20 best movies like Accidents Happen (2009)

In LA's Fairfax district, where ethnic groups abound, four households celebrate Thanksgiving amidst family tensions. In the Nguyen family, the children's acculturation and immigrant parents' fears collide. In the Avila family, Isabel's son has invited her estranged husband to their family dinner. Audrey and Ron Williams want to keep their own family's ruptures secret from Ron's visiting mother. In the Seelig household, Herb and Ruth are unwilling to discuss openly their grown daughter's living with her lover, Carla. Around each table, things come to a head. A gun, an affair, a boyfriend, and a pregnancy precipitate crises forcing each family to find its center.

Jake and Kristy Briggs are newlyweds. Being young, they are perhaps a bit unprepared for the full reality of marriage and all that it (and their parents) expect from them. Do they want babies? Their parents certainly want them to. Is married life all that there is? Things certainly aren't helped by Jake's friend Davis, who always seems to turn up just in time to put a spanner in the works.

Set in New York City in the sweltering summer, The Wackness tells the story of a troubled teenage drug dealer, who trades pot for therapy sessions with a drug-addled psychiatrist. Things get more complicated when he falls for one of his classmates, who just happens to be the doctors daughter. This is a coming-of-age story about sex, drugs, music and what it takes to be a man.

After being thrown away from home, pregnant high school dropout Maria meets Matthew, a highly educated and extremely moody electronics repairman. The two begin an unusual romance built on their sense of mutual admiration and trust.

In 1976, a lower-middle-class teenager struggles to cope living with her neurotic family of nomads on the outskirts of Beverly Hills.

Teenage Mary Cummings, who has "been Born Again her whole life," is about to enter her senior year at American Eagle Christian High School near Baltimore with her Fundamentalist Christian friends Hilary Faye and Veronica, the three of whom have formed a girl group called the Christian Jewels. Everything seems perfect—until Mary’s "perfect Christian boyfriend" Dean tells her, as they’re swimming underwater, that he thinks he's gay.

Based on the novel by Truman Capote, this often-witty coming-of-age drama looks at a young man growing up with an unusual family in the Deep South in the 1940s.

A sweeping multigenerational story set against the backdrop of the raw, roaring New York City of the late 1980s; adoption, teen pregnancy, drugs, hardcore punk rock, the unbridled optimism and reckless stupidity of the young—and old—are all major elements in this heart-aching tale of the son of diehard hippies and his strange odyssey through the extremes of late 20th century youth culture.

In this luminous tale set in the former Yugoslavia, Perhan, an engaging young Romany with telekinetic powers, is seduced by the quick-cash world of petty crime that threatens to destroy him and those he loves.

After his wife died a man refuses to go out and doesn't want to talk to his only son. Life has no meaning for him. One day his son finds a baby pelican and decides to leave the bird at home. Pelican helps the boy find his father again and revive him back to life ...

From Spike Lee comes this vibrant semi-autobiographical portrait of a school-teacher, her stubborn jazz-musician husband and their five kids living in '70s Brooklyn.

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.

13-year-old Gunther Strobbe grows up surrounded by alcohol, trash and his completely useless father and uncles. Slowly but surely, he's being prepared for the same hapless life. Can he defy his destiny?

An acclaimed writer, his ex-wife, and their teenaged children come to terms with the complexities of love in all its forms over the course of one tumultuous year.

The story of a normal Italian family in which come out the dreams of those who have lost their possibilities and of those who want to realize them. Carlo and Giulia are a married couple who have each given up their aspirations in order to live an average life. Their 19-year-old son, Paolo, is having trouble finding an identity, while their 18-year-old daughter, Valentina, has already figured out how to use sex to her advantage. The family goes through a crisis when Carlo begins having an affair, Giulia attempt to seduce the director of a local stage production she is in, and Valentina does what she does best to land an audition for a TV show

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

The film talks about a family that weathers all sorts of disasters and keeps going in spite of it all. It is noted for its wonderful assortment of oddball characters.

Bright young student Raymond Aibelli is forced to sidetrack an important medical internship because his mother, Susan, is recovering from a broken leg. When he isn't tasked with the most mundane aspects of Susan's recuperation, Raymond finds distraction in a neighborhood girl, Toni Peck. But, as Susan begins relying on her son for both physical and emotional needs, Raymond starts developing disturbing and unwanted new yearnings.

Comedy sequel to "East Is East". Manchester, North of England, 1975. The now much diminished, but still claustrophobic and dysfunctional, Khan family continues to struggle for survival. Sajid, the youngest Khan, the runt of the litter, is deep in pubescent crisis under heavy assault both from his father's tyrannical insistence on Pakistani tradition, and from the fierce bullies in the schoolyard. So, in a last, desperate attempt to 'sort him out', his father decides to pack him off to Mrs Khan No 1 and family in the Punjab, the wife and daughters he had abandoned 35 years earlier. It is not long before Ella Khan (Mrs Khan No2) with a small entourage from Salford, England, swiftly follows to sort out the mess, past and present.

The tale of a ten-year-old boy in a Catholic school who, following the death of his beloved grandfather, embarks on a quest to discover the meaning of life.

Mandy Moore stars as Halley, a young hip high school student who's convinced true love doesn't exist based on the crazy relationships around her. Her mother is divorcing her father who is dating a younger woman Halley can't stand. Her crazed sister is planning a wedding but has second thoughts and her best friend has fallen madly in love for the first time leaving Halley to feel even more alone.

Leo falls in love with Beatrice, a slightly older high-school student who has leukemia.

A man forced to confront his past when he and his girlfriend end up entangled in a web of lies.

Teenage musicians travel to England's Spike Island in the hope of attending an outdoor performance by their favorite band, the Stone Roses.

The second film from the Le Boum series about a young French teenage girl who after moving to a new city falls in love with a boy and is thinking of having sex with him because her girlfriends have already done it.

Over the course of his summer break, a teenager comes into his own thanks in part to the friendship he strikes up with one of the park's managers.

Natalie allows her classmate Jeff, who ran away from home after a fight with his stepfather, to stay at her place while her father is away on a business trip. Natalie soon starts dating Jeff's friend James Casey, who isn't as faithful as she thinks, while her best friend Polly falls in love with baseball player Zoo Knudsen.

A Serious Man is the story of an ordinary man's search for clarity in a universe where Jefferson Airplane is on the radio and F-Troop is on TV. It is 1967, and Larry Gopnik, a physics professor at a quiet Midwestern university, has just been informed by his wife Judith that she is leaving him. She has fallen in love with one of his more pompous acquaintances Sy Ableman.

The Chumscrubber is a dark comedy about the lives of people who live in upper-class suburbia. It all begins when Dean Stiffle finds the body of his friend, Troy. He doesn't bother telling any of the adults because he knows they won't care. Everyone in town is too self consumed to worry about anything else than themselves. And everybody is on some form of drug just to get through their days.

A man is reluctant to tell his fiancee that his parents, uncle and brother are dwarfs.

Various individuals think they’re coming together for a party in a private home, but a series of revelations results in a huge crisis that throws their belief systems – and their values – into total disarray.

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

Angie lives in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, N.Y. and dreams of a better life than everyone she knows. When she finds that she is pregnant by her boyfriend Vinnie, she decides that she will have the baby, but not Vinnie as a husband. This turns the entire neighborhood upside down and starts her on a journey of self discovery. This journey includes her family, a new lover and her life. Even her best friend Tina has trouble understanding Angie. Written by Tony Fontana

A sprawling drama centered on five key days in a family's life.

Giuseppe Tornatore traces three generations of a Sicilian family in in the Sicilian town of Bagheria (known as Baarìa in the local Sicilian dialect), from the 1930s to the 1980s, to tell the story of the loves, dreams and delusions of an unusual community.

Waxing nostalgic about the bittersweet passage from childhood to puberty in this tender coming-of-age tale, four childhood girlfriends -- Teeny, Chrissy, Samantha and Roberta -- recall the magical summer of 1970. During their walk down memory lane, they reconcile experiences with boys, secrets, bullies and more.

The whole Bélier family is deaf, except for sixteen year old Paula who is the important translator in her parents' day to day life especially when it comes to matters concerning the family farm. When her music teacher discovers she has a fantastic singing voice and she gets an opportunity to enter a big Radio France contest the whole family's future is set up for big changes.

Thomas is turning 16. His dad's in the army and they've just moved to a town in New South Wales; his mom is pregnant; his older brother, Charlie, who's autistic, has his own adolescent sexual issues. Thomas finds Charlie an embarrassment in public, so when Thomas is attracted to Jackie, a girl in his swim class, Charlie presents any number of obstacles when she drops by their house, when the three of them go for a walk, and during a family birthday dinner. Can Thomas find a way to enter the world of teen romance and still be his brother's keeper, or is Charlie's disability going to prove more than Thomas can handle?

This is the story of a dysfunctional New York family, and their attempts to reconcile

Hal, a 15-year-old high-school student with a minor yet socially alienating (and painful) disability: he stutters uncontrollably. Determined to work through the problem, Hal opts for an extreme route he joins the school debating team, which sends him on a headfirst plunge into breakneck speech competitions and offers a much-needed boost toward correcting the problem.

When down-on-his-luck part-time high school wrestling coach Mike agrees to become legal guardian to an elderly man, his ward's troubled grandson turns out to be a star grappler, sparking dreams of a big win -- until the boy's mother retrieves him.

Georgia Nicolson is fourteen, lives with nosey parents who don't understand her, an annoying three year old sister and has to wear a beret to school. She would, however, rather be blonde, have a smaller nose and a boyfriend. Revolving around her hilarious journal entries, prepare to be engulfed in the world of the soaring joys and bottomless angst of being a teenager.

Matti and Niila, growing up in the mid-sixties in the harsh and conservative environment of a Finnish-speaking part of Tornedalen in Swedish Laponia, close to the Finnish border. Their big dream is to become rock stars. In the present the now grown-up Matti feels guilt for the death of his drug-addicted rock star friend Niila.

Greg is coasting through senior year of high school as anonymously as possible, avoiding social interactions like the plague while secretly making spirited, bizarre films with Earl, his only friend. But both his anonymity and friendship threaten to unravel when his mother forces him to befriend a classmate with leukemia.

Summer of 1963. Carson is getting married to her boyfriend so her friends Melaina, Pudge and Luanne take her to Myrtle Beach for one last irresponsible weekend.

In this adaptation of the Mona Simpson novel, single mother Adele August is bad with money, and even worse when it comes to making decisions. Her straight-laced daughter, Ann, is a successful high school student with Ivy League aspirations. When Adele decides to pack up and move the two of them from the Midwest to Beverly Hills, Calif., to pursue her dreams of Hollywood success, Ann grows frustrated with her mother's irresponsible and impulsive ways.

A boy, obsessed with comparing himself with those less fortunate, experiences a different life at the home of his aunt and uncle in 1959 Sweden.

A coming of age dramedy where infidelity, real estate, and Lyme disease have two families falling apart on Long Island in the early eighties. Scott, 15, is at the point in his life when he finds out that the most important people around him, his father, his mother, and his brother, are not exactly who he thought they were. They are flawed and they are human.

A boy growing up in Dublin during the 1980s escapes his strained family life by starting a band to impress the mysterious girl he likes.

As her marriage dissolves, a Manhattan writer takes driving lessons from a Sikh instructor with marriage troubles of his own. In each other's company they find the courage to get back on the road and the strength to take the wheel.