20 best movies like Carny (1980)

Palo Alto weaves together three stories of teenage lust, boredom, and self-destruction: shy, sensitive April, torn between an illicit flirtation with her soccer coach and an unrequited crush on sweet stoner Teddy; Emily, who offers sexual favors to any boy to cross her path; and the increasingly dangerous exploits of Teddy and his best friend Fred, whose behavior may or may not be sociopathic.

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.

Waitress Annie has separated from her suicidal alcoholic husband, Glenn. Glenn has become an evangelical Christian, but his erratic attempts at getting back into Annie's life have alarmed her. High school student Arthur works at Annie's restaurant, growing closer to a new kid in town, Lila, after class. When Glenn and Annie's daughter go missing, the whole town searches for her, as he increasingly spirals out of control.

Three lives of three young people intersect over the course of one summer. A rich student and a young working-class man accidentally destroy a diner when their impromptu road race takes a disastrous turn. Ordered by a judge to spend the summer repairing the building, they find themselves becoming rivals for the affections of the owner's daughter.

Johnny, a freewheeling, motorcycle-riding musician, rolls into a small town with his band, and meets Kathy, an honor student who catches his eye. Meanwhile, Kathy's father, after being in the Witness Protection Program, is finally found by the two corrupt cops he escaped from years ago, who claim he owes them a lot of money.

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.

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.

The pit has spoken. Dawai, the potter of a backwoods community, has crafted a face on a ceramic jug of the person that the pit wants sacrificed. Ada, pregnant with her brother’s child, has seen her face on the jug and hides it in the woods, determined to save the life of her unborn. If she does not sacrifice herself however, the creature from the pit will kill everyone in the village until she does.

ELECTRICK CHILD tells the story of Rachel, a rambunctious girl from a polygamist colony in southern Utah. On Rachel’s 15th birthday, she finds a forbidden cassette tape. Having never seen anything like it before, Rachel plays the cassette tape, and finds glorious rock & roll thereupon. Weeks later, Rachel realizes a miracle has occurred - and the cassette tape must have something to do with it. She leaves her family and runs away to the closest city: Las Vegas. There she searches for the singer of the band on the cassette tape. She has a wild adventure and ultimately discovers who she really is: an ELECTRICK CHILD.

While staying at a picturesque village, a teen encounters the underground world of art forgery.

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

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.

A young Arab-American girl struggles with her sexual obsession, a bigoted Army reservist and her strict father during the Gulf War.

Terri, a pajama-clad, disaffected high school student learns how to engage the world with the help of Mr. Fitzgerald, his assistant principal.

In a seemingly perfect community, without war, pain, suffering, differences or choice, a young boy is chosen to learn from an elderly man about the true pain and pleasure of the "real" world.

Three disaffected youths live in Datong in 2001, part of the new "Birth Control" generation. Fed on a steady diet of popular culture, both Western and Chinese, the characters of Unknown Pleasures represent a new breed in the People's Republic of China, one detached from reality through the screen of media and the internet.

Life of a King is the true story of one man's mission to give inner city kids of Washington DC something he never had - a future. After being incarcerated for eighteen years, Eugene Brown established the Big Chair Chess Club to get kids off the streets and working towards lives they never believed they were capable of. This is his inspirational story.

After falling in love in Paris, Marina and Neil come to Oklahoma, where problems arise. Their church's Spanish-born pastor struggles with his faith, while Neil encounters a woman from his childhood.

Alejandro, a tough and ambitious Latino street orphan on the verge of adolescence, lives and works in an auto-body repair shop in a sprawling junkyard on the outskirts of Queens, New York. In this chaotic world of adults, young Alejandro struggles to make a better life for himself and his 16-year-old sister, Isamar.

When David Greene receives a football scholarship to a prestigious prep school in the 1950s, he feels pressure to hide the fact that he is Jewish from his classmates and teachers, fearing that they may be anti-Semitic. He quickly becomes the big man on campus thanks to his football skills, but when his Jewish background is discovered, his worst fears are realized and his friends turn on him with violent threats and public ridicule.

Avery, a reclusive older man, has a best friend in his dog, Red. When three teens kill Red without reason, Avery sets out for justice and redemption, attempting to follow the letter of the law. But when the law fails him, and the boys' father clearly defines right and wrong in his own way, Avery must avenge himself by any means possible.

This thriller follows the return of a politician’s young son who was presumed dead after disappearing over a decade earlier. As the mysterious young man is welcomed back into his family, suspicions emerge — is he really who he says he is?

This film tells the tale of the Harper Affair, in which young Jimmy Harper finds his life of promise turn into a life of debauchery and murder thanks to the new drug menace marijuana. Along the way he receives help from his girlfriend Mary and Jesus himself, but always finds himself in the arms of the Reefer Man and the rest of the denizens of the Reefer Den.

Set in the 1950s, a a group of young girls in upstate New York form their own gang.

A talentless teen will do anything to get on TV's "The Voice." Meanwhile, her father, a municipal worker, creates an uproar when a video of his rants at City Hall goes viral.

A woman and her son must leave a small South Carolina town because of her wild behavior.

Set against the backdrop of a decaying Midwestern town, a murder becomes the focal point of three people who work in a doll factory.

Set in the changing world of the late 1960s, Susanna Kaysen's prescribed "short rest" from a psychiatrist she had met only once becomes a strange, unknown journey into Alice's Wonderland, where she struggles with the thin line between normal and crazy. Susanna soon realizes how hard it is to get out once she has been committed, and she ultimately has to choose between the world of people who belong inside or the difficult world of reality outside.

A wealthy Iranian family struggles to contain a teenager's growing sexual rebellion and her brother's newfound conservatism.

Set in South Carolina in 1964, this is the tale of Lily Owens a 14 year-old girl who is haunted by the memory of her late mother. To escape her lonely life and troubled relationship with her father, Lily flees with Rosaleen, her caregiver and only friend, to a South Carolina town that holds the secret to her mother's past.

Jane Eyre is an orphan cast out as a young girl by her aunt, Mrs. Reed, and sent to be raised in a harsh charity school for girls. There she learns to be come a teacher and eventually seeks employment outside the school. Her advertisement is answered by the housekeeper of Thornfield Hall, Mrs. Fairfax.

Georgia Rule follows a rebellious, uncontrollable teenager who is hauled off by her dysfunctional mother to spend the summer with her grandmother. Her journey will lead all three women to revelations of buried family secrets and an understanding that - regardless what happens - the ties that bind can never be broken.

A 16-year-old girl and her extended family are left reeling after her calculating grandmother unveils an array of secrets on her deathbed.

In the boring desert of New Mexico, a single mother raises her two teenage daughters, Shade and Trudi, whose deepest desire is to leave the dead calm town. Shade is the type to escape in her extravagant fantasies while Trudi is so rebelious it could drive her away.

When teenager Ren and his family move from big-city Chicago to a small town in the West, he's in for a real case of culture shock after discovering he's living in a place where music and dancing are illegal.

In 1960, seven pre-teen outcasts fight an evil demon who poses as a child-killing clown. Thirty years later, they reunite to stop the demon once and for all when it returns to their hometown.

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.

Matt Travis is good-looking, popular, and his school's best competitive swimmer, so everyone is shocked when he inexplicably commits suicide. As the following year unfolds, each member of his family struggles to recover from the tragedy with mixed results.

When a teenage girl says she's the victim of a secret network called The Sisterhood of Night, a quiet suburban town becomes the backdrop for a modern-day Salem witch trial.

Loosely based on the Charles Dickens' classic novel, "Great Expectations" is a sensual tale of a young man's unforgettable passage into manhood, and the three individuals who will undeniably change his life forever. Through the surprising interactions of these vivid characters, "Great Expectations" takes a unique and contemporary look at life's great coincidences.

A vivid, dynamic Southern coming-of-age drama, takes place in the transitional space between high school and college, when life seems to be all questions and no answers, and the future is scarily wide open. Set in and around a Charleston, SC Baptist church, weaving through this ensemble piece are three main characters - Brea, an introspective pastor's daughter experiencing debilitating doubt, the hyperactive Laura, Brea's best friend and a devout believer, and Tim, the open-hearted son of a single father, confronting his homosexuality for the first time. Tensions and buried feelings abound, as colleges are chosen and adults behave badly, as Brea, Laura and Tim attempt to hang onto what they have, all the while yearning to break free.

The Munns, father John and sons Chris and Tim, recede to the woods of rural Georgia. Their life together is forever changed with the arrival of Uncle Deel, though the tragedy that follows forces troubled Chris to become a man.

Sylvia Barrett is a rookie teacher at New York's inner-city Calvin Coolidge High: her lit classes are overcrowded, a window is broken, there's no chalk, books arrive late. The administration is concerned mainly with forms and rules (there's an up and and a down staircase); bells ring at the wrong time. Nevertheless, she tries. How she handles the chaos and her despair in her first semester makes up the film: a promising student drops out, another sleeps through class, a girl with a crush on a male teacher gets suicidal, and a bright but troublesome student misunderstands Sylvia's reaching out. A discussion of Dickens, parents' night, and a mock trial highlight the term. Can she make it?

Mark Hunter is an intelligent but shy teenager who has just moved to suburban Arizona from New York. Unbeknownst to his parents and peers, at 10pm each school night Mark takes to the shortwave radio in his basement and transforms into pirate DJ "Hard Harry". Mark's show, at once thoughtful and profane, becomes an underground hit with students at his high school, inspiring the wrath of his principal and the Federal Communications Commission [FCC].

This is a film about a troubled teen, Sean Randall, who is falsely accused of planning a Columbine shooting scenario. It all begins when an unlikely bond forms between Sean (Connor Jessup) and a preppy teenage girl named Deanna Roy (Alexia Fast). Deanna's boyfriend is deeply threatened by Sean and Deanna's friendship, resulting in a violent confrontation. Seeking to protect himself, Sean issues a death threat online - and is swiftly arrested. When the police raid Sean's home, they find rifles, shotguns, knives and ammunition - all property of Sean's father Ricky (Michael Buie), an avid hunter. They also find a supposed "hit list" with twenty names of people who have tormented Sean. The authorities and the media proclaim another Columbine has been narrowly averted, and soon Sean faces a terrifying imprisonment in a youth detention facility. Sean's only hope is to overcome his dark image, and prove his innocence to Deanna and to his community.

A look inside a tragedy through the eyes of a survivor. Based on actual events, April Showers is about picking up the pieces in the direct aftermath of school violence

People disappear every year out in the snow--but this year, something is adding to the body count. Jim and his research team study the Canadian Lynx every year. This year, he has to take his rebelling 16 year-old daughter, Emmy, with him. But the lynx are missing. As Jim and his team try to find why, something stalks them--a predator no prey can escape.

When Juli meets Bryce in the second grade, she knows it's true love. After spending six years trying to convince Bryce the same, she's ready to give up - until he starts to reconsider.

Bob Revere is a small town Mayor and combat decorated veteran. He faces a root of bitterness from his past filled with heartbreaking loss. His grandson comes back into his life after many years to ask the most important question, “What are we doing with our life to make a difference?” Bob had grown apathetic along with an entire town. Now with the help of children, a group of people all band together to inspire hope, take back the freedoms that are being lost and take a stand for truth. The cast includes Marshall Teague (Roadhouse), Jennifer O’Neill (Summer of ‘42), Fred Williamson (Black Ceasar) and Jenna Boyd (Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants).

A track coach in a small California town transforms a team of athletes into championship contenders.