Movies like Julien Donkey-Boy (1999)
The best movies like Julien Donkey-Boy (1999) are Nil by Mouth (1997), Gummo (1997) and Permanent Vacation (1981). If Julien Donkey-Boy hooked you with its drama, these 30 similar films are what to watch next, and every pick says why it matches.
Quick picks
- Highest ratedMommy (2014)8.2/10 from 2,925 votes
- NewestAngel of Mine (2019)Released 2019
Nil by Mouth (1997)
The family of Raymond, his wife Val and her brother Billy live in working-class London district. Also in their family is Val and Billy's mother Janet and grandmother Kath. Billy is a drug addict and Raymond kicks him out of the house, making him live on his own. Raymond is generally a rough and even violent person, and that leads to problems in the life of the family.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisGummo (1997)
Teenagers Solomon and Tummler kill time in Xenia, Ohio, a small town that has never recovered from the tornado that ravaged the community in the 1970s.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisPermanent Vacation (1981)
In downtown Manhattan, twentysomething Allie, whose father is not around and whose mother is institutionalized, is a big Charlie Parker fan. He almost subconsciously searches for meaning in his life and meets some idiosyncratic characters along the way.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
SnoozefestMovies like thisManic (2002)
In lieu of prison, Lyle, a violent adolescent, is placed in a juvenile mental institution where he encounters a group of equally troubled teens. This motley crew—abused, sexually confused, violent, and yet hanging on by their grit and anger—becomes Lyle's last lifeline as he fights to find meaning in a world that seems to defy understanding.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisI Smile Back (2015)
Laney is an attractive, intelligent suburban wife and devoted mother of two adorable children. She has the perfect husband who plays basketball with the kids in the driveway, a pristine house, and a shiny SUV for carting the children to their next activity. However, just beneath the façade lie depression and disillusionment that send her careening into a secret world of reckless compulsion. Only very real danger will force her to face the painful root of her destructiveness and its crumbling effect on those she loves.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisMommy (2014)
A peculiar neighbor offers hope to a recent widow who is struggling to raise a teenager who is unpredictable and, sometimes, violent.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Absolute CinemaMovies like thisMysterious Skin (2005)
A teenage hustler and a young man obsessed with alien abductions cross paths, together discovering a horrible, liberating truth.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisGirl, Interrupted (1999)
Set in the changing world of the late 1960s, Susanna Kaysen's prescribed "short rest" from a psychiatrist she had met only once becomes a strange, unknown journey into Alice's Wonderland, where she struggles with the thin line between normal and crazy. Susanna soon realizes how hard it is to get out once she has been committed, and she ultimately has to choose between the world of people who belong inside or the difficult world of reality outside.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisKen Park (2003)
Teen skater Ken Park (nicknamed Krap Nek; his name spelled and pronounced backward) kills himself at a Visalia skate park; his death bookends the lives of four other young people who knew him: Shawn, the most conventional; Tate brims with psychotic rage; Claude is habitually harassed by his brutish father and coddled, rather uncomfortably, by his enormously pregnant mother; and Peaches looks after her devoutly religious father, but yearns for freedom. They're all rather tight, or so they claim.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisAnimals (2014)
ANIMALS tells the story of Jude and Bobbie: a young couple that exist somewhere between homelessness and the fantasy of their imaginations. Though they masterfully con and steal in an attempt to stay one step ahead of their addiction, they are ultimately forced to face the reality of their situation when one of them gets hospitalized.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
The Ice Storm (1997)
In the weekend after thanksgiving 1973 the Hood family is skidding out of control. Then an ice storm hits, the worst in a century.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisStorytelling (2001)
College and high school serve as the backdrop for two stories about dysfunction and personal turmoil.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisCharlotte for Ever (1986)
Once a successful Hollywood screenwriter, Stan is now a depressive alcoholic who spends most of his time mooching about his house whilst pouring out his troubles to his drinking partner. The only thing that keeps him going is his love for his teenage daughter, Charlotte, but she despises him, believing him to be responsible for the accident in which her mother died.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Factotum (2005)
This drama centers on Hank Chinaski, the fictional alter-ego of "Factotum" author Charles Bukowski, who wanders around Los Angeles, CA trying to live off jobs which don't interfere with his primary interest, which is writing. Along the way, he fends off the distractions offered by women, drinking and gambling.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisStinking Heaven (2015)
A black-as-tar comedy charting the dissolution of a commune for sober living in suburban 1990s New Jersey.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
I 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: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisWelcome to the Dollhouse (1996)
An unattractive 7th grader struggles to cope with suburban life as the middle child with inattentive parents and bullies at school.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Idiots (1998)
A group of perfectly intelligent young people decide to react to society's cult of aimless, non-creative and non-responsible form intellect by living together in a community of 'idiots'. Their primary activity becomes going out into the world of 'normal' people and pretending to be mentally incompetent. They take advantage of this situation to create anarchy, and, by every possible means, to make those around them miserable.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisSwoon (1992)
Teenagers Nathan Leopold Jr. and Richard Loeb share a dangerous sexual bond and an amoral outlook on life. They spend afternoons breaking into storefronts and engaging in petty crimes, until the calculating Nathan ups the ante by kidnapping, and murdering, a young boy.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Permanent Midnight (1998)
Juggling increasing career success and a growing heroin habit, a television comedy writer attempts to go down a path of improvement.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
SnoozefestMovies like thisThumbsucker (2005)
Justin Cobb, a teenager in suburban Oregon, copes with his thumb-sucking problem, romance, and his diagnosis with ADHD and subsequent experience using Ritalin.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisFrownland (2008)
Keith is a disturbingly maladjusted social outcast and self-described “troll” whose neuroses plunge him into an unstoppable spiral of self-obliteration as his crummy coupon-selling job, pitiful living situation and last remaining human relationships disintegrate around him.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Punch-Drunk Love (2002)
A socially awkward and volatile small business owner meets the love of his life after being threatened by a gang of scammers.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Legend of the Holy Drinker (1988)
Andreas Kartak, a homeless man living under the bridges of Paris, is lent 200 francs by a stranger as long as he promises to repay it to a local church when he can afford to. Kartak is determined to pay back his debt but circumstances, and his alcoholism, forever intervene.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisLove Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon (1998)
In the 1960s, British painter Francis Bacon surprises a burglar and invites him to share his bed. The burglar, a working class man named George Dyer, accepts. After the unique beginning to their love affair, the well-connected and volatile artist assimilates Dyer into his circle of eccentric friends, as Dyer's struggle with addiction strains their bond.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisMe and You and Everyone We Know (2005)
Single dad Richard meets Christine, a starving artist who moonlights as a cabbie. They awkwardly attempt to start a romance, but Richard’s divorce has left him emotionally damaged. Meanwhile, Richard’s sons—one a teenager, the other 6-years-old—take part in clumsy experiments with the opposite sex.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisMall (2014)
Malcom's done with his life. Only the noise of Crystal Meth gives him a reason to keep going - everything else it has long regardless. Equipped with a bag full of weapons and self-made bombs, he makes his way to the nearby mall to really stir things up. On his personal war campaign, he not only changes his life radically, but also the fate of other people who are in the wrong place at the same time: a teenager whose favorite pastime is smoking pot in his dreary existence, a housewife, where their best days have been left behind, a greedy businessman whose only desire is to increase his wealth and a depressed pervert.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
SnoozefestMovies like thisThe Mountain (2019)
1950s America. Since his mother‘s confinement to an institution, Andy has lived in the shadow of his stoic father. A family acquaintance, Dr. Wallace Fiennes, employs the introverted young man as a photographer to document an asylum tour advocating for his increasingly controversial lobotomy procedure.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
SnoozefestMovies like thisTrash Humpers (2010)
Follow a small group of elderly “Peeping Toms” through the shadows and margins of an unfamiliar world. Crudely documented by the participants themselves, we follow the debased and shocking actions of a group of true sociopaths the likes of which have never been seen before. Inhabiting a world of broken dreams and beyond the limits of morality, they crash against a torn and frayed America.
Why it matches: Fans watch both
SnoozefestMovies like thisAngel of Mine (2019)
A woman grieving over the death of her daughter loses grip of reality when she begins to think her girl may still be alive.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like this
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Frequently asked questions
What are the best movies like Julien Donkey-Boy?
The closest matches to Julien Donkey-Boy are Nil by Mouth (1997), Gummo (1997) and Permanent Vacation (1981). Below are 27 more, each with the reason it matches.
What should I watch after Julien Donkey-Boy?
People who watched Julien Donkey-Boy most often go on to Nil by Mouth (1997), Gummo (1997) and Permanent Vacation (1981).
What is the highest-rated movie like Julien Donkey-Boy?
Mommy (2014), rated 8.2/10 by 2,925 TMDB users.
What is the newest movie like Julien Donkey-Boy?
Angel of Mine (2019) is the most recent release on this list.
Are there English movies like Julien Donkey-Boy?
Yes: Nil by Mouth (1997), Gummo (1997) and Permanent Vacation (1981).
How are movies similar to Julien Donkey-Boy chosen?
First come films that Trakt’s viewers watch alongside Julien Donkey-Boy, then TMDB’s recommendations and films it rates as similar in story and genre. Each pick says which signal put it there.