20 best movies like Mary Forever (1988)

Lucas, a 14-year-old boy inducted into the gang life in Washington D.C., is determined that his 10-year-old brother won't follow the same path. When an Afghanistan war veteran comes into the neighborhood, an opportunity arises.

Au revoir les enfants tells a heartbreaking story of friendship and devastating loss concerning two boys living in Nazi-occupied France. At a provincial Catholic boarding school, the precocious youths enjoy true camaraderie—until a secret is revealed. Based on events from writer-director Malle’s own childhood, the film is a subtle, precisely observed tale of courage, cowardice, and tragic awakening.

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 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.

Seven short films - each one focused on the plight of a different child protagonist.

The story of five teenage girls who form an unlikely bond after beating up a teacher who has sexually harassed them. They build a solid friendship but their wild ways begin to get out of control.

An all-black inner city school has to become an integrated school. Few dozen white kids are transfered there, but the black students are aggressively opposed to this. The school then approaches a tough black teacher for help.

Based on a true story: Norwegian winter, 1915. On the island Bastøy, outside Oslo, a group of young boys aged 11 to 18, are held in an institution for delinquent youth, notorious for its sadistic regime. One day a new boy, Erling, arrives, determined to escape from the island. After a tragic incident, he ends up leading the boys in a violent uprising. When the boys manage to take over the island, 150 soldiers are sent in to restore order.

Two children, Ignacio and Enrique, know love, the movies and fear in a religious school at the beginning of the 1960s. Father Manolo, director of the school and its professor of literature, is witness to and part of these discoveries. The three are followed through the next few decades, their reunion marking life and death.

Akbar has just turned eighteen. He has been held in a rehabilitation centre for committing murder at the age of sixteen when he was condemned to death. Legally speaking, he had to reach the age of eighteen so that the conviction could be carried out. Now, Akbar is transferred to prison to await the day of his execution. A'la, a friend of Akbar, who himself has undergone imprisonment for burglary, soon after his release tries desperately to gain the consent of Akbar's plaintiff so as to stop the execution

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

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.

Two teenage outsiders are demoralized daily at school, until an idea for vengeance offers them a terrifying release.

The life inside a farm in Italy at the beginning of the century. Many poor country families live there, and the owner pays them by their productivity. One of the families has a very clever child. They decide to send him to school instead of make him help them, although this represents a great sacrifice. The boy has to wake up very early and walk several miles to get to the school. One day the boy's shoes break when returning home, but they do not have money to buy other. What can they do?

An Italian high school student becomes infatuated with a woman he sees outside his class window. Her fiancée is in jail for being involved in a radical movement, and she spends much time in court providing moral support. At first she resists the student's advances, but eventually begins an affair with him. Their situation is condemned by her family and his father, who is the woman's psychologist.

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.

The lives of four women intersect in small-town America, where each is imperfectly blazing a trail.

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.

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 Justine’s family everyone is a vet and a vegetarian. At 16, she’s a gifted teen ready to take on her first year in vet school, where her older sister also studies. There, she gets no time to settle: hazing starts right away. Justine is forced to eat raw meat for the first time in her life. Unexpected consequences emerge as her true self begins to form.

Venice, 1596. Bassanio begs his friend Antonio, a prosperous merchant, to lend him a large sum of money so that he can woo Portia, a very wealthy heiress; but Antonio has invested his fortune abroad, so they turn to Shylock, a Jewish moneylender, and ask him for a loan.

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

Young and in prison for theft, Daphne falls in love with Josh, another inmate. Their love story exists through secret letters and fleeting conversations.

Betrayed by an informant, Philippe Gerbier finds himself trapped in a torturous Nazi prison camp. Though Gerbier escapes to rejoin the Resistance in occupied Marseilles, France, and exacts his revenge on the informant, he must continue a quiet, seemingly endless battle against the Nazis in an atmosphere of tension, paranoia and distrust.

Based on a true story. In Léon Blum high school in Créteil (France), a history teacher decides to have her weakest 10th grade class take a national history competition. This will change them.

Rome, 1984, Aria is nine-year-old girl. On the verge of divorce, Aria's infantile and selfish parents are too preoccupied with their careers and extra-marital affairs to properly tend to any of Aria's needs. While her two older sisters are pampered, Aria is treated with cold indifference. Yet she yearns to love and to be loved. At school, Aria excels academically but is considered a misfit by everyone. She is misunderstood. Aria finds comfort in her cat - Dac and in her best friend - Angelica. Thrown out of both parents' homes, abandoned by all, even her best friend, Aria finally reaches the limit of what she can bear. She makes an unexpected decision in her life.

A gritty coming of age thriller about a young girl sent to juvenile prison for the murder of her abusive step father. The film follows Anna Nix's journey into the dark world of an all girls jail where she discovers complex relationships, drugs, mental illness and her eventual search for redemption.

A family living on the outskirts of Moscow are mired in quarrels, discomfort and mutual oppression. They spit negative emotions at each other, forgetting about love, compassion and God. A tragedy will take them through a belated catharsis.

A drama based on the experiences of Agu, a child soldier fighting in the civil war of an unnamed African country. Follows the journey of a young boy, Agu, who is forced to join a group of soldiers in a fictional West African country. While Agu fears his commander and many of the men around him, his fledgling childhood has been brutally shattered by the war raging through his country, and he is at first torn between conflicting revulsion and fascination Depicts the mechanics of war and does not shy away from explicit, visceral detail, and paints a complex, difficult picture of Agu as a child soldier.

Elizabeth, a voluptuous, shy and unpopular girl, is the object of ridicule at school by the cool in-crowd. Her life spirals downward after the death of her only friend, her grandmother. But she has a crush on a popular boy at school, and a deranged plan to make all her dreams come true!

The 1990s. Empty shelves in the shops, an economic abyss and criminal dramas that unfold literally at every corner. The young leader of a criminal gang Anton Bykov, with the nickname “Bull”, must make money in whatever way to provide for his family. After a local shootout, Anton ends up in the police station, from where he is released at the intervention of Moscow’s crime lords. In exchange, the latter asks Anton for a small, but dangerous service

Everyone deserves a great love story. But for seventeen-year old Simon Spier it's a little more complicated: he's yet to tell his family or friends he's gay and he doesn't know the identity of the anonymous classmate he's fallen for online.

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.

Based on actual events that took place at Gwangju Inhwa School for the hearing-impaired, where young deaf students were the victims of repeated sexual assaults by faculty members over a period of five years in the early 2000s.

Set at a Southern college during the 1950s, three co-eds (Ally Sheedy, Virginia Madsen and Phoebe Cates) re-assess their values in light of the burgeoning civil rights movement.

Jean Paul and Chema have been together ten years. They have successful careers, a comfortable home and many friends. But that's all turned turned upside down when close friend Ivana rescues Hendrix from his broken home and asks them to care for the boy. Hendrix's mother Nina is a drug addict who suffers at the hands of her abusive partner Patrick. The men begin to consider making Hendrix part of their family. ~ Baseline StudioSystems

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.

A drama centered on an orphaned Palestinian girl growing up in the wake of the first Arab-Israeli war who finds herself drawn into the conflict.

Alevtina Romanova is a warden in the woman's colony, and the only thing that is different from her «iron lady» image is her voice - a voice which even a notable opera diva would envy. However, Alevtina has been ashamed of her talent since the times she was a kid and nowadays, preliminarily making sure no one's around, she rarely sings for herself. Despite the fact that Alevtina is trying to stay invisible, one of the prisoners secretly records her singing on video by a cellphone and puts it online. The tape becomes a real sensation, and soon Alevtina is invited to Moscow to participate in the main singing show on national television. A sincere desire to change her life awakens inside Alevtina but she's not ready to compete in the show at all. The only person who could train her voice and prepare her for the performance is that very prisoner, who recorded the video, who turns out to be a singer in the past.

Sandra is a young woman who has only one weekend to convince her colleagues they must give up their bonuses in order for her to keep her job — not an easy task in this economy.

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.

The true story of the life of Gavino Ledda, the son of a Sardinian shepherd, and how he managed to escape his harsh, almost barbaric existence by slowly educating himself, despite violent opposition from his brutal father.

Best friends Alice and Darlene take a trip to Thailand after graduating high school. In Thailand, they meet a captivating Australian man, who calls himself Nick Parks. Darlene is particularly smitten with Nick and convinces Alice to take Nick up on his offer to treat the two of them to what amounts to a day trip to Hong Kong. In the airport, the girls are seized by the police and shocked to discover that one of their bags contains heroin.

A reenactment of the final days of the 2001 G8 Summit.

Seth McArdle (Samuel Davis) is a high school senior with an especially full plate. Not only must he navigate the usual social and academic pitfalls of high school, but he has to contend with his young twin sisters, serving as de facto parent in the absence of his deceased mother and deadbeat father. The pressure mounts when the bank calls with a foreclosure warning, and Seth's frustrations spill over into various altercations with the school football team. An exasperated coach exiles Seth to work after school with Abel the eccentric groundskeeper (Kevin Sorbo). Their relationship starts off cold and rocky, but as the two spend more time together, they realize they have more in common than either thought. The downside: it's pretty much pain and sadness that they share. The upside: God loves them.

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.

Winner of the Golden Bear at the 2012 Berlin Film Festival, Caesar Must Die (Cesare Deve Morire), the scripted documentary shows inmates at a prison in Rome rehearsing for a performance of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.

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.

A private security contractor in Iraq rejects the official explanation of his friend's death and decides to investigate.

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.