gruff, violent Lee Kang-do, while his past deeds come to catch up with him, and while he reckons with the way money has replaced all what makes life meaningful. While the (thankfully, pseudo-) incest may be hard to stomach, Pieta is nonetheless a haunting, compelling portrayal of revenge. Just don’t watch this with your mom, though.

A woman loses her phone on her way back to her countryside childhood home. Once there, she connects an old landline in hopes of finding her lost mobile, only to start receiving weird calls that seem to be from 20 years ago.

On the other side of the receiver is a girl who seems to be in danger. The Call is thrilling, sometimes scary, but also brilliantly shot, and its plot is so expertly woven. It’s a proper movie-night movie.

This Danish film which was the country’s submission to the Oscars is about a delicate subject. A lawyer who specializes in defending children, and who is used to developing closeness with her clients including meeting with them in her home, starts having an affair with her teenage step-son.

There is inherent tension to this obviously very explicit plotline: how would a serious, non-erotic (or not-only-erotic) movie like this one portray such attraction. And of course, afterwards, what are the implications?

This drama from France and Canada is about Matthieu, a 33-year-old from Paris who never knew his father. One morning he gets a call to go to Montreal, where he is told his dad has passed away and where a funeral will take place.

To add to his confusion, upon arrival Matthieu is asked to conceal his identity from his step-mother and step-brothers.

A Kid is made as though the filmmaking styles from the countries it’s set in were mixed together. There are complicated family dynamics reminiscent of Xavier Dolan movies; and identity issues and comments on different compositions of families like the films of Mia Hansen-Løve.

When a woman that looks like the love of your life randomly shows up at an empty train station, but strangely has no memory of you, maybe you should try to confirm their identity first– doppelgangers do exist, after all. But aside from this detail, there’s a certain charm in the way Be With You unfolds, as the family gets a second chance to cherish a loved one, and as Woo-jin indulges in sharing their love story, a story that Woo-jin understandably doesn’t want to forget. Be With You doesn’t reinvent the entire genre, and it would inevitably be compared to the 2004 Japanese original, but this Korean remake does it so well, celebrating the way love transcends lifetimes.

While Hollywood still makes some films in this genre, there are less historical epics being released, in part due to cost, but also in part due to having had so many, ever since the start of the medium. However, there are some historical events that we rarely see on film, and one of them is The Great Battle. Set before the formation of a united Korea, the film is a classic standoff against a larger army, that has all the swordfighting and armies we’ve come to expect, but it’s also grounded by the dynamic between a young warrior sent to assassinate, and the hardened, brilliant commander whose leadership kept the troops protected. While there are moments that definitely eludes historical accuracy, and there are some subplots that distract from the main conflict, The Great Battle is a fairly entertaining historical epic to watch, especially when focused on the action-packed clashes and the spectacular warfare.

In another country, you can forge a completely different life from the one you had in your hometown. For closeted LGBTQ+ individuals, moving to a more tolerant society allows you to explore facets of your sexuality that wasn’t possible previously. In Goodbye Mother, first generation immigrant Nau Van is confronted with the secrets he hid from his hometown, the secret that isn’t a secret in America. The conflict plays out in a familiar fashion, going through plenty of the usual experiences that coming out entails, but, while these are familiar, Goodbye Mother tugs at the reality Asian immigrants experience, and does so in a sweet and empathetic way.

Blood Tea and Red String is cryptic as hell. There’s no dialogue, the film was in production for around 13 years, and the stop-motion animated rats and bat-crow creatures fight over a stuffed human-like doll and her bird-bodied child, spilling some tea and sewing her together with help from frog priests and a spider woman that keeps spinning her web. Whether the film is an allegory for class struggle and the inherent destructiveness of art, or is a straightforward Alice-in-Wonderland-esque fairytale with goth and medieval motifs is up to the viewer, but either way, the symbolism of Blood Tea and Red String is interesting enough to watch and try to make your own conclusions.

While adoption doesn’t have the same stigma as it did back in the day, it doesn’t mean that the process is worry-free. There’s still a host of issues surrounding the process, plenty of which have been depicted in film. So, it’s no surprise that True Mothers holds more or less the same themes we’ve seen before, but where some films focus on mining the melodrama, filmmaker Naomi Kawase’s writing is much more restrained, keeping its take as naturalistic and detail-oriented as possible, and thus, demystifying the process. The slow pace may not be to everyone’s taste, but True Mothers is a thoughtful, sensitive portrayal of Japan’s adoption system today.