Best movies like Guardian Angel
Last updated March 2024
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Plot Summary:
A journalist investigates the smuggling of gypsy children on the black market and tries to save a young boy.
IMDB Rating: 7.0
IMDB Votes: 247
Genere: Crime, Drama
Country: Yugoslavia
Duration: 90 min
Plot tags:
Best tv shows and movies like Guardian Angel (1987):
Similar in 79%
Special Education (1977)
Plot Summary:
Educator and those educated in a home for juvenile delinquents in the same test: approach, take a peek into his soul to become a man. The story of a minor, neglected boys-offenders and their teachers who try to reject the old methods of rehabilitation.
IMDB Rating: 8.3
IMDB Votes: 2000
Genere: Drama
Country: Yugoslavia
Duration: 110 min
Plot tags: educational
Similar in 76%
Veronica (2008)
Plot Summary:
A teacher takes a student to his house in the slum, but on arrival discovered that drug traffickers killed his parents and now are at your demand.
IMDB Rating: 6.5
IMDB Votes: 415
Genere: Crime, Drama
Country: Brazil
Duration: 90 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 75%
The Fight with the Panther (1975)
Plot Summary:
Three nymphets struggle to have a beneficial youth: Ana is suicidal, Mercedes is attracted to her brother William, and Patricia desires to be sexually abused.
IMDB Rating: 6.2
IMDB Votes: 50
Genere: Crime, Drama
Country: Mexico
Duration: 94 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 76%
Child Murders (1993)
Plot Summary:
A melodrama about children, the child murders that the film’s title refers to are the million and one ways that children’s souls are ravaged by neglect, unkindness and cruelty, even though several physical deaths take place in the story.
IMDB Rating: 6.5
IMDB Votes: 140
Genere: Drama
Country: Hungary
Duration: 78 min
Plot tags: thought provoking
Similar in 88%
Intrusive Behavior (2013)
Plot Summary:
Years after the institutionalizing and abandoning of their mentally unstable daughter, the Kilpatrick family becomes victim to mental instabilities of their own as their past comes back to haunt them.
IMDB Rating: 4.3
IMDB Votes: 29
Genere: Crime, Drama, Thriller
Country: USA
Duration: 80 min
Plot tags: twisted, independent film, detective
Similar in 83%
Aloa: Festivity of the Whores (1988)
Plot Summary:
A married couple from Germany, middle-aged Manfred and his much younger wife Meyra, who are originally from Zagreb, spend their vacation on the island Hvar. They are staying at Ms. Marija's house. Ms. Marija's son and Meyra feel an erotic attraction to each other. After some time, a tension develops between the young man, Meyra and Manfred. Nobody knows Meyra's secret, or her true reason for coming to Hvar.
IMDB Rating: 5.9
IMDB Votes: 264
Genere: Drama
Country: Yugoslavia
Duration: 120 min
Plot tags: tension, sexual, sexy, suspense
Similar in 78%
The Most Beautiful Wife (1970)
Plot Summary:
Based on the story of Franca Viola and Filippo Melodia. In Sicily, as a Mafia boss leaves for prison, he advises Vito, a young man who's his potential successor, to marry a virtuous and poor woman. Vito's eye settles on Francesca, only 15, but lovely and self-possessed. Among her virtues are high self worth and forthright speech, so although she falls in love with Vito, she won't bow down to him. Believing he's losing face, he has his boys kidnap her and he rapes her. Then, he tells her he'll still marry her. Instead, she files charges. Her parents, brother, and neighbors refuse to support her. Will she break?.
IMDB Rating: 7.1
IMDB Votes: 969
Genere: Crime, Drama
Country: Italy
Duration: 108 min
Plot tags: poliziottesco
Similar in 76%
Real Men (2003)
Plot Summary:
A powerful and disturbing two-part drama about sexual manipulation, the loss of innocence and betrayal of trust, starring Ben Daniels. A policeman's determination to solve the three-year-old case of an abducted schoolboy leads him to uncover a web of systematic abuse that is threatening to destroy the lives of vulnerable children.
IMDB Rating: 7.8
IMDB Votes: 81
Genere: Crime, Drama
Country: UK
Duration: 180 min
Plot tags: psychological, suspense, suspenseful, touching
Similar in 84%
The Ciambra (2017)
Plot Summary:
Pio Amato, a 14 year-old member of a small Romani community in Calabria, is in a hurry to grow up. Pio follows his older brother Cosimo everywhere and from him he learns how to hustle and how to navigate the streets of his hometown. One night Pio sets out to prove to his brother that he is as good or better than him but, when things go wrong, a series of events will forever change the way he sees the world.
IMDB Rating: 6.9
IMDB Votes: 3000
Genere: Crime, Drama
Country: Italy, Brazil, Germany, France, Sweden, USA
Duration: 118 min
Plot tags: neorealism, psychological, tense, suspense, contemplative, sad, art house, crying
Similar in 84%
Cyclo (1995)
Plot Summary:
Follows a young cyclo (bicycle cab) driver on his poverty-driven descent into criminality in modern-day Ho Chi Minh City. The boy's struggles to scratch out a living for his two sisters and grandfather in the mean streets of the city lead to petty crime on behalf of a mysterious Madame from whom he rents his cyclo.
IMDB Rating: 7.2
IMDB Votes: 5000
Genere: Crime, Drama
Country: Vietnam, France, Hong Kong
Duration: 123 min
Plot tags: disturbing, bleak, stylized, intellectual, neo noir, controversial, rough, serious, realistic, crying
Similar in 80%
In the Kingdom of the Blind, the Man with One Eye Is King (1995)
Plot Summary:
Al is caught between his loyalty to the police force and his love for his brother in a tense setting. It seems that his brother, Rudy, was involved in a mob hit that could potentially start a gang war. Tony C., a local mob boss and childhood acquaintance of Al, hires him to find out who was involved in the hit. Al must find his brother and make some decisions.
IMDB Rating: 4.6
IMDB Votes: 301
Genere: Crime, Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 99 min
Plot tags: independent film
Similar in 76%
Valan: Valley of Angels (2019)
Plot Summary:
Peter returns to his Transilvanian hometown, Valan, where a dead body was found in the snow-capped mountains. The investigation about his 22 years missing sister leads him to the maze of grave sins of present and the past, where he has to fight not only with local criminals but his own demons too.
IMDB Rating: 6.8
IMDB Votes: 2000
Genere: Crime, Drama
Country: Hungary
Duration: 98 min
Plot tags: tense, suspense, suspenseful, disturbing
Similar in 80%
Òlòtūré (2019)
Plot Summary:
In Lagos, Nigeria, young, naive Nigerian journalist Òlòtūré goes undercover to expose the shady underworld of human trafficking. Unused to this brutal environment, crawling with ruthless traders and pimps, Òlòtūré finds warmth and friendship with Blessing, Linda and Beauty, the prostitutes she lives with. However, she gets drawn into their lifestyle and finds it difficult to cope. In her quest to uncover the truth, she pays the ultimate price - one that takes her to the verge of no return.
IMDB Rating: 5.6
IMDB Votes: 879
Genere: Crime, Drama
Country: Nigeria
Duration: 106 min
Plot tags: tense, captivating, suspense, disturbing
Similar in 84%
Infidus (2015)
Plot Summary:
In the suburbs of Rome, two disparate lives with only desire for vengeance and redemption in common find their destinies intertwined. Massimo's mind is plagued with images of his wife's violent death at the hands of a criminal gang involved in the production of snuff films. With every memory of the woman he loved replaced by unforgettable images of her horrific final moments, Massimo sees only one chance to take back his life: find the wealthy individual who commissioned the sickening murder - and make them pay. Barabba, a recently released convict, hopes to keep a promise he made to his father and start a new life with his brother, Spaccio, far from the violent world that they used to inhabit. Discovering that his brother is involved in the snuff gang, Barabba seeks to change things the only way he knows how: through violence and bloodshed.
IMDB Rating: 5.5
IMDB Votes: 647
Genere: Crime, Drama
Country: Italy
Duration: 80 min
Plot tags: suspense, brutal, bloody, psychological, tense, suspenseful, hood
Similar in 89%
Blood Ties (1986)
Plot Summary:
An innocent American engineer is blackmailed by gangsters into a plot to assassinate his cousin, who is a judge in Sicily fighting the Mafia.
IMDB Rating: 6.1
IMDB Votes: 138
Genere: Crime, Drama
Country: Italy, USA
Duration: 125 min
Plot tags: rough, serious, realistic, suspenseful, poliziottesco
Similar in 88%
The Son of the Shark (1993)
Plot Summary:
Brothers Martin and Simon, not yet teens, are incorrigible vandals; Martin runs away from reform school, Simon from foster homes, and they always find each other in a seacoast town of Lignan, where their destructive behavior is infamous. (It may date to their mother's leaving the family.) Martin is philosophical, romantic, and poetic: he dreams of being the son of a shark; he holds tight to a book about goldfish his mother gave him. In both halting and wild ways, he tries to court Marie, a neighbor girl. Simon, with a pocketknife and an intractable will, seems more dangerous to others. What, on earth, is there for these children-becoming-men?.
IMDB Rating: 6.8
IMDB Votes: 327
Genere: Crime, Drama
Country: Belgium, France, Luxembourg
Duration: 90 min
Plot tags: rough, touching, serious, realistic
Similar in 77%
Tainted Souls (2017)
Plot Summary:
The lives of the tenants of a lower-class apartment building in the outskirts intersect on a backdrop of crime, drug dealing, confused feelings and tainted relationships, in a lucid portrait of contemporary Rome. Marcello, a bisexual former body builder married with Chiara, has an affair with the bourgeois professor Walter; the ambitious Mauro and cold-blooded dealer and his wife Simona get involved in the ambiguous business of the local boss Carmine to move up to the elegant and cruel circles of central Rome that profit from the public funds for the disadvantaged; Valeria and her son Attilio, Flaminia and her violent husband Bruno face the daily difficulties of their troubled lives. The corrupted powers of urban speculation invade a suspended corner of the suburbs, contaminating the lives of a group of lost souls,revealing the desperate world of the slum and the pitiless scene of the city center as the hidden face of the same coin.
IMDB Rating: 6.0
IMDB Votes: 266
Genere: Crime, Drama
Country: Italy
Duration: 101 min
Plot tags: psychological, tense, touching, suspense, disturbing
Similar in 78%
Ginostra (2002)
Plot Summary:
An FBI Agent from America and his bride and young child travel to the Sicilian island of Ginostra to solve the murder of a key witness.
IMDB Rating: 4.6
IMDB Votes: 790
Genere: Crime, Drama
Country: France, Italy, USA
Duration: 139 min
Plot tags: tense, rough, serious, suspenseful, exciting, realistic, gloomy, independent film
Similar in 89%
Honor Thy Father and Mother: The True Story of the Menendez Murders (1994)
Plot Summary:
TV movie based on the novel "Blood Brothers," about the murder of Jose Menéndez and his wife Kitty by their sons, Erik and Lyle.
IMDB Rating: 5.6
IMDB Votes: 165
Genere: Crime, Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 93 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 81%
Joe the King (1999)
Plot Summary:
A destitute 14 year old struggles to keep his life together despite harsh abuse at his mother's hands, harsher abuse at his father's, and a growing separation from his slightly older brother. Petty thefts for food grow into more major takes until he steals a cash box from the diner where he works. Although Joe uses the money to pay off some of his father's debts and to replace his mother's records that his father smashed in a fit of temper, Joe gets no thanks.
IMDB Rating: 6.7
IMDB Votes: 3000
Genere: Crime, Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 93 min
Plot tags: emotional, harsh, tense, rough, grim, realistic, art house, semi autobiographical, serious, gloomy
Similar in 81%
Our Lady of the Assassins (2000)
Plot Summary:
World-weary arthur Fernando has returned to his native Colombia to live out his days in peace. But Fernando's once-quiet hometown has become a hotbed of violence, drugs and corruption. On the brink of despair, Fernando meets Alexis, a beautiful but hardened street kid who lives by the rule of the gun. Together, they forge an unlikely relationship.
IMDB Rating: 6.8
IMDB Votes: 4000
Genere: Crime, Drama
Country: Spain, France, Colombia
Duration: 101 min
Plot tags: disturbing, meditative, rough, thought provoking, serious, realistic, contemplative, crying, sexy, enigmatic
Similar in 80%
Pianese Nunzio, Fourteen in May (1996)
Plot Summary:
A young priest crusades against organized crime in his Naples neighbourhood but falls in love with a 13-year old boy. It's the chance the gangsters were waiting for to get rid of the thorn in their side. Will they be able to force the boy to accuse the priest of sexual harassment and have his reputation destroyed?.
IMDB Rating: 6.3
IMDB Votes: 424
Genere: Crime, Drama
Country: Italy
Duration: 114 min
Plot tags: touching, serious, realistic, sexual, crying, sexy, gay cinema, baroque
Similar in 87%
The Thief (1997)
Plot Summary:
In 1946, a soldier fathers a child then dies before its birth. Jump to 1952: on a train, the child and his mother meet a handsome soldier who makes a play for her. She accepts. Posing as a married family, the soldier finds them a rooming house where he becomes everyone's favorite through his good looks and generosity. Meanwhile he gives the boy, Sanya, lessons in life: to fight back, to win at all costs. The child's mother, Katya, is head-over-heels in love with Tolyan, the soldier, but the relationship becomes rocky when Tolyan's true plans for the rooming house become clear. It starts them on a treadmill of flight that risks Katya's life, Tolyan's liberty, and Sanya's trust.
IMDB Rating: 7.6
IMDB Votes: 6000
Genere: Crime, Drama
Country: Russia, France
Duration: 96 min
Plot tags: bleak, realistic, sincere, gloomy, serious, crying, sentimental, atmospheric, thought provoking, touching
Similar in 77%
L.I.E. (2001)
Plot Summary:
In this biting and disturbing coming-of-age tale from writer-director Michael Cuesta, life is bittersweet along the L.I.E., also known as the Long Island Expressway, as suburban teen Howie Blitzer learns all too clearly. In the space of a week, he loses nearly everything and everyone he knows and is left to navigate his adolescence virtually unsupervised.
IMDB Rating: 7.1
IMDB Votes: 10000
Genere: Crime, Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 97 min
Plot tags: disturbing, bleak, controversial, brutal, enigmatic, touching, realistic, sexy, stylized, independent film
Similar in 84%
Oliver Twist (2005)
Plot Summary:
Oliver Twist the modern filmed version of Charles Dickens bestseller, a Roman Polanski adaptation. The classic Dickens tale, where an orphan meets a pickpocket on the streets of London. From there, he joins a household of boys who are trained to steal for their master.
IMDB Rating: 6.8
IMDB Votes: 34000
Genere: Crime, Drama
Country: France, UK, Czech Republic
Duration: 130 min
Plot tags: emotional, costume drama, atmospheric, sentimental, touching, serious, suspense, period piece, melancholic, stylized
Similar in 79%
Pixote (1980)
Plot Summary:
Pixote, a 10-year-old runaway boy, is arrested on the streets of Sao Paulo during a police round-up homeless people. Pixote endures torture, degradation and corruption at a local youth detention center where two of the runaways are murdered by policemen who frame Lilica, a 17-year-old transvesite hustler. Pixote helps Lilica and three other boys escape where they make their living by the life of crime which only escalates to more violence and death.
IMDB Rating: 7.9
IMDB Votes: 9000
Genere: Crime, Drama
Country: Brazil
Duration: 128 min
Plot tags: disturbing, depressing, bleak, realistic, rough, atmospheric, serious, political, controversial, hood
Similar in 75%
The Sicilian Girl (2008)
Plot Summary:
Inspired to a true story, on November 5th 1991, Rita Atria a young 17-year-old Sicilian girl, goes to see an anti-Mafia judge Paolo Borsellino to denounce the Mafia system that was responsible for the murder of her father and her brother. It is the first time that such a young woman from a Mafia family rebels and betrays the Mafia. From that moment on, Rita's days are numbered. She only has nine months to live.
IMDB Rating: 6.9
IMDB Votes: 2000
Genere: Crime, Drama
Country: Italy, France
Duration: 115 min
Plot tags: tense, rough, serious, suspenseful, sincere, emotional, realistic, touching
Similar in 87%
Tsotsi (2005)
Plot Summary:
The South African multi-award winning film about a young South African boy from the ghetto named Tsotsi, meaning Gangster. Tsotsi, who left home as a child to get away from helpless parents, finds a baby in the back seat of a car that he has just stolen. He decides that it his responsibility to take care of the baby and in the process learns that maybe the gangster life isn’t the best way.
IMDB Rating: 7.2
IMDB Votes: 29000
Genere: Crime, Drama
Country: UK, South Africa
Duration: 95 min
Plot tags: sincere, bleak, emotional, harsh, rough, captivating, dramatic, art house, realistic, inspirational
Similar in 80%
Salaam Bombay! (1988)
Plot Summary:
Before Slumdog Millionaire came Salaam Bombay!, Mira Nair’s Oscar-nominated drama tells the moving story of life on the streets of Bombay as seen through the eyes of Chaipu, a twelve-year-old boy living rough in the city.
IMDB Rating: 7.9
IMDB Votes: 10000
Genere: Crime, Drama
Country: India, USA, France, UK
Duration: 113 min
Plot tags: touching, realistic, social, offbeat, depressing, sad, art house, art film, existential, sentimental
Similar in 89%
Time of the Gypsies (1988)
Plot Summary:
In this luminous tale set in the former Yugoslavia, Perhan, an engaging young Romany with telekinetic powers, is seduced by the quick-cash world of petty crime that threatens to destroy him and those he loves.
IMDB Rating: 8.1
IMDB Votes: 32000
Genere: Comedy, Crime, Drama, Fantasy
Country: Yugoslavia, Italy, UK
Duration: 142 min
Plot tags: surreal, touching, poignant, independent film, cerebral, social, humorous, realistic, art house, atmospheric