20 best movies like Ixcanul (2015)

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.

Spain, 1966. An English teacher who travels to Almería when he hears that John Lennon is making a film there befriends with a 16-year-old boy who has run away from home and a young girl who also seems to be running away from something.

Inspired by events that took place in Massachusetts, Delphine and Muriel Coulin's provocative debut focuses on a group of bored teenage girls who all make an irrevocable pact. When Camille (Louise Grinberg) accidentally becomes pregnant, she encourages her friends and fellow high school classmates to follow suit. It's only a matter of time, before 17 girls in the high school are pregnant and the town is thrown into a world of chaos. Set in the writer/directors' small, seaside hometown of Lorient in Brittany, 17 Girls is a reflection on adolescence, body image, friendship and the perplexing realities of growing up.

Delia, a young Romanian girl, comes to Bucharest with her parents to collect a prize she has won in a contest organized by a soft-drinks company. The prize is a beautiful new car. All Delia has to do now is appear in front of the camera in a commercial. All goes well until it becomes clear that Delia and her parents have very different ideas about what to do with the new car. Meanwhile, the contest's sponsor needs a radiant prize-winner with a gleaming smile. A wicked satire and a psychological portrait of a society perverted by its slavery to capitalism and consumerism

During the 1970s a student named Gilles gets entangled in contemporary political turmoils although he would rather just be a creative artist. While torn between his solidarity to his friends and his personal ambitions he falls in love with Christine.

A deadbeat teacher helps an angry, aimless teenager find direction in life during his final year of high school.

Eccentric British painter J.M.W. Turner lives his last 25 years with gusto and secretly becomes involved with a seaside landlady, while his faithful housekeeper bears an unrequited love for him.

On the edge of a crumbling city, 11-year-old Alexander lives in a sequestered commune alongside other children, their mothers, and charismatic leader, Gregori. Gregori teaches the children how to raise livestock, grow vegetables, work as a community - and how to kill. With the birth of a new baby brother weighing on his mind, Alexander begins to question Gregori’s overpowering influence on the children and their training to become assassins. Threatened by his increasing unwillingness to fall in line, Gregori’s behavior turns erratic and adversarial toward the child he once considered a son. With the two set dangerously at odds and the commune’s way of life disintegrating, the residents fear a violent resolution is at hand.

When carefree, young Lenni and his girlfriend find themselves expecting a child, he ends up looking for a role model in all the wrong places as he becomes involved with local right-wing activists.

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

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. 

After transferring to a new school, a teenage girl finds her troubled past exposed when she innocently signs up for a singing club.

Araf is the story of Zehra and Olgun whose lives are caught in a vacuum. The world in which they live and work is a place of throwaway culture and constant change. They too are waiting for a chance to change and escape from their empty, monotonous lives.

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

A drama set at a Swiss ski resort and centered on a boy who supports his sister by stealing from wealthy guests.

A summer day in Italy. The camera follows the deaf-mute Giacomo and a childhood girlfriend Stefi closely – in the woods, by the river – without wanting to disrupt the mystery of their relationship, between restrained sensuality and childhood games.

Eka and Natia leave their childhood behind and ignore societal customs to escape from their turbulent family lives.

Set in the mid 1990s in Singapore, ILOILO chronicles the relationship between a family and their maid from Ilo Ilo, a province in the Philippines.

Romeo11 is a frequent visitor to internet chat rooms and social networking sites, where he's been engaging in an ongoing flirtation with an attractive woman. But Romeo11 doesn't actually exist; he's the creation of Rami, a teenager who lives with his family in a Lebanese community in Montreal. Rami walks with a limp from an accident years ago, and his controlling father Ziad, who runs a small diner, insists on making Rami's choices for him. Ziad has decided his son will enroll in business school, but Rami, who is lonely and a bit of a dreamer, doesn't have his heart in it and often skips his community college classes. Rami's older sister and one of his few confidantes, prepares to get married, he begins wondering about what sort of a life he can make for himself, and when the young woman insists she wants to meet Romeo11 in person, he hatches a scheme to pass himself off as the character he's invented.

In a godforsaken Kazakh village four adolescent teenagers try to find their place in the world...

Ali, Kwita, Omar and Boubker are street kids. The daily dose of glue sniffing represents their only escape from reality. Since they left Dib and his gang, they have been living on the portside of Casablanca. They live in constant fear of Dib's revenge. Ali wants to become a sailor - when he was living with his mother, a prostitute, he used to listen to a fairy tale about the sailor who discovered the miracle island with two suns. Instead of finding his island in the dream, Ali and his friends are confronted with Dib's gang. Matters are getting serious.

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.

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

When an aging matriarch starts showing signs of dementia, her dysfunctional family in Istanbul must navigate a minefield of unresolved issues to care for her.

As the Algerian War draws to a close, a teenager with a girlfriend starts feeling homosexual urges for two of his classmates: a country boy, and a French-Algerian intellectual.

The story of an adult and a teenage couple during a brief summer holiday by the sea. While Nic's parents remain trapped in a precarious mutual dependency despite repeated attempts at reconciliation, their 12-year-old son tries to come to terms with his father's traumatizing violent outbursts in games with other children. He tries to teach Marie, who is of his age and suffers from her own relationship with her father, to feel nothing. In fact, both of them are transformed by their experience of the joys and pains of first love.

The film tells a story of a divorced couple trying to raise their young son. The story follows the boy for twelve years, from first grade at age 6 through 12th grade at age 17-18, and examines his relationship with his parents as he grows.

A sex therapist goes through puberty after the successful removal of a benign tumor resting against his pituitary gland. He experiences all the changes and effects of puberty over a three-week period.

Paul Gauguin feels smothered by the atmosphere prevailing in Paris in the year 1891. Around him, everything is so artificial and conventional: he needs authenticity to renew his art. Failing to convince his wife Mette and his five children to follow him to Paradise Lost, he sets out for Tahiti alone. Once there, he chooses to settle down in Mataiera, a village far away from Papeete, installing himself in a native-made hut. He soon starts working passionately, painting and carving in a style close to the primitive art specific to the island. During his two-year stay the artist will experience poverty, cardiac problems and other displeasures but also happiness in the arms of Tehura, a beautiful young native girl.

Alex,Gabi and Oki, three teenagers living in a big city, are completely unknown to their parents, to their teachers and for themselves. Their emotional isolation, led to the limit, will have unexpected and terrible consequences that will shake society.

Jake Taylor has everything. He has a beautiful girl, he's the champion in basketball and beer pong, and everyone loves him. Then, an old childhood friend, whom Jake used to be friends with, commits suicide. Jake begins to think. He wonders what he could've done to save his friend's life. A youth minister tells him that Jake needs God. So Jake becomes a Christian. However, things begin to spin out of control. His dad is cheating on his mom, his girlfriend is pregnant, and his former friends ridicule and mock him. During all this, Jake is going to realize just what it means to be a Christian and how, to save a life.

The film tells the story of Malony and his education as he grows from a six-year-old into an 18-year-old. A minors’ judge and a caseworker work tirelessly to try to save the young offender.

Meeting his handicapped son for the first time, a young father attempts to forge a relationship with the teenager.

Days before the end of the school year, Liliana gives Janek an ultimatum, giving him 24 hours to either prove his love for her or forget about her altogether.

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.

After an accidental drug overdose, a talented teenage DJ goes to live with his estranged father in a small Army town, where he gets to the bottom of his own pain and learns empathy for others.

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

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.

Bucharest 1989 - the last year of Ceausecu's dictatorship. Eva lives with her parents and her 7 year old brother, Lalalilu. One day at school, Eva and her boyfriend accidentally break a bust of Ceausescu. They are forced to confess their crime before a disciplinary committee and Eva is expelled from school and transferred to a reformatory establishment. There she meets Andrei, and decides to escape Romania with him. Lalalilu becomes convinced that Ceausescu is the main reason for Eva's decision to leave. So with his friends from school he devises a plan to kill the dictator.

Frank and Simone have fulfilled a dream and live with their two children in a row house in the suburbs. They are a happy couple, until the day Frank is diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. The family is suddenly confronted with death.

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.

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.

The story of a normal Italian family in which come out the dreams of those who have lost their possibilities and of those who want to realize them. Carlo and Giulia are a married couple who have each given up their aspirations in order to live an average life. Their 19-year-old son, Paolo, is having trouble finding an identity, while their 18-year-old daughter, Valentina, has already figured out how to use sex to her advantage. The family goes through a crisis when Carlo begins having an affair, Giulia attempt to seduce the director of a local stage production she is in, and Valentina does what she does best to land an audition for a TV show

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.

Oppressed by her family setting, dead-end school prospects and the boys law in the neighborhood, Marieme starts a new life after meeting a group of three free-spirited girls. She changes her name, her dress code, and quits school to be accepted in the gang, hoping that this will be a way to freedom.

Joan Jett and Cherie Currie, two rebellious teenagers from Southern California, become the frontwomen for the Runaways -- the now-legendary group that paved the way for future generations of female rockers. Under the Svengalilike influence of impresario Kim Fowley, the band becomes a huge success.

In central Gothenburg, Sweden, a group of boys, aged 12-14, robbed other children on about 40 occasions between 2006 and 2008. The thieves used an elaborate scheme called the 'little brother number' or 'brother trick', involving advanced role-play and gang rhetoric rather than physical violence.

A teenage girl helps an escaped fugitive flee Germany into France, after extracting a promise that he will help her commit suicide.

Thanks to a strict Muslim upbringing that largely shielded him from the outside world, Tariq's first year of college proves transformative. That is, until the 9/11 terrorist attacks invite growing suspicion and distrust from his angry classmates.

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.