Movies like First Cousin Once Removed (2012)
The best movies like First Cousin Once Removed (2012) are Dick Johnson Is Dead (2020), Come See Me in the Good Light (2025) and Struggle: The Life and Lost Art of Szukalski (2018). If First Cousin Once Removed hooked you with its documentary, these 30 similar films are what to watch next, and every pick says why it matches.
Quick picks
- Highest ratedRobin Williams: Come Inside My Mind (2018)7.9/10 from 273 votes
- NewestA Toxic Love Story (2026)Released 2026
Dick Johnson Is Dead (2020)
With this inventive portrait, director Kirsten Johnson seeks a way to keep her 86-year-old father alive forever. Utilizing moviemaking magic and her family’s dark humor, she celebrates Dr. Dick Johnson’s last years by staging fantasies of death and beyond. Together, dad and daughter confront the great inevitability awaiting us all.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both documentary
Worth the HypeMovies like thisCome See Me in the Good Light (2025)
In an intimate and joyful story of love in the face of loss, celebrated poets Andrea Gibson and Megan Falley find strength—and unexpected hilarity—in what might be their final year together.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both documentary
Worth the HypeMovies like thisStruggle: The Life and Lost Art of Szukalski (2018)
Artists in LA discover the work of forgotten Polish sculptor Stanislav Szukalski, a mad genius whose true story unfolds chapter by astounding chapter.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both documentary
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Curse of the Dragon (1993)
A 1993 documentary film about Bruce Lee. The film includes interviews from some of his fellow students and opponents who worked alongside him in his movies.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both documentary
Worth the HypeMovies like thisAnna Nicole Smith: You Don't Know Me (2023)
From the heights of her modeling fame to her tragic death, this documentary reveals Anna Nicole Smith through the eyes of the people closest to her.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both documentary
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisNight Will Fall (2014)
When Allied forces liberated the Nazi concentration camps in 1944-45, their terrible discoveries were recorded by army and newsreel cameramen, revealing for the first time the full horror of what had happened. Making use of British, Soviet and American footage, the Ministry of Information’s Sidney Bernstein (later founder of Granada Television) aimed to create a documentary that would provide lasting, undeniable evidence of the Nazis’ unspeakable crimes. He commissioned a wealth of British talent, including editor Stewart McAllister, writer and future cabinet minister Richard Crossman – and, as treatment advisor, his friend Alfred Hitchcock. Yet, despite initial support from the British and US Governments, the film was shelved, and only now, 70 years on, has it been restored and completed by Imperial War Museums under its original title "German Concentration Camps Factual Survey".
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both documentary
Worth the HypeMovies like thisGilbert (2017)
The life and career of one of comedy's most inimitable modern voices, Mr. Gilbert Gottfried.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both documentary
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisTo Kill a Tiger (2023)
Ranjit, a farmer in India, takes on the fight of his life when he demands justice for his 13-year-old daughter, the victim of a brutal gang rape. His decision to support his daughter is virtually unheard of, and his journey unprecedented.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both documentary
Worth the HypeMovies like thisA Toxic Love Story (2026)
A string of threatening emails escalates into a revenge plot involving a newly married US marshal and his ex-girlfriend.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both documentary
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisThe Battered Bastards of Baseball (2014)
Hollywood veteran Bing Russell creates the only independent baseball team in the country—alarming the baseball establishment and sparking the meteoric rise of the 1970s Portland Mavericks.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both documentary
Worth the HypeMovies like thisFather Soldier Son (2020)
When Sgt. First Class Brian Eisch is critically wounded in Afghanistan, it sets him and his sons on a journey of love, loss, redemption and legacy.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both documentary
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisFrida (2024)
An intimately raw and magical journey through the life, mind, and heart of iconic artist Frida Kahlo. Told through her own words for the very first time — drawn from her diary, revealing letters, essays, and print interviews — and brought vividly to life by lyrical animation inspired by her unforgettable artwork.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both documentary
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisVal (2021)
For over 40 years Val Kilmer, one of Hollywood's most mercurial and/or misunderstood actors, has been documenting his own life and craft through film and video. He has amassed thousands of hours of footage, from 16mm home movies made with his brothers, to time spent in iconic roles for blockbuster movies like Top Gun, The Doors, Tombstone, and Batman Forever. This raw, wildly original and unflinching documentary reveals a life lived to extremes and a heart-filled, sometimes hilarious look at what it means to be an artist and a complex man.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both documentary
Worth the HypeMovies like thisPamela, a love story (2023)
In her own words, through personal video and diaries, Pamela Anderson shares the story of her rise to fame, rocky romances and infamous sex tape scandal.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both documentary
Worth the HypeMovies like thisMapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures (2016)
Nude men in rubber suits, close-ups of erections, objects shoved in the most intimate of places—these are photographs taken by Robert Mapplethorpe, known by many as the most controversial photographer of the twentieth century. Openly gay, Mapplethorpe took images of male sex, nudity, and fetish to extremes that resulted in his work still being labelled by some as pornography masquerading as art. But less talked about are the more serene, yet striking portraits of flowers, sculptures, and perfectly framed human forms that are equally pioneering and powerful.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both documentary
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisFuck (2006)
A documentary on the expletive's origin, why it offends some people so deeply, and what can be gained from its use.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both documentary
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisBukowski: Born Into This (2003)
Director John Dullaghan’s biographical documentary about infamous poet Charles Bukowski, Bukowski: Born Into This, is as much a touching portrait of the author as it is an exposé of his sordid lifestyle. Interspersed between ample vintage footage of Bukowski’s poetry readings are interviews with the poet’s fans including such legendary figures such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Joyce Fante (wife of John), Bono, and Harry Dean Stanton. Filmed in grainy black and white by Bukowski’s friend, Taylor Hackford, due to lack of funding, the old films edited into this movie paint Bukowski’s life of boozing and brawling romantically, securing Bukowski’s legendary status.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both documentary
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisGirl Rising (2013)
Nine filmmakers each profile a young girl from a different part of the world to weave a global tapestry of youth in the 21st century.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both documentary
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThey'll Love Me When I'm Dead (2018)
As his life comes to its end, famous Hollywood director Orson Welles puts it all on the line at the chance for renewed success with the film The Other Side of the Wind.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both documentary
Worth the HypeMovies like thisRobin Williams: Come Inside My Mind (2018)
A funny, intimate and heartbreaking portrait of one of the world’s most beloved and inventive comedians, Robin Williams, told largely through his own words. Celebrates what he brought to comedy and to the culture at large, from the wild days of late-1970s L.A. to his death in 2014.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both documentary
Absolute CinemaMovies like thisText Messages from the Universe (2019)
A film that immerses its audience in subjective states of consciousness they might experience when they die, imagining what they can see and think and hear in a seamless but fragmentary flow of poetic images, words and music. The viewer undertakes a journey into their own interior world of dreams and projections in which time and space, and cause and effect logic, are turned on their heads. Text Messages from the Universe is inspired by The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a text which guides souls on their journey of 49 days through the 'Bardo', or intermediate state, between dying and rebirth.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both documentary
Hello My Dear (2021)
The documentary is titled after Arkadaş Z. Özger’s poem “Hello My Dear” which had caused much controversy in the period it was first published. Considered to be in defiance of heteronormativity, the said poem includes references to the poet’s personality, his family, his relationship to the society, and his “unexpected” death, which came three years after its publication. Today, 50 years after it was written, the documentary follows these same lines in the poem utilising cinematic elements. The documentary also rediscovers the poetics; reaches out to the family, the comrades, the friendships, departing from the official historical accounts, cognizant of his experience of otherness, in pursuit of the “lost” portrait of Arkadaş Z. Özger.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both documentary
Pat XO (2013)
This documentary profiles the life and career of Pat Summitt, the NCAA's winningest basketball coach, who resigned from her post at the University of Tennessee in 2012 due to early-onset Alzheimer's disease.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both documentary
Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me (2014)
A documentary film detailing Glen Campbell's final tour and his struggle with Alzheimer's disease.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both documentary
Worth the HypeMovies like thisCseh Tamás énekel (1980)
Smoky little clubs, late nights, late nights of conversation over a glass of beer and a guitar. The lyricist Géza Bereményi and the composer-performer Tamás Cseh are the creators of the most topical and accurate songs of the 70s and 80s, expressing the mood of the "30s and 40s" of that time - a mood that was their own destiny. This stunning recording from 1980 includes songs like Tangó, Álomfejtés, Szabó Kálmán tegnap este..., A 100. éjszaka, A legjobb viccek, Születtem Magyarországon, A dédapa dala, Egy bogár, Krakkói vonat, Az ócska cipő, Filmdal.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both documentary
Sunnyside (TBA)
Ninety-year-old sound artist and comedian Henry “Sandy” Jacobs lives a quirky existence at the end of Sunnyside Drive, a steep and winding dirt road washed by fog from the Pacific Ocean. Sixty feet down the hill lives his eccentric 84-year-old friend and neighbor, architect and former Frank Lloyd Wright collaborator Daniel Liebermann. These extraordinary old men, influential artists in the 1950s and ’60s, continue, each in their own way, to search the world for perfection. Sunnyside takes us to an extraordinary place, a microcosm with its own distinctive rhythm and remarkable inhabitants. It is a film about creativity, the capacity to dream and, ultimately, the transience of life.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both documentary
Breaking Glass: The Pat Summitt Story (2026)
Chronicles the life of the legendary Tennessee Lady Vols basketball coach.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both documentary
Elfriede & Elfriede (2004)
Two friends, two Viennese, two poets, two unusual women. They have known each other for 30 years. Elfriede Jelinek is the better known of the two, the great author with her analytical mind and her social commitment against the whole "politician's docks." The now deceased lyricist Elfriede Gerstl remains rather tender with her poetry, although her poems do not miss a certain amount of sharpness, albeit ironically packed. When the two Elfrieden sit in their Viennese coffee house and drink the little brown, they usually talk about clothes, they talk about the fashion that Elfriede Gerstl has just collected again.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both documentary
Poetry Is an Island, Derek Walcott (2014)
Intimate portrait of poet, playwright, painter and filmmaker Derek Walcott, set in his beloved native island, St Lucia.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both documentary
Golden Seniors (2023)
The adventure of five seniors who engage in an intense training of their mind. For the purpose of a scientific study, the impact of meditation on aging is evaluated.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both documentary
Like First Cousin Once Removed and something else?
Blend two favourites and we’ll find the films in between.
Frequently asked questions
What are the best movies like First Cousin Once Removed?
The closest matches to First Cousin Once Removed are Dick Johnson Is Dead (2020), Come See Me in the Good Light (2025) and Struggle: The Life and Lost Art of Szukalski (2018). Below are 27 more, each with the reason it matches.
What should I watch after First Cousin Once Removed?
Start with Dick Johnson Is Dead (2020), the closest match to First Cousin Once Removed.
What is the highest-rated movie like First Cousin Once Removed?
Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind (2018), rated 7.9/10 by 273 TMDB users.
What is the newest movie like First Cousin Once Removed?
A Toxic Love Story (2026) is the most recent release on this list.
Are there English movies like First Cousin Once Removed?
Yes: Dick Johnson Is Dead (2020), Come See Me in the Good Light (2025) and Struggle: The Life and Lost Art of Szukalski (2018).
How are movies similar to First Cousin Once Removed chosen?
First come films that Trakt’s viewers watch alongside First Cousin Once Removed, then TMDB’s recommendations and films it rates as similar in story and genre. Each pick says which signal put it there.