Best movies like It All Starts Today
Last updated March 2024
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Plot Summary:
Set in a forlorn mining town near Valencienne in the north of France, the story is about one man's struggle to bring life to his once prosperous village and its inhabitants. Philippe Torreton, who won a César for Best Actor with his title role in Capitaine Conan, plays Daniel, the head teacher of a nursery school in a town demoralized by unemployment. Daniel is determined against all odds to bring life to the community. When a parent who has come to pick up her children collapses at the school grounds due to alcohol abuse, and social services turns a deaf ear to all pleas for help, Daniel decides to take the law into his own hands. Despite resistance from the townspeople, in the long run his efforts are not fruitless.
IMDB Rating: 7.4
IMDB Votes: 3000
Genere: Drama
Country: France
Duration: 117 min
Plot tags: social, sincere, thought provoking, touching, bleak, serious, realistic, contemplative, gloomy
Best tv shows and movies like It All Starts Today (1999):
Similar in 88%
The Proud Ones (1980)
Plot Summary:
In early twentieth-century Brittany, two peasants marry, have a son, and live in traditional Breton ways: three generations under one roof, a division of labor between the sexes, elders' stories at night, politics and religion during their little free time. Times are hard: la Chienne du Monde drives some to suicide; Ankou (death) is close at hand. Pierre is born into this republican family, his lyric childhood interrupted by the outbreak of war and his father's conscription. He learns his catechism and, as a child of a Reds, also reveres school. His grandfather and father often put him on their shoulders, giving him a ride on the horse of pride.
IMDB Rating: 6.2
IMDB Votes: 294
Genere: Drama
Country: France
Duration: 120 min
Plot tags: sentimental, sincere, touching, serious, realistic, saga, contemplative
Similar in 79%
Sheep (2013)
Plot Summary:
The life of a small French town is rocked by a bizarre incident.
IMDB Rating: 5.8
IMDB Votes: 137
Genere: Drama
Country: France
Duration: 96 min
Plot tags: sincere, serious, contemplative, stylized, offbeat, realistic, gloomy, freeze frame
Similar in 88%
Under the Pines (2013)
Plot Summary:
A young widow wants to carry on with her husband's work:managing a pine plantation where they extract resin;but most of all,she wants to have electricity installed in her valuable property.In this place,it seems that 1789 never happened and that time stood still:her workers,circa 1920,do not receive any salary and ,like the peasants in the middle ages,have to bring their production to their landlady. But her progressive ideas come up against men still remembering WW1 and against her bourgeois peers.Her foreman ,first bewildered ,is finally won over by his boss' resilience and strength of character.For her own good,the young heiress is too ahead of her time though.
IMDB Rating: 6.0
IMDB Votes: 115
Genere: Drama
Country: Belgium, France
Duration: 90 min
Plot tags: sincere, atmospheric, serious, realistic
Similar in 81%
Little Lion (2012)
Plot Summary:
Mitri is 15 years old and lives in a village in Senegal. Like all the youngsters of his age, he plays football, dreaming of the Barcelona and Chelsea Football Clubs. When an agent sees him, Mitri believes in his luck. But, in order to go chasing Europe´s big clubs, he has to pay. The family puts money together and runs into debts to help him. Once in Paris, everything falls apart: Mitri finds himself abandonned without a cent in his pocket, and cannot imagine facing shame when he comes back to the village. An odyssey of tanglements begins then. But, his football dream will catch up with him when he meets someone.
IMDB Rating: 6.1
IMDB Votes: 220
Genere: Drama
Country: France
Duration: 102 min
Plot tags: touching, realistic, captivating, psychological, serious
Similar in 88%
The Forest for the Trees (2003)
Plot Summary:
As an awkward idealistic high school teacher begins her first job in the city, things turn out to be much tougher than she had imagined.
IMDB Rating: 7.2
IMDB Votes: 2000
Genere: Drama
Country: Germany
Duration: 81 min
Plot tags: psychological, sincere, serious, emotional, mumblecore, sad, realistic, contemplative, gloomy
Similar in 86%
Clockwork Mice (1995)
Plot Summary:
When new teacher Steve Drake joins the faculty at a school for special-needs students, his unorthodox instruction methods raise eyebrows. But attitudes begin to change when he makes a connection with a particularly unruly student.
IMDB Rating: 6.3
IMDB Votes: 333
Genere: Drama
Country: UK
Duration: 100 min
Plot tags: independent film, touching, serious, realistic, sexual, sexy
Similar in 83%
Just the Wind (2012)
Plot Summary:
Drawing inspiration from the death-squad murders of several Gypsy families in Hungary in 2008, director Bence Fliegauf's chilling and unforgettable real-life horror story follows a family whose dreams of emigration and escape are suddenly, horribly destroyed.
IMDB Rating: 6.5
IMDB Votes: 1000
Genere: Drama
Country: Hungary, Germany, France
Duration: 95 min
Plot tags: sincere, bleak, serious, realistic, thought provoking, slow cinema, aesthetic, tense
Similar in 88%
I Am from Titov Veles (2007)
Plot Summary:
Burdened by memories of their late father, three sisters struggle to escape the suffocating environment of the dying town of Veles. A contemporary story of urban decay, „Jas sum od Titov Veles“ employs a stark realism to depict the vivid landscape of post-Communist Macedonia.
IMDB Rating: 6.3
IMDB Votes: 617
Genere: Drama
Country: Belgium, France, Slovenia
Duration: 102 min
Plot tags: sincere, touching, serious, realistic, bleak, contemplative, gloomy
Similar in 82%
It's Winter (2006)
Plot Summary:
The struggle to survive, for a generation, torn between wanting to leave its country, yet bound by blood to home.
IMDB Rating: 6.7
IMDB Votes: 650
Genere: Drama
Country: Iran, France
Duration: 86 min
Plot tags: sincere, atmospheric, touching, serious, bleak, realistic, contemplative, gloomy
Similar in 80%
The Invisible Eye (2010)
Plot Summary:
Spying on her students, a teacher finds an exciting hobby.
IMDB Rating: 6.2
IMDB Votes: 841
Genere: Drama
Country: Argentina, France, Spain
Duration: 97 min
Plot tags: realistic, tense, serious, psychological, captivating, sincere, bleak, contemplative, gloomy
Similar in 81%
The Famous and the Dead (2009)
Plot Summary:
In a small town in the countryside in the south of Brazil, a teenager that uses the codename Mr. Tambourine Man spends his time in Internet, at school, smoking pot with his best friend Diego and with his dysfunctional mother. He dreams on leaving his hometown to watch a Bob Dylan's show but seems to be hopeless stranded in the spot.
IMDB Rating: 6.6
IMDB Votes: 762
Genere: Drama
Country: Brazil, France
Duration: 101 min
Plot tags: atmospheric, serious, surreal, captivating, tense, contemplative, gloomy
Similar in 90%
No One Writes to the Colonel (1999)
Plot Summary:
Every Friday, the Colonel puts on his only suit and goes to the dock to await a letter announcing the arrival of his pension. But the townsfolk all know that this pension will never come. His wife also knows it, and even he knows it. But he is still waiting, living with the pain of the death of his son.
IMDB Rating: 6.6
IMDB Votes: 1000
Genere: Drama
Country: Mexico, France, Spain
Duration: 122 min
Plot tags: sincere, serious, atmospheric, realistic, psychological, contemplative, gloomy
Similar in 82%
A Week's Holiday (1980)
Plot Summary:
Laurence, a young schoolteacher from Lyons, takes a week's leave. During the break, she reflects on her career and her personal life.
IMDB Rating: 6.7
IMDB Votes: 699
Genere: Drama
Country: France
Duration: 102 min
Plot tags: psychological, sincere, thought provoking, touching, serious, emotional, realistic, contemplative
Similar in 75%
Manpower (2014)
Plot Summary:
An intelligent social issues drama, Manpower sketches a portrait of four men in crisis. Moving between scathing realism and subtle irony, the film raises questions of belonging and uprooting, exile and emigration, home and family. Meir Cohen is a decorated police officer yet he barely earns a living. His new assignment to deport African migrant workers teaches him that foreigners aren’t the only ones with no future in his country. Other plotlines intertwine with Meir’s story: an Israeli-Filipino boy fighting for recognition; a taxi driver whose children are migrating to a distant country; and a veteran migrant worker who’s forced to decide whether to leave or to hide until trouble passes.
IMDB Rating: 6.8
IMDB Votes: 66
Genere: Drama
Country: Israel, France
Duration: 85 min
Plot tags: sincere, thought provoking, touching, realistic, serious, gloomy, biting, suspense
Similar in 79%
Eden (1996)
Plot Summary:
Story of a New England boys' school and of one of the students who is infatuated with an instructor's wife who has Multiple Sclerosis. The woman struggles to show her strict husband how love rather than demands helps the student to blossom, but finally she falls into a coma. While she is able to have some 'looking down' awareness of what is happening, her coma is what brings her husband to an understanding of the needs of others.
IMDB Rating: 5.7
IMDB Votes: 356
Genere: Drama
Country: USA, Canada
Duration: 106 min
Plot tags: independent film, sentimental, sincere, touching, serious, emotional, realistic, gloomy
Similar in 85%
Taking Back Our Town (2001)
Plot Summary:
A true story about a concerned housewife, Pat Melancon, who tries to block Shintech, a massive Japanese petrochemical conglomerate, from building a plant in her toxic township already known as "cancer alley". Pat and a few newly recruited, fledgling activitsts face the full force of Shintech's wealth and influence peddling, which has bought the cooperation of the government from the local level all the way up to the Governor's office.
IMDB Rating: 5.4
IMDB Votes: 123
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 90 min
Plot tags: sincere, thought provoking, serious, realistic
Similar in 83%
The Beat (1988)
Plot Summary:
A new kid moves into a tough neighborhood controlled by gangs, and tries to teach them poetry.
IMDB Rating: 5.3
IMDB Votes: 220
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 98 min
Plot tags: serious, emotional, touching, realistic, independent film, gloomy
Similar in 88%
The Class (2008)
Plot Summary:
Teacher and novelist François Bégaudeau plays a version of himself as he negotiates a year with his racially mixed students from a tough Parisian neighborhood.
IMDB Rating: 7.5
IMDB Votes: 36000
Genere: Drama
Country: France
Duration: 128 min
Plot tags: sincere, melancholic, psychological, realistic, talky, independent film, political, art house, mesmerizing, intellectual
Similar in 90%
Cheaters (2000)
Plot Summary:
In the fall of 1994, a teacher at Chicago's run-down Steinmetz High conspires with the school's academic decathlon team to cheat on an academic competition.
IMDB Rating: 6.7
IMDB Votes: 4000
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 108 min
Plot tags: sincere, clever, serious, realistic, offbeat
Similar in 81%
Behavior (2014)
Plot Summary:
Meet Chala, an eleven year-old boy with a hard life and strong respect for Carmela, his sixth grade teacher. The pair develops a solid bond, but after Carmela suffers an accident, things get complicated….
IMDB Rating: 7.5
IMDB Votes: 2000
Genere: Drama
Country: Cuba
Duration: 108 min
Plot tags: serious, emotional, realistic, touching, inspirational, bleak, biting, suspense
Similar in 87%
Up the Down Staircase (1967)
Plot Summary:
Sylvia Barrett is a rookie teacher at New York's inner-city Calvin Coolidge High: her lit classes are overcrowded, a window is broken, there's no chalk, books arrive late. The administration is concerned mainly with forms and rules (there's an up and and a down staircase); bells ring at the wrong time. Nevertheless, she tries. How she handles the chaos and her despair in her first semester makes up the film: a promising student drops out, another sleeps through class, a girl with a crush on a male teacher gets suicidal, and a bright but troublesome student misunderstands Sylvia's reaching out. A discussion of Dickens, parents' night, and a mock trial highlight the term. Can she make it?.
IMDB Rating: 7.3
IMDB Votes: 2000
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 124 min
Plot tags: esoteric, independent film, rough, bleak, serious, realistic, disturbing, gloomy
Similar in 84%
Won't Back Down (2012)
Plot Summary:
Two determined mothers, one a teacher, look to transform their children's failing inner city school. Facing a powerful and entrenched bureaucracy, they risk everything to make a difference in the education and future of their children.
IMDB Rating: 6.4
IMDB Votes: 7000
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 121 min
Plot tags: touching, uplifting, realistic, serious, emotional, inspirational
Similar in 82%
Goodbye, Mr. Chips (2002)
Plot Summary:
In the later years of the nineteenth century Latin master Mr. Chipping is the mainstay of Brookfields boys boarding school, a good teacher and a kindly person but he is considered to be married to the job so that it is a surprise when, on a walking holiday, he meets and marries the vivacious Kathie,who becomes his helpmate at the school but sadly pre-deceases him. Just before World War One insensitive new headmaster Ralston tries to edge Chipping out but the boys rally and Sir John Rivers, an old pupil of Chipping's and now head of the board of governors, invites him to stay and,when the war breaks out and Ralston joins up, Chipping becomes the new head.
IMDB Rating: 7.5
IMDB Votes: 898
Genere: Drama
Country: UK
Duration: 99 min
Plot tags: sentimental, touching, serious, emotional, realistic
Similar in 90%
To Sir, with Love II (1996)
Plot Summary:
Mark Thackeray (Poitier) is a West Indian, who in the 1967 film had taken teaching in a London East End school. He spent twenty years teaching and ten in administrative roles. He has taught the children of his former pupils, but is now retiring.
IMDB Rating: 6.3
IMDB Votes: 1000
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 92 min
Plot tags: political, sincere, uplifting, touching, serious, emotional, realistic
Similar in 77%
Knights of the South Bronx (2005)
Plot Summary:
A business man decides that he wants to teach school in the inner city and chooses a tough school in the South Bronx. He teaches the children how to play the game of chess, and along the way they learn a lot about life.
IMDB Rating: 6.7
IMDB Votes: 1000
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 89 min
Plot tags: uplifting, touching, serious, realistic, spiritual
Similar in 77%
Red Like the Sky (2006)
Plot Summary:
A nearly sightless boy is sent to a school for blind children, where he secretly discovers the possibilities of the recorded sound.
IMDB Rating: 7.7
IMDB Votes: 2000
Genere: Drama
Country: Italy
Duration: 96 min
Plot tags: uplifting, touching, serious, realistic, contemplative, educational, fairy tale, factual
Similar in 75%
Everybody Dies But Me (2008)
Plot Summary:
One Monday morning Katya, Vika and Zhanna learn that there will be a school disco, their first disco, on the coming Saturday night. The girls feverishly start preparing for the event, which rapidly becomes the most important moment ever in their universe, and looks like the ideal way to escape their daily lives.
IMDB Rating: 6.4
IMDB Votes: 3000
Genere: Drama
Country: Russia
Duration: 80 min
Plot tags: serious, touching, realistic, suspense, psychological, rough, sincere, gloomy
Similar in 90%
Conrack (1974)
Plot Summary:
A young, white teacher is assigned to an isolated island off the coast of South Carolina populated mostly by poor black families. He finds that the basically illiterate, neglected children there know so little of the world outside their island.
IMDB Rating: 7.3
IMDB Votes: 2000
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 106 min
Plot tags: deep, sincere, uplifting, thought provoking, touching, feel good, serious, realistic
Similar in 82%
Detachment (2011)
Plot Summary:
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.
IMDB Rating: 7.7
IMDB Votes: 96000
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 98 min
Plot tags: depressing, psychological, bleak, thought provoking, touching, sad, independent film, serious, inspirational, emotional
Similar in 75%
The Emperor's Club (2002)
Plot Summary:
William Hundert is a passionate and principled Classics professor who finds his tightly-controlled world shaken and inexorably altered when a new student, Sedgewick Bell, walks into his classroom. What begins as a fierce battle of wills gives way to a close student-teacher relationship, but results in a life lesson for Hundert that will still haunt him a quarter of a century later.
IMDB Rating: 6.9
IMDB Votes: 18000
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 109 min
Plot tags: touching, realistic, inspirational, emotional, contemplative, sincere, serious, educational, philosophical, feel good