Movies like The Restless Years (1958)
The best movies like The Restless Years (1958) are All Together Now (2020), Omaha (2025) and Won't Back Down (2012). If The Restless Years hooked you with its drama, these 30 similar films are what to watch next, and every pick says why it matches.
Quick picks
- Highest ratedWho's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)7.7/10 from 959 votes
- NewestOmaha (2025)Released 2025
All Together Now (2020)
An optimistic, talented teen clings to a huge secret: she's homeless and living on a school bus. When tragedy strikes, can she learn to accept a helping hand?
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisOmaha (2025)
A young girl and her brother are awoken by their father and loaded into the car on an early morning in 2008. As they road trip across the American West, she discovers the truth about their seemingly spontaneous journey.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisWon't Back Down (2012)
Jamie Fitzpatrick and Nona Alberts are two women from opposites sides of the social and economic track, but they have one thing in common: a mission to fix their community's broken school and ensure a bright future for their children. The two women refuse to let any obstacles stand in their way as they battle a bureaucracy that's hopelessly mired in traditional thinking, and they seek to re-energize a faculty that has lost its passion for teaching.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisJonathan (2018)
Jonathan is a young man with a strange condition that only his brother understands. But when he begins to yearn for a different life, their unique bond becomes increasingly tested.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
SnoozefestMovies like thisLady Driver (2020)
When a rebellious teen embarks on a solo summer journey to connect with her roots, she finds herself in a new world, geared up for the ride of her life, and discovers she had the drive in her all along.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisHello Sister, Goodbye Life (2006)
A college student must take care of her 7-year-old half sister after the death of their parents.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisRocks (2020)
15-year-old Rocks fears that she and her little brother Emmanuel will be taken into care and forced apart if anyone finds out that their mother has left them. Against all odds, and with the help of her loyal friends, she evades the authorities and navigates the most defining days of her young life.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisFatima (2020)
In 1917, outside the parish of Fátima, Portugal, a 10-year-old girl and her two younger cousins witness multiple visitations of the Virgin Mary, who tells them that only prayer and suffering will bring an end to World War I. As secularist government officials and Church leaders try to force the children to recant their story, word of the sighting spreads across the country, inspiring religious pilgrims to flock to the site in hopes of witnessing a miracle..
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Color of Friendship (2000)
Mahree Bok lives on a farm in South Africa. Her father is a policeman who cannot hide his joy when activist Steve Biko is caught by the South African authorities. Piper Dellums is the daughter of a US congressman from California and who lives in a nice home in Washington DC. When Mahree is chosen to spend a semester at the Dellums' house, she doesn't expect that her host family would be black. Nor do her hosts suspect that she is not a black South African.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisI Believe in Unicorns (2015)
Feeling awkward and isolated, an imaginative and strong-willed teenage girl runs away from home with an older punk rock drifter.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisHere (2024)
An odyssey through time and memory, centered on a place in New Jersey where—from wilderness, and then, later, from a home—love, loss, struggle, hope and legacy play out between couples and families over generations.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisA Kiss Before Dying (1956)
A college student tries to get rich quick by wooing two wealthy sisters.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisThe Christmas Shoes (2002)
Two separate stories mesh - in the first, a young music teacher, Maggie Andrews, begins dying of a heart condition and her son Nathan tries to get a pair of Christmas shoes for her before she dies. In the second, lawyer Robert Layton and his wife Kate are slowly drifting apart and the matter comes to a head during Christmas when Kate takes over for Maggie for the school choir.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisThe Locket (1946)
A dark personal secret drives a young woman to use every man she encounters.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisAn American Girl: Chrissa Stands Strong (2009)
A fourth grader and her friends deal with bullying from a more popular girl in their class.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisFlicka (2006)
Katy McLaughlin desires to work on her family's mountainside horse ranch, although her father insists she finish boarding school. Katy finds a mustang in the hills near her ranch. The headstrong 16 year old then sets her mind to tame a mustang and prove to her father she can run the ranch. But when tragedy happens, it will take all the love and strength the family can muster to restore hope.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisInside I'm Dancing (2004)
Michael is a 24-year-old who has cerebral palsy and long-term resident of the Carrigmore Residential Home for the Disabled, run by the formidable Eileen. His life is transformed when the maverick Rory O'Shea moves in.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisSmall Things Like These (2024)
In 1985, while working as a coal merchant to support his family, Bill Furlong discovers disturbing secrets kept by the local convent and uncovers truths of his own; forcing him to confront his past and the complicit silence of a small Irish town controlled by the Catholic Church.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisBlue Chips (1994)
Pete Bell, a college basketball coach is under a lot of pressure. His team isn't winning and he cannot attract new players. The stars of the future are secretly being paid by boosters. This practice is forbidden in the college game, but Pete is desperate and has pressures from all around.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisThe Assault (2014)
After a cheerleader is sexually assaulted by the high school football team, she must overcome her shame and use the evidence gathered from the subsequent social media firestorm to piece together the night that she can't remember in her fight for justice. Based on the true story of the Steubenville, Ohio rape case.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisSay Anything... (1989)
Average student and eternal optimist Lloyd Dobler seeks to capture the heart of Diane Court, a beautiful but unattainable valedictorian classmate. He surprises just about everyone - including himself - when she returns the sentiment. However, Diane's divorced, over-protective father soon begins to disapprove of the match, and Lloyd realises that it's going to take more than just the power of love to conquer all.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisPretty in Pink (1986)
Andie is an outcast, hanging out either with her older boss, who owns the record store where she works, or her quirky high school classmate Duckie, who has a crush on her. When one of the rich and popular kids at school, Blane, asks Andie out, it seems too good to be true. As Andie starts falling for Blane, she begins to realize that dating someone from a different social sphere is not easy.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisWho's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)
A history professor and his wife entertain a young couple who are new to the university's faculty. As the drinks flow, secrets come to light, and the middle-aged couple unload onto their guests the full force of the bitterness, dysfunction, and animosity that defines their marriage.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisChameleon (2025)
After embarrassingly sitting with a full cup at the end of a game of Never Have I Ever, Maria sets out to live a little by doing all the things she's never done.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
Wild Geese (1927)
Silent romantic melodrama about a wife and mother who is desperate to keep a secret from the past IN the past, despite her husband's intentions to reveal it.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
Sarah Plays a Werewolf (2017)
17-year old Sarah, filled with adolescent angst, is an extreme person who in her rehearsals with a theatre group is transformed until she is almost in a trance, and her performances at home or elsewhere verge on excess. A cold, intellectual father, a timid mother, a younger sister and an older brother who has left home complete the picture: a silent time bomb.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
50 Ways of Saying Fabulous (2005)
Sweet, chubby, theatrical Billy was never cut out to be a farmer or a rugby player, but as the only son of a ‘good kiwi bloke’ he’s obliged to try. The cows are stubborn and the chores gruelling but Billy finds escape in a fantasy world playing Lana, heroine of his favourite TV show Adventures in Space. Not everyone approves of Billy's transformation. On the brink of adolescene, he discovers growing up is more complicated than he could ever have imagined.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
Typhoon Club (1985)
Offering a caustic immersion into the lives of disaffected junior high students on the cusp of adulthood, the film takes place over the 5-day period before, during, and after a ferocious, seemingly liberating typhoon, which six of the students endure while marooned in their school.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like this1-800-Hot-Nite (2022)
When 13-year-old Tommy loses his parents to a drug raid, he turns to a phone sex operator (his fairy godmother) for help as he embarks on an urban odyssey to escape foster care with his two best friends.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
Second Glance (1992)
A Christian teenager, missing out on his fun years, begins to contemplate his religion but is given the ability to SECOND GLANCE his life had he not been a leader sent by Him.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
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Frequently asked questions
What are the best movies like The Restless Years?
The closest matches to The Restless Years are All Together Now (2020), Omaha (2025) and Won't Back Down (2012). Below are 27 more, each with the reason it matches.
What should I watch after The Restless Years?
Start with All Together Now (2020), the closest match to The Restless Years.
What is the highest-rated movie like The Restless Years?
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), rated 7.7/10 by 959 TMDB users.
What is the newest movie like The Restless Years?
Omaha (2025) is the most recent release on this list.
Are there English movies like The Restless Years?
Yes: All Together Now (2020), Omaha (2025) and Won't Back Down (2012).
How are movies similar to The Restless Years chosen?
First come films that Trakt’s viewers watch alongside The Restless Years, then TMDB’s recommendations and films it rates as similar in story and genre. Each pick says which signal put it there.