20 best movies like Hillbilly Elegy (2020)

A pregnant Colombian teenager becomes a drug mule to make some desperately needed money for her family.

Alan, Red, and Smitty spend high summer on the Jersey Shore roving the boardwalk and getting into trouble. But the discovery of good old fashioned treasure sets the friends on an escalating course of suspicion and violence in this atmospheric thriller.

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.

Jaime Escalante is a mathematics teacher in a school in a hispanic neighbourhood. Convinced that his students have potential, he adopts unconventional teaching methods to try and turn gang members and no-hopers into some of the country's top algebra and calculus students.

Sentaro runs a small bakery that serves dorayaki pastries filled with sweet red bean paste (“an”). When an old lady, Tokue, offers to help in the kitchen he reluctantly accepts. She will soon prove to have magic in her hands…

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.

19-year-old Ben Burns unexpectedly returns home to his family's suburban home on Christmas Eve morning. Ben's mother, Holly, is relieved and welcoming but wary of her son staying clean. Over a turbulent 24 hours, new truths are revealed, and a mother's undying love for her son is tested as she does everything in her power to keep him safe.

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.

Though only 14 years old, May is selected to be the third wife of a wealthy landowner. Her new home seems idyllic, her husband favours her, and she quickly becomes pregnant with what she is certain will be the desired male progeny. But trouble is quietly brewing: she witnesses a forbidden tryst that will spark a chain reaction of misfortunes — and stir in May urges that until now had been dormant.

After the tragic death of star volleyball player Caroline "Line" Found, a team of dispirited high school girls must band together under the guidance of their tough-love coach in hopes of winning the state championship!

After the bizarre death of her brother, Johana Burwood must return home after four years, to face her strange siblings, her out of touch father and her very touchy past.

Boyz n the Hood is the popular and successful film and social criticism from John Singleton about the conditions in South Central Los Angeles where teenagers are involved in gun fights and drug dealing on a daily basis.

Detectives and best friends Andreas and Simon lead vastly different lives; Andreas has settled down with his beautiful wife and son; while Simon, recently divorced, spends most of his waking hours getting drunk at the local strip club. But all that changes when the two of them are called out to a domestic dispute between a junkie couple, caught in a vicious cycle of violence and drugs. It all looks very routine – until Andreas finds the couple's infant son, crying in a closet. The usually collected policeman finds himself confronted with his own powerlessness and is shaken to his core. As Andreas slowly loses his grip on justice, it suddenly becomes up to the unruly Simon to restore the balance between right and wrong.

In 1993, teenager Cameron is sent to a gay conversion therapy center after getting caught with another girl in the back seat of a car on prom night. Run by the strict and severe Dr. Lydia Marsh and her brother, Reverend Rick, the center is built upon repenting for "same sex attraction." In the face of intolerance and denial, Cameron meets a group of fellow sinners including the amputee stoner Jane, and her friend, the Lakota Two-Spirit, Adam. Together, this group of teenagers form an unlikely family as they fight to survive.

Spurred by a white woman's lie, vigilantes destroy a black Florida town and slay inhabitants in 1923.

Erin Bell is an LAPD detective who, as a young cop, was placed undercover with a gang in the California desert with tragic results. When the leader of that gang re-emerges many years later, she must work her way back through the remaining members and into her own history with them to finally reckon with the demons that destroyed her past.

The story of an emotionally detached backup dancer named Athena, who must return home to Florida to help care for her estranged father, Jack, after he gets diagnosed with cancer. There she must contend with Jack’s irresponsible lifestyle while looking after six year old Honey Bunny who is only beginning to grasp the err in Jack’s ways.

A girl struggling with asthma is taken to a clinic in South Tyrol to be cured. After some time she decides to get out of this hell (that's how she feels about it) and soon she'll meet a new friend. Together they try to reach the peak of a mountain where, according to an old custom, she can be healed.

A young refugee of the Sudanese Civil War who wins a lottery for relocation to the United States with three other lost boys. Encountering the modern world for the first time, they develop an unlikely friendship with a brash American woman assigned to help them, but the young man struggles to adjust to this new life and his feelings of guilt about the brother he left behind.

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.

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.

The story of the onset of the HIV-AIDS crisis in New York City in the early 1980s, taking an unflinching look at the nation's sexual politics as gay activists and their allies in the medical community fight to expose the truth about the burgeoning epidemic to a city and nation in denial.

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.

Sergei and Kira were considered the most beautiful bohemian couple among cinema lovers of Saint Petersburg in the early 90’s. Their fantastic love affair ended with Kira leaving town, fleeing for new life, new relationship. Sergei has died shortly after. Only after a few years does Kira realize that she never stopped loving Sergei. And that she’s doomed to stay in a neverending dialogue with a dead lover.

Romeo Aldea, a physician living in a small mountain town in Transylvania, has raised his daughter Eliza with the idea that once she turns 18, she will leave to study and live abroad. His plan is close to succeeding. Eliza has won a scholarship to study psychology in the UK. She just has to pass her final exams – a formality for such a good student. On the day before her first written exam, Eliza is assaulted in an attack that could jeopardize her entire future. Now Romeo has to make a decision. There are ways of solving the situation, but none of them using the principles he, as a father, has taught his daughter.

Two suicidal paraplegic junkies hustle their way through the city streets trying to find a reason to live.

Over the course of one day, a shy 13-year-old forms a bond with his troubled uncle.

For teenage twins Robert and Elena, a weekend can seem endless yet still fly by. Time almost stands still while discussing philosophy, lying in a blissful cornfield near a remote gas station. They are in their own little world, a twin world of twin games and twin love. A confined world where emotions rise, where pressure mounts into rage… The turmoil of adolescence.

A young drug dealer watches as his high-rolling life is dismantled in the wake of his cousin's murder, which sees his best friend arrested for the crime.

An eighteen year old high school drop out and his twenty-seven year old friend start trafficking marijuana across the border of Canada in order to make money and their lives are changed forever.

A drama teacher's taboo relationship with an unstable student strikes a nerve in her jealous classmate, sparking a vengeful chain of events within their suburban high school that draws parallels to 'The Crucible'.

In 1957, a son and mother flee the East and an abusive boyfriend to find a new life, and end up in Seattle, where the mother meets a polite garage mechanic. The boy continually gets into trouble by hanging out with the wrong crowd. The mom marries the mechanic, but they soon find out that he's an abusive and unreasoning alcoholic, and they struggle to maintain hope in an impossible situation as the boy grows up with plans to escape the small town by any means possible. Based on a true story by Tobias Wolff.

After Davey's father is killed in a hold-up, she and her mother and younger brother visit relatives in New Mexico. Here Davey is befriended by a young man who helps her find the strength to carry on and conquer her fears.

A controlling father’s attempts to ensure that his two children succeed in high school backfire after his son experiences a career-ending sports injury. Their familial bonds are eventually placed under severe strain by an unexpected tragedy.

Years after a childhood prank goes horribly wrong, a clique of South Central LA teens find themselves terrorized during Homecoming weekend by a killer hell-bent on revenge.

Mouse desperately wants to join The Midnight Clique, the infamous Baltimore dirt bike riders who rule the summertime streets. When Midnight’s leader, Blax, takes 14-year-old Mouse under his wing, Mouse soon finds himself torn between the straight-and-narrow and a road filled with fast money and violence.

Despite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis. But when a patient named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel's story is about to be completely rewritten.

Ava, 13, is spending the summer on the Atlantic coast when she learns that she will lose her sight sooner than expected. Her mother decides to act as if everything were normal so as to spend their best summer ever. Ava confronts the problem in her own way. She steals a big black dog that belongs to a young man on the run...

Samantha Kingston has everything. Then, everything changes. After one fateful night, she wakes up with no future at all. Trapped into reliving the same day over and over, she begins to question just how perfect her life really was.

After running away from her abusive mother, a streetwise teen seeks refuge with her father, but he rejects her when he learns that she's pregnant.

A teenage con artist tricks a desperate mother into hiring her as a live-in companion for her autistic daughter.

Single mom Laura, along with her awkward 14 year-old son Henry is forced to drive Jack, her estranged, care-free pot dealing father across country after he's kicked out of yet another nursing home.

Stevie is a sweet 13-year-old about to explode. His mom is loving and attentive, but a little too forthcoming about her romantic life. His big brother is a taciturn and violent bully. So Stevie searches his working-class Los Angeles suburb for somewhere to belong. He finds it at the Motor Avenue skate shop.

The lives of two different families collide when their children begin a relationship that leads to a tragic accident.

One day in the life of Anders, a young recovering drug addict, who takes a brief leave from his treatment center to interview for a job and catch up with old friends in Oslo.

In a town of low-income and fractured families, a group of teens are lured into working for a dangerous drug dealer. A new girl arrives who hides a dangerous secret that will impact everybody and change their lives forever.

Benjamin Morton's life changed forever the day he met the little girl next door. Ava was and always would be the girl of his dreams. From the innocence of a childhood friendship, through adolescent attraction, their love strengthens and grows. When life takes a turn neither of them expected, their entire future is called into question.

17 year-old Ree Dolly sets out to track down her father, who put their house up for his bail bond and then disappeared. If she fails, Ree and her family will be turned out into the Ozark woods. Challenging her outlaw kin's code of silence and risking her life, Ree hacks through the lies, evasions and threats offered up by her relatives and begins to piece together the truth.

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.

The story of a precocious six year-old and her ragtag group of friends whose summer break is filled with childhood wonder, possibility and a sense of adventure while the adults around them struggle with hard times.