Movies like The Bookshop (2017)
The best movies like The Bookshop (2017) are The Long, Hot Summer (1958), The River (1984) and The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1972). If The Bookshop hooked you with its drama, these 30 similar films are what to watch next, and every pick says why it matches.
Quick picks
- Highest ratedPaths of Glory (1957)8.3/10 from 3,435 votes
- NewestSpringsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (2025)Released 2025
The Long, Hot Summer (1958)
Accused barn burner and conman Ben Quick arrives in a small Mississippi town and quickly ingratiates himself with its richest family, the Varners.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe River (1984)
Tom and Mae Garvey are a Tennessee farming couple battling violent floods to save their land. In addition to natural disasters, the Garveys fight to stop a selfish land developer and a local corporation from foreclosing on their farm. While Mae stays at home to care for their children and tend to the crops, Tom finds work as a scab at a steel mill to preserve his family's property.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisThe Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1972)
Middle-aged widow Beatrice Hunsdorfer and her daughters Ruth and Matilda are struggling to survive in a society they barely understand. Beatrice dreams of opening an elegant tea room but does not have the wherewithal to achieve her lofty goal. Epileptic Ruth is a rebellious adolescent, while shy but highly intelligent and idealistic Matilda seeks solace in her pets and school projects, including one designed to show how small amounts of radium affect marigolds.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisAdopt a Highway (2019)
Russ Millings has just been released from prison after serving 21 years for a 3rd strike conviction for possessing an ounce of marijuana. As he tries to adapt to a world he doesn’t recognize – including trying to learn how to use the internet – he finds an abandoned baby in a dumpster behind the fast food restaurant where he works as a dishwasher. Unsure of what to do, and caught between impulses of kindness and panic, Russ soon realizes this could be his chance at redemption.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisDrums Along the Mohawk (1939)
Albany, New York, 1776. After marrying, Gil and Lana travel north to settle on a small farm in the Mohawk River Valley, but soon their growing prosperity and happiness are threatened by the sinister sound of drums that announce dark times of revolution and war.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisWonderstruck (2017)
The story of a young boy in the Midwest is told simultaneously with a tale about a young girl in New York from fifty years ago as they both seek the same mysterious connection.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisNorma Rae (1979)
Norma Rae is a southern textile worker employed in a factory with intolerable working conditions. This concern about the situation gives her the gumption to be the key associate to a visiting labor union organizer. Together, they undertake the difficult, and possibly dangerous, struggle to unionize her factory.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Old Oak (2023)
A pub landlord in a previously thriving mining community struggles to hold onto his pub. Meanwhile, tensions rise in the town when Syrian refugees are placed in the empty houses in the community.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisA Question of Faith (2017)
When Tragedy Strikes three Families, their Destiny forces them on a coverging path and mercy as the challenges of their fate could also resurrect their beliefs
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisHurry Sundown (1967)
A ruthless Southern opportunist tries to buy his cousin's land, and when thwarted, brings several tragedies to the lives of his loved ones.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisThe Organization (1971)
After a group of young revolutionaries break into a company's corporate headquarters and steal $5,000,000 worth of heroin to keep it off the street, they call on San Francisco Police Lieutenant Virgil Tibbs for assistance.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisThe Girl in the Book (2015)
The story of a young writer's transformation when her past invades her present.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
SnoozefestMovies like thisA Call to Spy (2020)
The story of Vera Atkins, a crafty spy recruiter, and two of the first women she selects for Churchill's "secret army": Virginia Hall, a daring American undaunted by a disability and Noor Inayat Khan, a pacifist. These civilian women form an unlikely sisterhood while entangled in dangerous missions to turn the tide of the war.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisGigi & Nate (2022)
A young man with a bright future suffers a near-fatal accident and recreates his new life with the help of an unlikely animal friend.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisSkin (2009)
Based on the true story of a black girl who was born to two white Afrikaner parents in South Africa during the apartheid era.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisHammett (1982)
Chinatown, San Francisco, 1928. Former private detective Dashiell Hammett, a compulsive drinker with tuberculosis who writes pulp fiction for a living, receives an unexpected visit from an old friend asking for help.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisThe Scarlet and the Black (1983)
Fr. Hugh O'Flaherty is a Vatican official in 1943-45 who has been hiding downed pilots, escaped prisoners of war, and Italian resistance families. His activities become so large that the Nazis decide to assassinate him the next time he leaves the Vatican.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisFX's A Christmas Carol (2019)
London, 1843. Ebenezer Scrooge, a bitter old man, despises the Christmas holiday. Over the course of Christmas Eve night he is visited by three ghosts to show him his past, present and future.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisTyson's Run (2022)
When fifteen-year-old Tyson attends public school for the first time, his life is changed forever. While helping his father clean up after the football team, Tyson befriends champion marathon runner Aklilu. Never letting his autism hold him back, Tyson becomes determined to run his first marathon in hopes of winning his father's approval. With the help of an unlikely friend and his parents, Tyson learns that with faith in yourself and the courage to take the first step, anything is possible.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisStormageddon (2015)
What happens when you ask the most powerful computer program, run by the most powerful computers, to follow, listen and predict human behavior? The program learns, becomes sentient and begins to behave like a human. When a master computer program, Echelon, takes over America's entire online system, our country is threatened to be brought to its knees. Hacking into DARPA, Echelon gains the ability to manipulate the weather, create earthquakes, and cause a level of destruction unlike anything the country could ever imagine. But how do you stop a computer program when it has control over any and every defense you have?
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisCool Hand Luke (1967)
When petty criminal Luke Jackson is sentenced to two years in a Florida prison farm, he doesn't play by the rules of either the sadistic warden or the yard's resident heavy, Dragline, who ends up admiring the new guy's unbreakable will. Luke's bravado, even in the face of repeated stints in the prison's dreaded solitary confinement cell, "the box," make him a rebel hero to his fellow convicts and a thorn in the side of the prison officers.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisDoctor Zhivago (1965)
The life of a Russian physician and poet who, although married to another, falls in love with a political activist's wife and experiences hardship during World War I and then the October Revolution.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
The classic story of English POWs in Burma forced to build a bridge to aid the war effort of their Japanese captors. British and American intelligence officers conspire to blow up the structure, but Col. Nicholson, the commander who supervised the bridge's construction, has acquired a sense of pride in his creation and tries to foil their plans.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
The spoiled young heir to the decaying Amberson fortune comes between his widowed mother and the man she has always loved.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisPaths of Glory (1957)
A commanding officer defends three scapegoats on trial for a failed offensive that occurred within the French Army in 1916.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
Absolute CinemaMovies like thisScarface (1932)
In 1920s Chicago, Italian immigrant and notorious thug, Antonio 'Tony' Camonte, aka Scarface, shoots his way to the top of the mobs while trying to protect his sister from the criminal life.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisCrash (1996)
A car crash victim inexplicably finds himself aroused by car accidents and becomes involved with an underground subculture of like-minded souls.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisAll the President's Men (1976)
During the 1972 elections, two reporters' investigation sheds light on the controversial Watergate scandal that compels President Nixon to resign from his post.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisAparajito (1956)
Apu and his family have moved away from the country to live in the bustling holy city of Benares. As he progresses from wide-eyed child to intellectually curious teenager, eventually studying in Kolkata, we witness his academic and moral education, as well as the growing complexity of his relationship with his mother.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisSpringsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (2025)
Bruce Springsteen, a young musician on the cusp of global superstardom, struggles to reconcile the pressures of success with the ghosts of his past.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like this
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Frequently asked questions
What are the best movies like The Bookshop?
The closest matches to The Bookshop are The Long, Hot Summer (1958), The River (1984) and The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1972). Below are 27 more, each with the reason it matches.
What should I watch after The Bookshop?
Start with The Long, Hot Summer (1958), the closest match to The Bookshop.
What is the highest-rated movie like The Bookshop?
Paths of Glory (1957), rated 8.3/10 by 3,435 TMDB users.
What is the newest movie like The Bookshop?
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (2025) is the most recent release on this list.
Are there English movies like The Bookshop?
Yes: The Long, Hot Summer (1958), The River (1984) and The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1972).
How are movies similar to The Bookshop chosen?
First come films that Trakt’s viewers watch alongside The Bookshop, then TMDB’s recommendations and films it rates as similar in story and genre. Each pick says which signal put it there.