20 best movies like Crossing Over (2009)

Los Angeles citizens with vastly separate lives collide in interweaving stories of race, loss and redemption.

A young street magician is left to take care of his little sister after his mother's passing and turns to drug dealing in the Los Angeles party scene to keep a roof over their heads. When he gets into trouble with his supplier, his sister is kidnapped and he is forced to rely on both his sleight of hand and brilliant mind to save her.

A Chechen Muslim illegally immigrates to Hamburg and becomes a person of interest for a covert government team which tracks the movements of potential terrorists.

Set in a blighted, inner-city neighbourhood of London, Breaking and Entering examines an affair which unfolds between a successful British landscape architect and Amira, a Bosnian woman – the mother of a troubled teen son – who was widowed by the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

An idealistic rookie cop joins the LAPD to make ends meet while finishing law school, and is indoctrinated by a seasoned veteran. As time goes on, he loses his ambitions and family as police work becomes his entire life.

When a brutal carjacking yields a videocamera, a teenage boy decides to document his life and the lives of his fellow gangbangers.

The film follows the personal relationship between a father and his two sons, one of whom is a hit-man for the Russian mafia in Brooklyn.

Grand Canyon revolved around six residents from different backgrounds whose lives intertwine in modern-day Los Angeles. At the center of the film is the unlikely friendship of two men from different races and classes brought together when one finds himself in jeopardy in the other's rough neighborhood.

A lawyer defends her father accused of war crimes, but there is more to the case than she suspects.

A young Texan mother who loses her child to foster care begins smuggling Mexicans across the border.

A gardener in East L.A. struggles to keep his son away from gangs and immigration agents while traveling across town to perform landscaping work for the city's wealthy landowners.

After saving a Black Panther from some racist cops, a black male prostitute goes on the run from "the man" with the help of the ghetto community and some disillusioned Hells Angels.

A collection of intersecting short stories set in early 1980s Los Angeles, depicts a week in the lives of an assortment of socially alienated, mainly well-off characters who numb their sense of emptiness with casual sex, violence, and drugs.

An elite group of vice cops are fired from the L.A.P.D. for being over-zealous in their war against drugs. It is immediately apparent that some of their superiors are involved in the drug ring. Banded together, four of the banned cops (which quickly becomes three when one is killed early) band together to fight the drug ring undercover. They gain capital for weapons by ripping off minor drug dealers. Then well-armed they go after the kingpin (Boyd).

Lachlan MacAldonich is a self-described “lazy Scotsman” and former guitar player for a once-popular 1990s rock band. No longer famous, he now lives a comfortably numb existence working on an organic farm outside Los Angeles. He drinks himself into a stupor every night and retires to his shabby apartment to record his podcast, recounting the tragic deaths of great musicians. After a particularly heavy night of drowning his sorrows at a local watering hole, he is arrested for driving under the influence. This snag, coupled with a long-ago conviction for a drug offense, means Lachlan faces possible deportation. His only hope of remaining stateside is proving that his absence would cause extreme hardship for a spouse or relative – forcing him to confront relationships he thought were buried forever.

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

A cop clashes with his priest brother while investigating the brutal murder of a young prostitute

Five post grads figure the best way to get back at the unfair economy and live the life they've always wanted is to steal from the rich and give to themselves.

When a hard-working machinist loses a promotion to a Polish-born worker, he is seduced into joining the secretive Black Legion, which intimidates foreigners through violence.

A man is put to prison for 10 years. Coming out of prison he wants to live a normal life and stop with crime but his son has yet followed the criminal path of his father.

After crossing the border illegally for work, Miguel, a hard-working father and devoted husband, finds himself wrongfully accused of murdering a former sheriff’s wife. After learning of his imprisonment, Miguel’s pregnant wife tries to come to his aid and lands in the hands of corrupt coyotes who hold her for ransom. Dissatisfied with the police department’s investigation, the former sheriff tries to uncover the truth about his wife’s death and discovers disturbing evidence that will destroy one family’s future, or tear another’s apart.

When a retiring assassin realizes that he is the target of a hit, he winds up back in the game going head to head with a gang of younger, ruthless killers.

A dispossessed, violent man's life is a disastrous attempt to exist outside the social order. Successively deprived of parents and homes and with few other ties, he descends to the level of a cave dweller and falls deeper into crime and degradation.

Fed up with the cruelty and stupidity of American culture, an unlikely duo goes on a killing spree, killing reality TV stars, bigots and others they find repugnant in this black comedy.

Two con artists have spent 26 years training their only daughter to swindle, scam and steal at every turn. During a desperate and hastily conceived heist, they charm a stranger into joining them, only to have their entire world turned upside down.

The clues to a young woman's death come together as the lives of seemingly unrelated people begin to intersect.

Benjamin Garcia, Benny is deported from the United States. Back home and against a bleak picture, Benny gets involved in the drug business, in which he has for the first time in his life, a spectacular rise surrounded by money, women, violence and fun. But very soon he will discover that criminal life does not always keep its promises.

A darkly comic swamp noir story of two best friends set in the late 1980s. Based on the novels by Joe R. Lansdale, the series follows Hap Collins, an East Texas white boy with a weakness for Southern women, and Leonard Pine, a gay, black Vietnam vet with a hot temper.

Strong and successful Alice Martin is a fraud investigator who's about to be the victim of fraud by her fiancé. Between her cases, she is determined to find him before it ruins her career.

Utah and his girlfriend Opal, are drug addicts living on the streets in rural Ohio. After getting recruited by body broker Wood, and offered treatment in Los Angeles, Wood takes Utah under his wing and introduces him to treatment center mogul Vin. Wood and Vin bring Utah in on their lucrative and illegal dealings, where saving lives comes second to the bottom line.

Fifteen years after the events of the feature film, Kyle Craig is assigned to go undercover in an elite squad of the LAPD as Detective Frank Rourke’s trainee to spy on him and report on his off-book methods. As Frank starts teaching his principled trainee the way of the streets, they form an uneasy alliance that will change the course of both their lives irrevocably.

Academy Award Winner Cuba Gooding, Jr. is a Border Patrol Officer in the New Mexico desert with a secret past that is about to catch up with him. When his old gang leader tracks him down and forces him to smuggle drugs across the border, he must choose between the life he swore to leave behind and saving his family at any cost.

J.J. is a rookie in the Sheriff's Department and the first black officer at that station. Racial tensions run high in the department as some of J.J.'s fellow officers resent his presence. His only real friend is the other new trooper, the first female officer to work there, who also suffers similar discrimination in the otherwise all-white male work environment. When J.J. becomes increasingly aware of police corruption during the murder trial of Teddy Woods, whom he helped to arrest, he faces difficult decisions and puts himself into grave personal danger in the service of justice.

A fishing-boat crew takes on a dangerous commission to smuggle a group of illegal immigrants from China to Korea.

When a prostitute is found dead in a Los Angeles skyscraper occupied by a large Japanese corporation, detectives John Conner and Web Smith are called in to investigate. Although Conner has previous experience working in Japan, cultural differences make their progress difficult until a security disc showing the murder turns up. Close scrutiny proves the disc has been doctored, and the detectives realize they're dealing with a cover-up as well.

Hours after his release from prison, Jesus Quintana pairs up with fellow misfits Petey and Marie for a freewheeling joyride of petty crime and romance.

Bill Scanlin loses his job and embarks on a life of crime. As Bill stays ahead of the law, he discovers that sometimes the only thing worse than getting caught is getting away with it.

A young street artist in East Los Angeles is caught between his father's obsession with lowrider car culture, his ex-felon brother and his need for self-expression.

Roy and Bo leave their small town the weekend after graduation for a short road trip to LA. Soon, they find themselves lashing out and leaving a trial of bodies behind them. The violence escalates throughout.

Spanning over two decades, "For the Love of Money" follows the true account of an Israeli immigrant who searches for his piece of the American dream.

Follows veteran police officer Dave Brown, the last of the renegade cops, as he struggles to take care of his family, and fights for his own survival.

Los Angeles homicide detective Jerry Beck searches for the murderer who killed a police officer on Christmas Eve. The investigation takes Beck inside the violent world of hate groups and white supremacists, who are hatching a deadly plot to attack even more innocent people. Beck must also confront his own personal demons, including his growing problem with alcohol, if he wants to track down and stop the violent neo-Nazis before it is too late.

A thriller set in New York City during the winter of 1981, statistically one of the most violent years in the city's history, and centered on a the lives of an immigrant and his family trying to expand their business and capitalize on opportunities as the rampant violence, decay, and corruption of the day drag them in and threaten to destroy all they have built.

As two teen prodigies try to master the art of time travel, a tragic police shooting sends them on a series of dangerous trips to the past.

The series follows Detective Carter, a radical LAPD detective, and Detective Lee, a by-the-book detective from Hong Kong, as they are forced into forming an unlikely partnership

Karen and Jack met in a mental hospital and fell in love. They set out to follow what Jack thinks is his destiny: killing Elvis Presley.

Jeff Powers is the newest member of a very elite and very secret LAPD division. Their mission is to target important criminals and to get them to stop. Police brutality is not a known term for the division and they will stop at nothing to get the job done, even if it means murder.

Based on true events, The Wannabe, a story about Thomas, a man obsessed with Mafia culture during the 1990s in New York City. When Thomas’s failed attempts to fix the trial of infamous mobster John Gotti gets him rejected by the people he idolizes most, he sets off on a drug infused crime spree with his girlfriend and longtime mob groupie, Rose, by brazenly robbing the local Mafia hangouts.

A Romanian police officer teams up with a small crew of bank robbers to pull off a heist by convincing everyone at the scene of the crime that they are only filming a movie.

Battling insomnia and undiagnosed PTSD, a war veteran works nights as a projectionist at a decrepit theater. While struggling to adapt to civilian life, he soon finds himself tangled in an inescapable web of seduction, addiction, and violence.