Best movies like The Northerners

A commitment-phobic man reunites with his estranged, ailing father and comes to terms with his own childhood.

Edgar works as a waiter in 'Het Westen', a restaurant. He is married and has a lover. His neighbors terrorize him with loud music and garbage. One day after he is mistreated by some customers he is sick of it all and goes to talk to his creator, the scenario writer.

One man's quiet suburban life takes a sickening lurch for the worse when a young couple move into the deserted house next door. From the word go it is obvious these are not the quiet professional types who *should* be living in such a nice street. As more and more unbelievable events unfold, our hero starts to question his own sanity... and those of his family.

Matt and Karen have inconsiderate neighbours whose lawn sprinkler drowns their flowers. A feud errupts and a series of tit-for-tat actions develop and escalate.

Leslie is left with few options when her husband is sent back to war in the Middle East. A modest amount of help arrives in the form of his brother, Salman, who is less than prepared to care for the couple's two preadolescent boys. When Leslie still can't make ends meet on her own, Salman is forced to find employment, but, with minimal qualifications, his only option is to become a mascot for a digital company by donning a bulbous blue costume.

A pastor preoccupied with writing the perfect sermon fails to realize that his wife is having an affair and his children are up to no good.

Ken Park focuses on several teenagers and their tormented home lives. Shawn seems to be the most conventional. Tate is brimming with psychotic rage; Claude is habitually harassed by his brutish father and coddled, rather uncomfortably, by his enormously pregnant mother. Peaches looks after her devoutly religious father, but yearns for freedom. They're all rather tight, or so they claim.

In his quest to become the world's greatest air-drummer, a small-town dreamer must overcome obstacles and ridicule to save the day.

In a blue-collar American town, a group of teens bands together to form the Dandies, a gang of gunslingers led by Dick Dandelion. Following a code of strict pacifism at odds with the fact that they all carry guns, the group eventually lets in Sebastian, the grandson of Dick's childhood nanny, Clarabelle, who fears the other gangs in the area. Dick and company try to protect Clarabelle, but events transpire that push the gang past posturing.

Wendell Lawson has only six months to live. Not wanting to endure his last few months of life waiting for the end, he decides to take matters into his own hands and enlists the help of a delusional mental patient to help him commit suicide.

A peaceful family-life is suddenly disturbed when the children enter puberty. The children take over the house and disrupt the lives of their parents.

A group of teenage summer campers and one counselor share the stories of their first sexual experiences when an avalanche traps them in a cave...

A mysterious power failure in a small mountain town coincides with the disappearance of one of its most eccentric young residents. Mystery piles upon mystery as his family and friends search for him, fail, and ultimately try to forget about him, an undertaking that results in many unexpected, and in some cases bizarre, effects on the town's already peculiar community.

In 1950s England, sailor Harold Guppy arrives in a small seaside town looking for his estranged brother. After a brief reunion, Harold finds a room for rent in the house of Mrs. Beasley, her meek husband and their teenage daughter, Joyce. It's clear that Harold has a troubled past, but his future is about to get more perilous yet. Despite the rosy surface, Harold soon finds himself in a tawdry sexual tug-of-war that won't end well.

A suburban Baltimore housewife's life is upended when her husband reveals he's been serially unfaithful and her teenage children go wayward. Then she meets a handsome stranger...

Six outwardly average individuals have elaborate fetishes they indulge with surreptitious care. A mousy letter carrier makes dough balls she grotesquely ingests before bed. A shop clerk fixates on a TV news reader while he builds a machine to massage and masturbate him. One of his customers makes an elaborate chicken costume for a voodoo-like scene with a doll resembling his plump neighbor. She, in turn, has a doll that resembles him, which she whips and dominates in an abandoned church. The TV news reader has her own fantasy involving carp. Her husband, who is indifferent to her, steals materials to fashion elaborate artifacts that he rubs, scrapes and rolls across his body.

College and high school serve as the backdrop for two stories about dysfunction and personal turmoil.

A well-to-do, thirty-something shut-in faces city life, family secrets and his own quirks when he is finally thrown out by his parents.

A woman living in a large country home drives her servants to mutiny with her outrageous demands as she waits for death to come for her.

A charismatic, crazy hothead transforms a family's life when she becomes the nanny of five girls.

Marilyn Jordan, an American, lives in Stockholm with her Swedish husband and family. Her behavior is bizarre, perhaps mad: she poisons the dog's milk and advises the dog not to drink it; she sets the sheets afire as her husband sleeps; she crawls under the dining table to sing. While detained at airport customs for carrying pruning shears, she meets a young Yugoslav woman and goes with her to a Gypsy enclave where she's fought over, takes a lover, helps with the sordid entertainment at a bar, and returns home more dangerous than before. The film also tells parallel stories of Marilyn's daughter becoming a junior homemaker as the young immigrant practices her striptease.

For the first time in 15 years, all four siblings in a family show up to care for their dying mother, who is only given a couple of weeks to live. One comes from America with her two children. A divorced sister also comes with her child and sneaks off regularly to meet a mystery man who may be her ex-husband. The third & youngest daughter is an unmarried nurse aware of her ticking biological clock. The only son chases after his grumpy father who seems to not care a whit about his wife's circumstances. The four are also faced my their mother's dreams to accomplish a few things before she dies - to visit a beach she had visited in the past, to see her youngest married, and to visit Paris. She also wants to be embalmed and be honored with a 21 gun salute. Thus the whole group has to set off in the quest to fulfill their mother's wishes.

Brand, an unemployed illiterate in his fourties, lives with his wife Keet in some desolate corner of the Dutch countryside. Keet, being tired of having to read the subtitles on television out loud so Brand can understand what's going on, one day decides he should learn to read for himself. She hires Lena, an attractive woman in her thirties, to do the teaching. Lena and Brand develop a passionate relationship, and Keet decides to let it happen because she wants her husband to be happy. She even goes so far as to claim she never actually was married to Brand: it all was just a game, she's just his sister. Lena then moves in, and soon takes over. But after a while she gets pregnant and bears a son, Kleine Teun ("Little Teun"). Then Keet, who can't have children herself, finally caves in and decides Lena has to be eliminated ...

A lonely widower finds himself facing both his devout Calvinist village community and his own deepest regrets when he takes a deranged vagrant into his home.

Johan Dros is born as eleventh consecutive son of soccer-obsessed pa Rinus, who raises his boys mainly as the small island Texel's team. Johan's rare reprieves from training for a sport he doesn't care for cease when ma dies. After captain brother Johhny sort of steals his local girl-friend Evy, Johan leaves for Amsterdam, where he becomes a hairdresser and would-be singer. Soccer, a vocal TV talent-hunt and Evy will bring them all together again, but also raise unprecedented strife in the Dros family

A regular guy struggles with a repressive home and professional life, as well as making amends for the trouble his free-spirited brother and sister cause about town.

Elizabeth, a voluptuous, shy and unpopular girl, is the object of ridicule at school by the cool in-crowd. Her life spirals downward after the death of her only friend, her grandmother. But she has a crush on a popular boy at school, and a deranged plan to make all her dreams come true!

The story of a summer dress and those who have to do with it, especially the train conductor (played by van Warmerdam, the director). The dress functions as catalyst for the whimsical events, which turns out to be either tragic or hilarious.

A young man journeys through a bizarre land inhabited by mentally impaired people, demons, and snails.

When Jamie's maternal grandmother dies, he and his brother Tommy are separated - Tommy is taken off to a welfare home and Jamie goes to live with his other grandmother and uncle. His life is far from happy, filled with silence, rejection and bouts of violence.

A mother and wife stricken with memory loss allows a dysfunctional family a second chance at harmony and happiness.

Joe and his siblings have a couple of problems. First off, their stepparents are despicably evil. Secondly, they seemed to have killed them. Now this mixed up mess of half-sisters and step-brothers have to figure out how to dispose of the bodies, cover up the murders, collect their grandfather's inheritance and somehow stick together as a family -- all without getting caught. Not to mention Joe's incessant need to keep tabs on his promiscuous sister, an eye on the precocious little ones and a lustful watch on the girl next-door. Growing up has its complications. Murder's just one of them.

Abdullah 'Ap' Bentarek is happy that, unlike his Uncle Yusuf who stayed in the ancestral Moroccan mountain village, his father Ali moved to the Netherlands – even though it does mean that he’ll have to deal with lousy friends and unrealistic expectations at the employment office. A light-hearted portrait of the immigrant experience and the ubiquitous intolerance of the unfamiliar in Dutch society.

A disparate variety of couples from all walks of life strive to maintain active sex lives despite the notable distraction of having kids.

In a typical American suburb filled with middle class morals, a lonely 59-year-old, Stan, contributes to society by offering cremation services from his basement. In fact, Stan murders neighbors he perceives to be social bullies. Jarod, a fatherless 17-year-old high school outcast, lands an after-school job in Stan's cremation house and the two develop an unusual working relationship that quickly evolves into a partnership. As detective Matt Fairchild puts together clues from local disappearances, Stan must decide if protecting his newfound trainee is worth killing for.