20 best movies like The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

The morning of a small town Labor Day picnic, a drifter blows into town to visit an old fraternity buddy who also happens to be the son of the richest man in town. Hal is an egocentric braggart - all potential and no accomplishment. He meets up with Madge Owens, the town beauty queen and girlfriend of Alan Benson.

Lt. Bud Wilozek is one of a group of veterans recovering in the paraplegic ward of a hospital in his hometown. His former fiancée, Ellen, explains to his physician, Dr. Brock, her concern about his isolation and apparent depression. The doctor cajoles the withdrawn paraplegic into the life of the ward, where fellow patients begin to pull Bud out of his spiritual miasma. At length, his sense of hope starts to return, and after seeing Ellen for the first time in months, he begins to contemplate the possibility of marriage.

Waldemar Nods, a young man from Suriname, meets the older Dutch woman Rika van der Lans and they fall in love. In pre-WWII Netherlands they could not be more different. The one black, the other white, 17 years between them and on top of that Rika already has four children with another man. They love each other, but then Rika appears to be pregnant...

Algeria, the 1930s. Younes is nine years old when he is put in his uncle's care in Oran. Rebaptized Jonas, he grows up among the Rio Salado youths, with whom he becomes friends. Emilie is one of the gang; everyone is in love with her. A great love story develops between Jonas and Emilie, which is soon unsettled by the conflicts troubling the country.

Set in suburban New Jersey in the 1960s, a group of friends form a rock band and try to make it big.

As the Japanese surrender at the end of WWII, Gen. Fellers is tasked with deciding if Emperor Hirohito will be hanged as a war criminal. Influencing his ruling is his quest to find Aya, an exchange student he met years earlier in the U.S.

Elderly Aleksandra visits her Russian soldier grandson, Denis, at the Chechen war front, providing comfort as she tours his army. All the while, Denis ponders the reason for her unexpected appearance.

Korea, 1950. A child's vow to take care of his family marks the beginning of a lifelong promise spanning sixty years.

When a Greek fisherman leaves to fight with the Greek army during WWII, his fiancee falls in love with the local Italian commander. The film is based on a novel about an Italian soldier's experiences during the Italian occupation of the Greek island of Cephalonia (Kefalonia), but Hollywood made it into a pure love story by removing much of the "unpleasant" stuff.

A Farewell to Arms is a 1957 American drama film directed by Charles Vidor. The screenplay by Ben Hecht, based in part on a 1930 play by Laurence Stallings, was the second feature film adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's 1929 semi-autobiographical novel of the same name. It was the last film produced by David O. Selznick.

Napoleon's tumultuous relations with Russia including his disastrous 1812 invasion serve as the backdrop for the tangled personal lives of two aristocratic families.

Tuur and Lambert are best friends. But the war is closing in and is about to change their lives forever. Tuurs dad joined the resistance and even his big brother seems so be part of it. Lamberts family on the other hand choose to obey the Germans. Then a new girls from the city shows up, befriending the boys but telling her secret to only one of them. A choice that separates the boys and ultimately gets her in trouble.

In an updated contemporary version of the beloved stage play and 1989 film, "Steel Magnolias" chronicles the lives and friendship of six women in Louisiana. Supporting each other through their triumphs and tragedies, they congregate at Truvy’s beauty shop to ponder the mysteries of life and death, husbands and children - and hair and nails - all the important topics that truly unite and celebrate women.

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.

An early-20th-century tale of love across class boundaries which tells the legendary and romantic story of Lady Chatterley’s affair with her gamekeeper. Jed Mercurio’s adaptation of DH Lawrence’s classic.

Six vignettes follow the Allied invasion from July 1943 to winter 1944, from Sicily north to Venice.

A beautiful but vain woman who rejects the love of her older husband must face the loss of her youth and beauty.

An adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Long Island-set novel, where Midwesterner Nick Carraway is lured into the lavish world of his neighbor, Jay Gatsby. Soon enough, however, Carraway will see through the cracks of Gatsby's nouveau riche existence, where obsession, madness, and tragedy await.

Spain in the 1930s is the place to be for a man of action like Robert Jordan. There is a civil war going on and Jordan—who has joined up on the side that appeals most to idealists of that era—has been given a high-risk assignment up in the mountains. He awaits the right time to blow up a crucial bridge in order to halt the enemy's progress

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 young coach turns a losing high school football program around to go undefeated for 12 consecutive seasons.

Western frontiers of the USSR, 1942. The region is under German occupation. A man is wrongly accused of collaboration. Desperate to save his dignity, he faces an impossible moral choice.

Beirut, 1982: a young Palestinian refugee and an Israeli fighter pilot form a tentative bond in their attempt to make their way across war-torn Lebanon back to their home.

A Hollywood-set romantic tale of a guy who is content to live his life without a job yet with the love of his life, a young actress.

Jess, age 18, and Moss, age 12 are second cousins in the dark-fire tobacco fields of rural Western Kentucky. Without immediate families that they can relate to, and lacking friends their own age, they only have each other. Over the course of a summer they venture on a journey exploring deep secrets and hopes of a future while being confronted with fears of isolation, abandonment and an unknown tomorrow.

A man with a low IQ has accomplished great things in his life and been present during significant historic events - in each case, far exceeding what anyone imagined he could do. Yet, despite all the things he has attained, his one true love eludes him. 'Forrest Gump' is the story of a man who rose above his challenges, and who proved that determination, courage, and love are more important than ability.

In the Salinas Valley in and around World War I, Cal Trask feels he must compete against overwhelming odds with his brother for the love of their father. Cal is frustrated at every turn, from his reaction to the war, how to get ahead in business and in life, and how to relate to his estranged mother.

Morgan is the inspiring story of Morgan Oliver, a gay young athlete determined that a bicycle accident that left him paralyzed will not change him. He takes a chance on love when he meets Dean Kagen on a basketball court. Dean helps Morgan train for the same race in which he had his accident. But when he sees that Morgan will risk everything to win, Dean walks out. Left alone to face the race and demons that caused his accident, Morgan teeters between what he needs and what he wants. Can he find the strength to pull himself back up again?

In 1930s Texas, a widow and her family fight to save their home by harvesting cotton.

Based on Evelyn Waugh's 1945 classic British novel, Brideshead Revisited is a poignant story of forbidden love and the loss of innocence set in England prior to the Second World War.

A young field administrator for the TVA comes to rural Tennessee to oversee the building of a dam on the Tennessee River. He encounters opposition from the local people, in particular a farmer who objects to his employment (with pay) of local black laborers. Much of the plot revolves around the eviction of an elderly woman from her home on an island in the River, and the young man's love affair with that woman's widowed granddaughter.

An intimate story set during the 1860s in which a young Irish woman Sarah and her family find themselves on both sides of the turbulent wars between British and Maori during the British colonization of New Zealand.

What does it mean to lead men in war? What does it mean to come home? Hell and Back Again is a cinematically revolutionary film that asks and answers these questions with a power and intimacy no previous film about the conflict in Afghanistan has been able to achieve. It is a masterpiece in the cinema of war.

The fates of two people - adult and teenager - are crossing paths when both of them are on a crossroads of their lives.

When the government opens up the Oklahoma territory for settlement, restless Yancey Cravat claims a plot of the free land for himself and moves his family there from Wichita. A newspaperman, lawyer, and just about everything else, Cravat soon becomes a leading citizen of the boom town of Osage. Once the town is established, however, he begins to feel confined once again, and heads for the Cherokee Strip, leaving his family behind. During this and other absences, his wife Sabra must learn to take care of herself and soon becomes prominent in her own right.

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.

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.

Wyatt Earp and his brothers Morgan and Virgil ride into Tombstone and leave brother James in charge of their cattle herd. On their return they find their cattle stolen and James dead. Wyatt takes on the job of town marshal, making his brothers deputies, and vows to stay in Tombstone until James' killers are found. He soon runs into the brooding, coughing, hard-drinking Doc Holliday as well as the sullen and vicious Clanton clan. Wyatt discovers the owner of a trinket stolen from James' dead body and the stage is set for the Earps' long-awaited revenge.

An old leper who owned a remote sorghum winery dies. Jiu'er, the wife bought by the leper, and her lover, identified only as "my Grandpa" by the narrator, take over the winery and set up an idealized quasi-matriarchal community headed by Jiu'er. When the Japanese invaders subject the area to their rule and cut down the sorghum to make way for a road, the community rises up and resists as the sorghum grows anew.

Sprawling epic covering the life of a Texas cattle rancher and his family and associates.

Stingo, a young writer, moves to Brooklyn in 1947 to begin work on his first novel. As he becomes friendly with Sophie and her lover Nathan, he learns that she is a Holocaust survivor. Flashbacks reveal her harrowing story, from pre-war prosperity to Auschwitz. In the present, Sophie and Nathan's relationship increasingly unravels as Stingo grows closer to Sophie and Nathan's fragile mental state becomes ever more apparent.

Ambassador Joseph Davies is sent by FDR to Russia to learn about the Soviet system and returns to America as an advocate of Stalinism.

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

Born out of wedlock early in the last century, Violette Leduc meets Simone de Beauvoir in postwar Saint-Germain-des-Près. An intense lifelong relationship develops between the two women authors, based on Violette's quest for freedom through writing and on Simone's conviction that she holds in her hands the destiny of an extraordinary writer.

When a US Naval captain shows signs of mental instability that jeopardizes the ship, the first officer relieves him of command and faces court martial for mutiny.

Germany, 1944. Leyna, the 15-year old daughter of a white German mother and a black African father, meets Lutz, a compassionate member of the Hitler Youth whose father is a prominent Nazi soldier, and they form an unlikely connection in this quickly changing world.

The Young Lions follows the lives of three soldiers: one German and two Americans, paralleling their experiences in World War II until they meet up at the end for a confrontation

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 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.

A teen drama set during the fall potato harvest in a small northern Maine town.