20 best movies like Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)

A Brooklyn teenager juggles conflicting identities and risks friendship, heartbreak, and family in a desperate search for sexual expression.

A River Runs Through is a cinematographically stunning true story of Norman Maclean. The story follows Norman and his brother Paul through the experiences of life and growing up, and how their love of fly fishing keeps them together despite varying life circumstances in the untamed west of Montana in the 1920's.

No one seemed to care about Jamie Marks until after his death. Hoping to find the love and friendship he never had in life, Jamie’s ghost visits former classmate Adam McCormick, drawing him into the bleak world between the living and the dead.

Because of the actions of her irresponsible parents, a young girl is left alone on a decrepit country estate and survives inside her fantastic imagination.

Two siblings discover a supernatural escape from a troubled home, but find their bond tested when reality threatens to tear their family apart.

Aging screenwriter Felix Bonhoeffer has lived his life in two states of existence: in reality and his own interior world. While working on a murder mystery script, and unaware that his brain is on the verge of implosion, Felix is baffled when his characters start to appear in his life, and vice versa.

Tommy and his older brother Eric live in the midst of vast remote forests. The death of their friend pushes them close to the edge. Eric doesn’t know how to channel his energy. All at once, nature’s vastness feels stifling.

Rusty James, an absent-minded street thug, struggles to live up to his legendary older brother's reputation, and longs for the days when gang warfare was going on.

Michael is a 12-year-old drug pusher who lives in a crowded house with his cousins and aunt. His father has become a street bum, but still meets with Fresh on occasion to play chess. Fresh is rather quiet in a crazy world. Fresh's sister is a junkie who sleeps with the dealers that Fresh sells for. As the story progresses Fresh realizes that he doesn't want to sell drugs anymore, he wants revenge.

Set in the landscape of a rural southern town, "George Washington" is a stunning portrait of how a group of young kids come to grips with a hard world of choices and consequences. During an innocent game in an abandoned amusement park, a member of the group dies. Narrated by one of the children, the film follows the kids as they struggle to balance their own ambitions and relationships against a tragic lie.

A chronicle of three weeks in the lives of several high school teachers, administrators and students through the eyes of substitute teacher, Henry Barthes. Henry roams from school to school, imparting modes of knowledge, but never staying long enough to form any semblance of sentient attachment.

Two boys find a fugitive hiding out on an island in the Mississippi River and form a pact to help him reunite with his lover and escape.

Based on the best selling autobiography by Irish expat Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes follows the experiences of young Frankie and his family as they try against all odds to escape the poverty endemic in the slums of pre-war Limerick. The film opens with the family in Brooklyn, but following the death of one of Frankie's siblings, they return home, only to find the situation there even worse. Prejudice against Frankie's Northern Irish father makes his search for employment in the Republic difficult despite his having fought for the IRA, and when he does find money, he spends the money on drink.

A teenage girl, distraught from her vain attempt to connect with her estranged mother, resorts to cutting herself. When she develops an online relationship with an older woman, she learns to accept her sexuality and the endless solitude of sprawling suburbia.

On the run after murdering a man, accountant William Blake encounters a strange North American man named Nobody who prepares him for his journey into the spiritual world.

An angel under the thumb of a ruthless gangster is saved by a trumpet player down on his luck.

A married farmer falls under the spell of a slatternly woman from the city, who tries to convince him to drown his wife.

A boy with a massive facial skull deformity and biker gang mother attempts to live as normal a life as possible under the circumstances.

A gauzy summer in South Brooklyn. Lila, an awkward adolescent girl, passes her time breaking into beach homes and tagging along on dates between her pretty friend Chiara and Chiara's new boyfriend, Patrick. Lila decides this will be the summer she loses her virginity, too—her interest is piqued when she meets Sammy, an older boy reputed to sleep with just about anyone. Yet Lila's attempts at sexual conquest risk taking her beyond her limits, and into dangerous uncharted territory. 

An adaptation of Petronius' satire about the decadent life in ancient Rome. "If you like the Fellini version, you should definitely see this one, too. It's every bit as good and in some ways better."

A man wanders out of the desert not knowing who he is. His brother finds him, and helps to pull his memory back of the life he led before he walked out on his family and disappeared four years earlier.

Once upon a time an old woman discovers a baby in her cabbage patch. She brings up the child and, when she dies, the boy, Toto, enters an orphanage. Toto leaves the orphanage a happy young man, and looks for work in post-war Milan. He ends up with the homeless and organizes them to build a shanty town in a vacant lot. The squatters discover oil in the land and Toto sees a vision of the old woman who gives him a magic dove that will grant him anything he wishes.

A haunting erotic fairytale about Lucy, a young University student drawn into a mysterious hidden world of beauty and desire.

Harassed by classmates who won't accept his shocking appearance, a shy young man known as "Powder" struggles to fit in. But the cruel taunts stop when Powder displays a mysterious power that allows him to do incredible things. This phenomenon changes the lives of all those around him in ways they never could have imagined.

A woman named Kit moves back to her parent's house, where she receives a mysterious invitation that would fulfill her childhood dreams.

Hannah Stern, an American-born Jewish adolescent, is uninterested in the culture, faith and customs of her relatives; however, Hannah begins to revaluate her heritage when she has a supernatural experience that transports her back to a Nazi death camp in 1941. There, she meets a young girl named Rivkah, a fellow captive in the camp. As Rivkah and Hannah struggle to survive in the face of daily atrocities, they form an unbreakable bond.

A young Anatolian Greek, entrusted with his family's fortune, loses it en route to Istanbul and dreams of going to America

The O'Neills lived happily in their house in the Australian countryside. That was until one day fate struck blindly, taking the life of Peter, the father, leaving his grief-stricken wife Dawn alone with their four children. Among them, eight-year-old Simone denies this reality. She is persuaded that her father still lives in the giant fig tree growing near their house and speaks to her through its leaves. But the tree becomes more and more invasive and threatens the house. It must be felled. Of course, Simone won't allow it.

Based on the Depression-era bildungsroman memoir of writer A. E. Hotchner, the film follows the story of a boy struggling to survive on his own in a hotel in St. Louis after his mother is committed to a sanatorium with tuberculosis. His father, a German immigrant and traveling salesman working for the Hamilton Watch Company, is off on long trips from which the boy cannot be certain he will return.

The story follows 19-year-old Renee who has always loved fairy tales: the idea of a princess, a hero and a happily ever after. But Renee’s life is that of a darker tale: she’s a young woman battling addiction, depression and self-injury. In a creative blend of artistic fantasy balanced with harsh reality, the movie follows Renee on her courageous journey towards recovery.

A young boy has lost his mother and is losing touch with his father and the world around him. Then he meets Hesher who manages to make his life even more chaotic.

Epic story about two families and their friendship and common destiny in Sweden's Gothenburg in the 1940s and 1950s. Told from the perspective of young Simon Larsson, who learns that he's an adopted child who has a Jewish father from Germany. After WWII Simon travels to explore his roots - a journey that leads to the basic mysteries of the human life. After the bestselling novel by Marianne Fredriksson.

A bullied young boy befriends a young female vampire who lives in secrecy with her guardian. A remake of the movie “Let The Right One In” which was an adaptation of a book.

Saxophone player Charlie Parker comes to New York in 1940. He is quickly noticed for his remarkable way of playing. He becomes a drug addict but his loving wife Chan tries to help him.

A teenager pretends to be dying from cancer as a way to cope with the realities of his daily existence and his father's terminal illness.

Duncan Mudge, mid-teens, lives apart from his rural world populated by his distant father and rough local kids. His main companionship is a chicken left after his mother's death until the neighbor's son befriends him.

In a world of fake castles and anthropomorphic rodents, an epic battle begins when an unemployed father's sanity is challenged by a chance encounter with two underage girls on holiday.

A young boy tries to cope with rural life circa 1950s and his fantasies become a way to interpret events. After his father tells him stories of vampires, he becomes convinced that the widow up the road is a vampire, and tries to find ways of discouraging his brother from seeing her.

Based on the Henry James novella, the story frames on 7-year-old Maisie, caught in a custody battle between her mother – a rock and roll icon – and her father. What Maisie Knew is an evocative portrayal of the chaos of adult life seen entirely from a child’s point of view.

After being assigned as study partners, two Chicana high schoolers find a bond that confuses them at times.

A family vacation is bogged down by unrelenting rain, as a teenage girl and her divorced father try to find common ground.

Max imagines running away from his mom and sailing to a far-off land where large talking beasts -- Ira, Carol, Douglas, the Bull, Judith and Alexander -- crown him as their king, play rumpus, build forts and discover secret hideaways.

When his mom deposits him at the Red Hook housing project in Brooklyn to spend the summer with the grandfather he’s never met, young Flik may as well have landed on Mars. Fresh from his cushy life in Atlanta, he’s bored and friendless, and his strict grandfather, Enoch, a firebrand preacher, is bent on getting him to accept Jesus Christ as his personal savior. Only Chazz, the feisty girl from church, provides a diversion from the drudgery. As hot summer simmers and Sunday mornings brim with Enoch’s operatic sermons, things turn anything but dull as people’s conflicting agendas collide.

A ten year old girl named Angela leads her six year old sister, Ellie, through various regimens of 'purification' in an attempt to rid themselves of their evil, which she believes to be the cause of their mother's mental illness. Precocious, to say the least, Angela has visions of Lucifer coming to take her and her sister away, and one of her remedies for this is for them to remain within a circle of their dolls and toys until they see a vision of the virgin Mary come to them. But such thinking can only lead to an ending befitting of her own mental state.

Grace, a compassionate young supervisor at a foster care facility, works with her boyfriend and colleague, Mason, to help at-risk teens. But when a new charge dredges up memories of her own troubled past, Grace's tough exterior begins eroding.

NEDs (Non Educated Delinquents) is the story of a young man’s journey from prize-winning schoolboy to knife-carrying teenager. Struggling against the low expectations of those around him, John McGill changes from victim to avenger, scholar to NED, altar boy to glue sniffer. When he attempts to change back again, his new reality and recent past make conformity near impossible and violent self determination near inevitable.

Young writer Richard Collier is met on the opening night of his first play by an old lady who begs him to "Come back to me". Mystified, he tries to find out about her, and learns that she is a famous stage actress from the early 1900s. Becoming more and more obsessed with her, by self-hypnosis he manages to travel back in time—where he meets her.

Life creates many obstacles for 12 years old boy - Tedo. Tedo belongs to the generation, which was forced to mass displacement because of the civil war in Abkhazia, one of the most beatiful places in Georgia. The civil war took away everything Tedo had, even hope. The film tells about an extraordinary internal drama of a little boy, his thoughts, feelings, pasions, sorrows and efforts to take arms against the difficulties.

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.

At the turn of the century in a Welsh mining village, the Morgans (he stern, she gentle) raise coal-mining sons and hope their youngest will find a better life.