He has won over 30 festival awards and having directed six feature films that became blockbusters in his home country and also received international recognition.

The film, which stars Pamela Tola, concerns young people in Finland who are caught between conventional careers and more alternative forms of living.

Beauty and the Bastard won the Norwegian National Film Prize Amanda sponsored by Canal+ & Svensk Filmindustri AB for best Nordic Debut-Film.

The Home of Dark Butterflies was nominated in ten categories for the Finnish National Film Awards, and this time Karukoski won the prize for the Best Director.

[4] The Home of Dark Butterflies was also chosen as Finland's representative for both The Nordic Council Film Prize and the Academy Awards.

Forbidden Fruit is a coming of age story about two girls who are a part of a religious sect called the Conservative Laestadianism.

Karukoski's fifth film is Heart of a Lion (Leijonasydän) in which a neo-Nazi leader (played by Peter Franzén) falls in love with a woman who has a black son.

Heart of a Lion premiered in Finland October 18 and was an instant success at the box office defeating films such as Gravity, Thor: The Dark World and Now You See Me.

Karukoski's sixth release Mielensäpahoittaja, titled in English The Grump, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2014.

It was an enormous hit in Finland, earning gross revenues placing it in the top 3 Finnish films of the past 25 years.

[6] The film got the Box office number one spot of the year, beating blockbuster titles including The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies.

[9] Karukoski directed a 2019 film about author J. R. R. Tolkien, depicting his formative years as a teenager and as young man during the First World War.

[12][3] The father of Karukoski was American actor George Dickerson (1933-2015), who appeared for example in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, where he played Detective Williams.