20 best movies like Imperial Dreams (2014)

An act of civil disobedience turns into a standoff with police when homeless people in Cincinnati take over the public library to seek shelter from the bitter cold.

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

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.

Inspired by a true story, “Beyond the Blackboard” is about a 24-year-old first-time teacher who makes a difference in the lives of the homeless children she teaches in a shelter’s makeshift classroom. Set in 1987 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, this movie tells the story a brand-new teacher and Mom who is given a tougher than expected teaching job and winds up teaching homeless children in a school that is housed in a room and called, literally, The School with No Name. She has some personal prejudicial hurdles to cross before she is able to be a true teacher for these children and of course there are hurdles like the lack of books and supplies.

Jamal Malik is an impoverished Indian teen who becomes a contestant on the Hindi version of ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?’ but, after he wins, he is suspected of cheating.

Jamie Fitzpatrick and Nona Alberts are two women from opposites sides of the social and economic track, but they have one thing in common: a mission to fix their community's broken school and ensure a bright future for their children. The two women refuse to let any obstacles stand in their way as they battle a bureaucracy that's hopelessly mired in traditional thinking, and they seek to re-energize a faculty that has lost its passion for teaching.

At the lowest point of his life, Richie gets a call from his estranged sister, asking him to look after his nine-year old niece, Sophia, for a few hours.

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.

Each member of a group of people has a connection to a self-help book authored by a reclusive former football coach.

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.

The coach of a women's swim team parlays her success into an opportunity to build her school's men's golf team.

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.

As law enforcement officers, Adam Mitchell, Nathan Hayes, and their partners are confident and focused. They willingly stand up to the worst the streets have to offer. Yet at the end of the day, they face a challenge that none of them are truly prepared to tackle: fatherhood. They know that God desires to turn the hearts of fathers to their children, but their children are beginning to drift further and further away from them. When tragedy hits home, these men are left wrestling with their hopes, their fears, their faith, and their fathering. Can a new found urgency help these dads draw closer to God ... and to their children? COURAGEOUS is the fourth release of Sherwood Pictures, the movie making ministry of Sherwood Church in Albany, Georgia.

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.

Henry struggles to bond with his estranged son, Gabriel, who suffers from a brain tumor that prevents him from forming new memories. With Gabriel unable to shed the beliefs and interests that caused their physical and emotional distance, Henry must learn to embrace his son's choices and try to connect with him through music.

Welcome to Fuller Junction, Wisconsin, a friendly small town settled by Norwegian farmers. Here we see the exploits of two young cousins, Selma and Arnold, who learn about their world and experience the ups and downs of life as the season pass.

Teenager Homer Macauley stays at home in small-town Ithaca to support his family while his older brother Marcus prepares to go to war.

An ex-con moves to L.A. to find work and creates a disturbance by fighting for a position. More importantly he touches the lives of many of his neighbors including an older man dying of cancer, a young married couple whose husband is too proud to accept a lesser position which causes strife with his wife, and a young boy on the verge of getting in trouble with street gangs.

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

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

This film is a glimpse into the life, love and the unconquerable spirit of the legendary Bruce Lee. From a childhod of rigorous martial arts training, Lee realizes his dream of opening his own kung-fu school in America. Before long, he is discovered by a Hollywood producer and begins a meteroric rise to fame and an all too short reign as one the most charasmatic action heroes in cinema history.

Clara and her two sons escape from her abusive husband with little more than their car and plan to start over in New York. After the car towed away, the family meets Alice, who gets them into an emergency shelter. While stealing food at a Russian restaurant called ‘Winter Palace’, Clara meets Marc, who has been given the chance to help the old eatery regain its former glory. The ‘Winter Palace’ soon becomes a place of unexpected encounters between people who are all undergoing some sort of crisis and whom fate has now brought together.

Young Cuban Rafael just buried his mother, and comes to Houston to meet his father John for the first time. The difficult part is that John doesn't know he is Rafael's father. John runs a dance studio, and everyone prepares for the World Open Dance championship in Las Vegas. It soon becomes clear Rafael is a very good dancer, and Ruby is the biggest hope for the studio at the championship.

In this uplifting film based on a true story, coach Jim Ellis (Terrence Howard) shocks the community and changes lives when, aided by a local janitor (Bernie Mac), he sets out to form Philadelphia's first black swim team. But the odds are against them as they battle rigid rules, racism and more.

In Brooklyn circa 1900, the Nolans manage to enjoy life on pennies despite great poverty and Papa's alcoholism. We come to know these people well through big and little troubles: Aunt Sissy's scandalous succession of "husbands"; the removal of the one tree visible from their tenement; and young Francie's desire to transfer to a better school...if irresponsible Papa can get his act together.

Fed up with her deadbeat grown kids and marginal urban existence, Juanita takes a Greyhound bus to Paper Moon, Montana - where she reinvents herself and finds her mojo.

A romantic drama set in 1961 that follows a young studio extra's ambitious efforts to reunite with the French girl he loves after being separated by the construction of the Berlin Wall.

Tod Lubitch is born with a deficient immune system. As such, he must spend the rest of his life in a completely sterile environment. His room is completely hermetically sealed against bacteria and virus, his food is specially prepared, and his only human contact comes in the form of gloved hands. The movie follows his life into a teenager.

After the unexpected death of their daughter, a couple work to build a state of the art children's hospital where families are welcomed into the healing process.

PK, an English orphan terrorized for his family's political beliefs in Africa, turns to his only friend, a kindly world-wise prisoner, Geel Piet. Geel teaches him how to box with the motto “fight with your fists and lead with your heart”. As he grows to manhood, PK uses these words to take on the system and the injustices he sees around him - and finds that one person really can make a difference.

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.

Quickie-mart employee Melissa and paraplegic Richie are very much in love. Supported only by Melissa’s small hourly wage, they are nevertheless thrilled to learn that Melissa is pregnant. Then their situation deteriorates, and their tenuous financial situation threatens to bring their happy life crashing down.

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.

The real-life story of Gisella Perl, a Jewish Hungarian doctor imprisoned in the notorious Auschwitz death camp of World War II.

Up-and-coming sports reporter rescues a homeless man ("Champ") only to discover that he is, in fact, a boxing legend believed to have passed away. What begins as an opportunity to resurrect Champ's story and escape the shadow of his father's success becomes a personal journey as the ambitious reporter reexamines his own life and his relationship with his family.

Dark Night enigmatically unfolds over the course of a lazy summer day, as it traces the events leading up to a mass shooting in a suburban multiplex. Abandoning the narrative confines of the true crime genre, the story is told through fragmented moments from the lives of several characters, whose fates are tragically intertwined. As the sky grows darker, the placid surface of daily life becomes disturbed by a lurking and inevitable horror.

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.

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.

Aibileen Clark is a middle-aged African-American maid who has spent her life raising white children and has recently lost her only son; Minny Jackson is an African-American maid who has often offended her employers despite her family's struggles with money and her desperate need for jobs; and Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan is a young white woman who has recently moved back home after graduating college to find out her childhood maid has mysteriously disappeared. These three stories intertwine to explain how life in Jackson, Mississippi revolves around "the help"; yet they are always kept at a certain distance because of racial lines.

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.

Two brothers fight to escape a violent and poor neighborhood in Caracas by playing soccer. Daniel wishes to play professionally while Julio supports the family with dirty money. The opportunity of a lifetime comes when a talent scout invites them to the Caracas Football Club. The boys' mother dies in a shootout forcing each brother to decide what it is more important to them:family, revenge, or achieving their dreams.

Kate and Charlie like to have a good time. Their marriage thrives on a shared fondness for music, laughter… and getting smashed. When Kate’s partying spirals into hard-core asocial behavior, compromising her job as an elementary schoolteacher, something’s got to give. But change isn’t exactly a cakewalk. Sobriety means she will have to confront the lies she’s been spinning at work, her troubling relationship with her mother, and the nature of her bond with Charlie.

Four young people navigate the suburban wonderland of metro-Detroit looking for love and adventure on the last weekend of summer.

The true story of an 84 year-old Kenyan villager and ex Mau Mau freedom fighter who fights for his right to go to school for the first time to get the education he could never afford.

Gary, a musician, is trapped in an unhappy relationship with his live-in lover, Dora. He becomes enthralled with a beautiful seductress who enters his dreams, and tries to control his dream-state so he can spend more and more time with her. When Gary sees his mystery woman's face on a bus billboard, he discovers she is real, and fate brings him an opportunity to meet her.

A love triangle involving a photographer, a director and an actress.

When principal Joe Clark takes over decaying Eastside High School, he's faced with students wearing gang colors and graffiti-covered walls. Determined to do anything he must to turn the school around, he expels suspected drug dealers, padlocks doors and demands effort and results from students, staff and parents. Autocratic to a fault, this real-life educator put it all on the lin

When a high school football star is suddenly stricken with irreversible total blindness, he must decide whether to live a safe handicapped life or bravely return to the life he once knew and the sport he still loves.

A lawyer takes on a case of a prison guard in South Africa who is traumatized by the executions he's witnessed.

Hardened by years in foster care, a teenage girl from Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighborhood decides that wrestling boys is the only way back to her estranged father.