Best movies like Illusion
Last updated March 2024
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Plot Summary:
Set in Philippine post-American colonialist era, where the American influence was still apparent, Ilusyon tells the story of Miguel, a young man from the countryside, who decides to visit his father, Pablo, a Modernist painter in Manila. Upon his arrival, he discovers that his father has decided to leave for the province but he opted to stay in Manila for a vacation. One day, he meets Stella, a nude model originally scheduled to pose for Miguel's father. Struck by her beauty, Miguel does the unthinkable - he pretends to be his father the painter. Developing a relationship based on a lie, things turn for the worse as Stella begets a strange skin disease that turns off Miguel. Surrounded by strange characters - a talking cow, a talkative mailman and a nosy landlady - Miguel is driven into a frenzy realization about beauty, lust, love and being true to oneself. An ambiguous ending underlines the surreal tone of the film.
IMDB Rating: 7.8
IMDB Votes: 65
Genere: Drama
Country: Philippines
Duration: 100 min
Plot tags:
Best tv shows and movies like Illusion (2005):
Similar in 90%
Closer to Home (1995)
Plot Summary:
Closer to Home weaves a universal, haunting tale of two people inexorably drawn together for vastly different reasons. Dalisay struggles to journey from the Philippine countryside to New York City to marry Dean, a disillusioned ex-merchant marine. She's hoping to buy a cure for her dying sister and, ultimately, a future for her debt-ridden family, while he hopes to escape his disintegrating American family through love and a family of his own. A powerful, controversial film that quietly builds to a shattering collision of aspirations and cultures.
IMDB Rating: 6.3
IMDB Votes: 63
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 125 min
Plot tags: independent film
Similar in 80%
Amber Waves (1980)
Plot Summary:
Two seemingly disparate men experience powerful life lessons when a wheat harvester gives a hitch-hiking male model a ride on what feels to be the worst day of their lives, at the peak of the war in Vietnam. The harvester has just been diagnosed with cancer, but desperately needs to fulfill a reaping contract, while the male model got himself beaten up in a bar, leading to his firing, and stranding in Kansas.
IMDB Rating: 7.3
IMDB Votes: 244
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 98 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 79%
Manila (2000)
Plot Summary:
Due to a delayed flight a group of German flight passengers have to wait in the hall of the airport of Manila. The crowd is quite mixed, ranging from an cultivated east German teacher couple up to sleazy sex tourists. As the waiting prolongs, more and more aggressions and long repressed behaviors shed their way to the surface.
IMDB Rating: 5.7
IMDB Votes: 183
Genere: Drama
Country: Germany
Duration: 113 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 88%
Wailing in the Forest (2016)
Plot Summary:
An indigenous family, one of the last forest people of old, copes with the unusual changes in their environment including the imposing lifestyle and customs of the more sociable tribes on the plains.
IMDB Rating: 7.5
IMDB Votes: 18
Genere: Drama
Country: Philippines
Duration: 105 min
Plot tags: fairy tale, mysterious
Similar in 83%
Whisper to God (1988)
Plot Summary:
When her boyfriend leaves for Japan on a singing contract, a dancer is so distraught she does not see the car that hits her. The driver pretends to be a helpful passer-by; they fall in love and gets married. Only bringing her to a more complicated life.
IMDB Rating: 8.2
IMDB Votes: 30
Genere: Drama
Country: Philippines
Duration: 82 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 90%
UPCAT (2008)
Plot Summary:
A of two high school senior students who believes passing the UPCAT will help make their dreams of becoming successful come true.
IMDB Rating: 5.1
IMDB Votes: 21
Genere: Drama
Country: Philippines
Duration:
Plot tags:
Similar in 89%
Letters of Solitude (2011)
Plot Summary:
Rashid Ali returns to his Maguindanao hometown after studying and working for more than 25 years in Barcelona, Spain. Idealistic, he dreams of using what he learned in Europe to improve the lives of his people. But nothing has changed since he left. Politicians remain corrupt, poverty is widespread, his people desperate.
IMDB Rating:
IMDB Votes:
Genere: Drama
Country: Philippines
Duration:
Plot tags:
Similar in 77%
Thy Womb (2012)
Plot Summary:
A Bajau midwife copes with the irony of her own infertility amid the deprivations of her gypsy community in Tawi-Tawi. A saga of island life stuck between the devil of passion and the deep blue sea of tradition.
IMDB Rating: 6.9
IMDB Votes: 273
Genere: Drama
Country: Philippines
Duration: 105 min
Plot tags: touching
Similar in 81%
Donsol (2006)
Plot Summary:
About two lonely people who met during the whaleshark watching season in Donsol, Sorsogon.
IMDB Rating: 7.4
IMDB Votes: 39
Genere: Drama
Country: Philippines
Duration: 105 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 90%
Last Day (2012)
Plot Summary:
One morning, residents of a rural village are horrified when the sun rises in the West. According to Islamic belief, this phenomenon signals the Apocalypse. As village folk react differently to the situation, a tragedy strikes when one of the residents is raped and her brother brutally murdered as he tries to avenge her. Steep in superstition, the villagers attribute these to the Devil himself.
IMDB Rating: 7.2
IMDB Votes:
Genere: Drama
Country: Philippines
Duration: 95 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 90%
Souvenirs intimes (1999)
Plot Summary:
In this French Canadian drama, the life of a paraplegic painter implodes when an old girlfriend comes back into his life and accuses him of raping her 15 years earlier.
IMDB Rating: 6.5
IMDB Votes: 233
Genere: Drama
Country: Canada
Duration: 118 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 81%
The Seventies (2002)
Plot Summary:
A middle-class Filipino family struggles to survive in the era of dictatorship.
IMDB Rating: 7.6
IMDB Votes: 581
Genere: Drama
Country: Philippines
Duration: 128 min
Plot tags: political, tagalog
Similar in 82%
Big Night (2009)
Plot Summary:
A group of male and female prostitutes make preparations for a big event happening at a shady club where audiences will come to watch them perform sexual acts on stage. As the big night looms, they begin to feel the consequences of their profession.
IMDB Rating: 6.2
IMDB Votes: 55
Genere: Drama
Country: Philippines
Duration: 89 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 75%
The Last Virgin (2003)
Plot Summary:
A priest visits a small seaside town. Miling a former nun who now teaches catechism on the island thinks that father Emman is the priest she sent for. She believes that a priest would help revive the townspeople's faith in God by putting up bars and girly joints.
IMDB Rating: 5.3
IMDB Votes: 93
Genere: Drama
Country: Philippines
Duration: 99 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 81%
The Man (2017)
Plot Summary:
Simon is the king of the Danish art scene - eccentric, successful, wealthy, with a beautiful wife and a young mistress. Life is beautiful, until the day his unknown son Casper turns up and attracts all the attention. It turns out that Casper is the world-famous graffiti artist “The Ghost”. This is a provocation and a challenge to Simon, and the relationship between father and son is put to a serious test. However, against all odds he two slowly grow closer to each other, but the question is whether blood ties are enough? Because after all Simon has no plans of being a father, and Casper has other plans with his father than simply getting to know him….
IMDB Rating: 6.2
IMDB Votes: 669
Genere: Drama
Country: Denmark, Norway, Czech Republic
Duration: 94 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 79%
Mazeppa (1993)
Plot Summary:
Mazeppa is a 1993 French drama film directed by Bartabas. It was entered into the 1993 Cannes Film Festival where it won the Technical Grand Prize.
IMDB Rating: 7.1
IMDB Votes: 278
Genere: Drama
Country: France
Duration: 111 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 82%
Never Again a Tomorrow (2017)
Plot Summary:
The slightly self-indulgent artist Thorvald collapses during an interview made in celebration of his 80th birthday and dies shortly after. But in spite of his death Thorvald can still follow those left behind. From a distance, and for better or worse, he sees with his own eyes the imprint he has left on his family and especially his son Vincent, who had a strained relationship with his father.
IMDB Rating: 5.9
IMDB Votes: 279
Genere: Drama
Country: Denmark
Duration: 96 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 85%
Nympha (2003)
Plot Summary:
A re-imagination of the Celso Ad Castillo classic, "Nympha" tells the story of an orphan woman named Nympha living in a backward province with a narrow minded aunt who is a religious fanatic.
IMDB Rating: 6.4
IMDB Votes: 35
Genere: Drama
Country: Philippines
Duration: 109 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 90%
A Painting Lesson (2011)
Plot Summary:
In Chile, during the 60´s, the son of a poor single teenage girl turns out to be a gifted painter. The man to discover his talent is the owner of the drugstore that lies in the outskirts of the small rural town, next to the railroad. He himself is an amateur painter who will try to make the boy into a great artist, like all the ones in his art books. From the pharmacists point of view in his old age, unfolds the story of this young boy who could have become a great art genius, had he not disappeared at the age of 13, along with all his works, on September 11th 1973, the day of the coupe d´état.
IMDB Rating: 7.1
IMDB Votes: 114
Genere: Drama
Country: Chile, Spain, Mexico
Duration: 85 min
Plot tags: captivating, suspense, disturbing
Similar in 87%
Landscape with a Woman (1989)
Plot Summary:
A ranger whose passion is nude painting comes to work in a remote Bosnian village. He asks the local women to pose naked for him. They are shy at first, but they eventually agree to do so. This makes their husbands furious, who think that the ranger is sleeping with their wives.
IMDB Rating: 7.9
IMDB Votes: 112
Genere: Drama
Country: Yugoslavia
Duration: 75 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 90%
Crime Delicado (2005)
Plot Summary:
Antônio Martins, respected theatrical critic, is a very rational man. But a chance meeting with young Inês, a nude painting model, is going to rock him. Inês keeps a relationship with painter José Torres Campana, an older man with a deep influence over her. Antônio gets jealous, and the three become characters of a drama saturated with desire and danger.
IMDB Rating: 6.1
IMDB Votes: 352
Genere: Drama
Country: Brazil
Duration: 87 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 81%
Ika-11 Utos Mahalin Mo Asawa Mo (1994)
Plot Summary:
This film is about domestic violence.
IMDB Rating: 6.0
IMDB Votes: 10
Genere: Drama
Country: Philippines
Duration:
Plot tags:
Similar in 79%
Angels of Revolution (2014)
Plot Summary:
Five friends – a poet, an actor, a painter, an architect and a primitivist film director – are five red avant-garde artists who try to find the embodiment of their hopes and dreams in the young Soviet state. The Revolution is boiling up like a bottle with apple cider: winged service dogs and heart-shaped potatoes, dead Semashko, the People’s Commissar for Health, and cheerful angels, love for the Tsar and love for the young secretary Annushka, executions and pregnancies – everything is interlaced and inseparable!.
IMDB Rating: 6.6
IMDB Votes: 355
Genere: Drama
Country: Russia
Duration: 113 min
Plot tags: psychological, captivating, disturbing, surreal, avant garde
Similar in 90%
Trap (2015)
Plot Summary:
The story of the rebuilding of their lives by the survivors of the disaster caused by Typhoon Yolanda in the Philippines, particularly focusing on the struggles of a mother who lost their children.
IMDB Rating: 6.1
IMDB Votes: 235
Genere: Drama
Country: Philippines
Duration: 97 min
Plot tags: psychological, suspenseful, disturbing, weird
Similar in 78%
Late Spring (2014)
Plot Summary:
Set in the 1960's. Joo-Goo (Park Yong-Woo) is viewed as Korea's best sculptor, but he suffers from a disease which will slowly paralyze his body. He gives up interests in the arts and just spends his days meaninglessly. His wife, Jung-sook (Kim Seo-hyung), tries to find a nude model for him, hoping the model might inspire him to sculpt again. One day, Jung-sook meets Min-gyung (Lee Yoo-young).
IMDB Rating: 6.5
IMDB Votes: 125
Genere: Drama, Romance
Country: South Korea
Duration: 102 min
Plot tags: sentimental, psychological, captivating, realistic
Similar in 77%
Siren's Kiss (1995)
Plot Summary:
A painter has serious creative block. He decides that two nude models living in his house might help. His wife objects, or does she?.
IMDB Rating: 4.1
IMDB Votes: 179
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 99 min
Plot tags: independent film
Similar in 82%
The Artist and the Model (2012)
Plot Summary:
The story of a famous old sculptor, weary of life and the folly of men, who finds, thanks to the arrival of a Spanish girl escaped from a refugee camp, the desire to return to work and sculpt your final work in occupied France in 1943. Model and artist, as they work, speak with simplicity and closeness to everything around them: The life and death, the injustice of the war, youth and old age, the search for beauty in times of horror, the sense and the need for art.
IMDB Rating: 6.6
IMDB Votes: 2000
Genere: Drama
Country: Spain, France
Duration: 105 min
Plot tags: atmospheric, light, touching, melancholic, dramatic, visually appealing, sexy, bleak, serious, realistic
Similar in 76%
Hokusai (2020)
Plot Summary:
The unknown life of Ukiyo-e artist Katsushika Hokusai in the Edo period, who is said to have painted more than 30,000 works throughout his life, such as "Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji".
IMDB Rating: 6.2
IMDB Votes: 296
Genere: Biography, Drama
Country: Japan
Duration: 129 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 76%
Brush with Fate (2003)
Plot Summary:
A mystery hidden for generations. Now the truth will finally be revealed.
IMDB Rating: 6.2
IMDB Votes: 475
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 100 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 80%
The Beautiful Troublemaker (1991)
Plot Summary:
The former famous painter Frenhofer lives quietly with his wife on his countryside residence in the French Provence. When the young artist Nicolas visits him with his girlfriend Marianne, Frenhofer decides to start again the work on a painting he long ago stopped: La Belle Noiseuse. And he wants Marianne as model. The now starting creative process changes life for everyone. It is a struggle for truth, life and sense, and the question where the limits of arts are or whether art is limitless.
IMDB Rating: 7.5
IMDB Votes: 9000
Genere: Drama
Country: France, Switzerland
Duration: 238 min
Plot tags: sincere, touching, realistic, psychological, atmospheric, erotic, serious, sexy, contemplative, sexual