Movies Like Willem

If you liked Willem (2020), a movie directed by David Hastings, here are 20 movies with a similar feel, based on TMDB's recommendations. Each one links to its cast, trailer and where it's streaming.

1
Bronson (2009)
★ 6.9/10
A young man who was sentenced to 7 years in prison for robbing a post office ends up spending 30 years in solitary confinement. During this time, his own personality is supplanted by his alter ego, Charles Bronson.
2
The Reader (2008)
★ 7.5/10
The story of Michael Berg, a German lawyer who, as a teenager in the late 1950s, had an affair with an older woman, Hanna, who then disappeared only to resurface years later as one of the defendants in a war crimes…
3
Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985)
★ 7/10
The story of two radically different men thrown together in a Latin American prison cell. One is Valentin, a journalist being tortured for his political beliefs. The other is Molina, a gay window-dresser who fills…
4
Where Hands Touch (2018)
★ 7.9/10
Germany, 1944. Leyna, the fifteen-year-old daughter of a white German mother and a black African father, meets Lutz, a compassionate member of the Hitler Youth whose father is a prominent Nazi soldier, and they form an…
5
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2008)
★ 7.8/10
When his family moves from their home in Berlin to a strange new house in Poland, young Bruno befriends Shmuel, a boy who lives on the other side of the fence where everyone seems to be wearing striped pajamas. Unaware…
6
Bent (1997)
★ 6.9/10
Max is a handsome young man who, after a fateful tryst with a German soldier, is forced to run for his life. Eventually Max is placed in a concentration camp where he pretends to be Jewish because in the eyes of the…
7
Midnight Express (1978)
★ 7.4/10
Billy Hayes is caught attempting to smuggle drugs out of a country. The courts decide to make an example of him, sentencing him to more than 30 years in prison. Hayes has two opportunities for release: the appeals made…
8
Brute Force (1947)
★ 7.3/10
Timeworn Joe Collins and his fellow inmates live under the heavy thumb of the sadistic, power-tripping guard Captain Munsey. Only Collins' dreams of escape keep him going, but how can he possibly bust out of Munsey's…
9
Truth & Treason (2025)
★ 8.1/10
In 1941 Nazi Germany, 16-year-old Helmuth Hübener begins questioning the regime after learning the truth about the war and seeing his Jewish friend persecuted. With two friends, he secretly listens to banned foreign…
10
Apt Pupil (1998)
★ 6.5/10
One day in 1984, Todd Bowden, a brilliant high school boy fascinated by the history of Nazism, stumbles across an old man whose appearance resembles that of Kurt Dussander, a wanted Nazi war criminal. A month later…
11
American History X (1998)
★ 8.3/10
Derek Vineyard is paroled after serving 3 years in prison for killing two African-American men. Through his brother, Danny Vineyard's narration, we learn that before going to prison, Derek was a skinhead and the leader…
12
The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
★ 8.7/10
Imprisoned in the 1940s for the double murder of his wife and her lover, upstanding banker Andy Dufresne begins a new life at the Shawshank prison, where he puts his accounting skills to work for an amoral warden…
13
Papillon (2017)
★ 7.3/10
Henri “Papillon” Charrière, a safecracker from the Parisian underworld, is wrongfully convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in the penal colony of French Guiana, where he forges a strong friendship with Louis…
14
Felon (2008)
★ 7.1/10
A family man convicted of killing an intruder must cope with life afterward in the violent penal system.
15
Suite Française (2015)
★ 7.2/10
France, 1940. In the first days of occupation, beautiful Lucile Angellier is trapped in a stifled existence with her controlling mother-in-law as they both await news of her husband: a prisoner of war. Parisian…
16
Dog Pound (2010)
★ 7.2/10
Three juvenile delinquents arrive at a correctional center and are put under the care of an experienced guard.
17
Papillon (1973)
★ 7.8/10
A man befriends a fellow criminal as the two of them begin serving their sentence on a dreadful prison island, which inspires the man to plot his escape.
18
Jojo Rabbit (2019)
★ 8/10
Jojo, a lonely German boy during World War II has his world shaken when he learns that his single mother is hiding a Jewish girl in their home. Influenced by a buffoonish imaginary version of Adolf Hitler, he begins to…
19
The Hurricane (1999)
★ 7.4/10
The story of Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, a boxer wrongly imprisoned for murder, and the people who aided in his fight to prove his innocence.
20
Sing Sing (2024)
★ 7.4/10
Divine G, imprisoned at Sing Sing for a crime he didn't commit, finds purpose by acting in a theatre group alongside other incarcerated men in this story of resilience, humanity, and the transformative power of art.