Movies like Minari (2020)
The best movies like Minari (2020) are Lion (2016), Blue Bayou (2021) and The Farewell (2019). If Minari hooked you with its drama, these 30 similar films are what to watch next, and every pick says why it matches.
Quick picks
- Highest ratedLion (2016)8.0/10 from 7,123 votes
- NewestThe President's Cake (2026)Released 2026
Lion (2016)
A five-year-old Indian boy gets lost on the streets of Calcutta, thousands of kilometers from home. He survives many challenges before being adopted by a couple in Australia; 25 years later, he sets out to find his lost family.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Absolute CinemaMovies like thisBlue Bayou (2021)
As a Korean-American man raised in the Louisiana bayou works hard to make a life for his family, he must confront the ghosts of his past as he discovers that he could be deported from the only country he has ever called home.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Farewell (2019)
A headstrong Chinese-American woman returns to China when her beloved grandmother is given a terminal diagnosis. Billi struggles with her family's decision to keep grandma in the dark about her own illness as they all stage an impromptu wedding to see grandma one last time.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisArmageddon Time (2022)
In 1980, Queens, New York, a young Jewish boy befriends a rebellious African-American classmate to the disapproval of his privileged family and begins to reckon with growing up in a world of inequality and prejudice.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisAbandoned Man (2025)
After serving time in prison for his brother's crime, a man warily reunites with family, finding hope and healing in a life-changing bond with his niece.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisIn America (2003)
A family of Irish immigrants adjusts to life on the mean streets of Hell's Kitchen while also grieving the death of a child.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Florida Project (2017)
The story of a precocious six year-old and her ragtag group of friends whose summer break is filled with childhood wonder, possibility and a sense of adventure while the adults around them struggle with hard times.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Quiet Girl (2022)
A quiet, neglected girl is sent away from her dysfunctional family to live with relatives for the summer. She blossoms in their care, but in this house where there are meant to be no secrets, she discovers one.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisNomadland (2021)
A woman in her sixties embarks on a journey through the western United States after losing everything in the Great Recession, living as a van-dwelling modern-day nomad.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisRoma (2018)
In 1970s Mexico City, two domestic workers help a mother of four while her husband is away for an extended period of time.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisHillbilly Elegy (2020)
An urgent phone call pulls a Yale Law student back to his Ohio hometown, where he reflects on three generations of family history and his own future.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisA Better Life (2011)
An Indigenous Latino American gardener in East L.A. struggles to keep his son away from gangs and immigration agents while traveling across town to perform landscaping work for the city's wealthy landowners.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Ties That Bind Us (2025)
A young single father trying to find the strength to love. A feminist librarian, single by conviction, who’s decided that she won’t be a mother. A six-year-old child trying to find a place in a new family structure. By revealing their aspirations, their fears, their choices, Carine Tardieu depicts different ways in which humans create families.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisAftersun (2022)
Sophie reflects on the shared joy and private melancholy of a holiday she took with her father twenty years earlier. Memories fill the gaps between camcorder footages as she tries to reconcile the father she knew with the troubled man she didn't.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisMoonlight (2016)
The tender, heartbreaking story of a young man’s struggle to find himself, told across three defining chapters in his life as he experiences the ecstasy, pain, and beauty of falling in love, while grappling with his own sexuality.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisManchester by the Sea (2016)
After his older brother passes away, Lee Chandler is forced to return home to care for his 16-year-old nephew. There he is compelled to deal with a tragic past that separated him from his family and the community where he was born and raised.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisColumbus (2017)
When a renowned architecture scholar falls suddenly ill during a speaking tour, his son Jin finds himself stranded in Columbus, Indiana - a small Midwestern city celebrated for its many significant modernist buildings. Jin strikes up a friendship with Casey, a young architecture enthusiast who works at the local library.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisLeft-Handed Girl (2025)
A mother and her two daughters move to Taipei to open a noodle stand at a vibrant night market, but family secrets and tradition test their fresh start.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisBoyhood (2014)
The film tells a story of a divorced couple trying to raise their young son. The story follows the boy for twelve years, from first grade at age 6 through 12th grade at age 17-18, and examines his relationship with his parents as he grows.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies 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: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisFremont (2023)
Donya, a lonely Afghan refugee and former translator, spends her twenties drifting through a meager existence in Fremont, California. Shuttling between her job writing fortunes for a fortune cookie factory and sessions with her eccentric therapist, Donya suffers from insomnia and survivor's guilt over those still left behind in Kabul as she desperately searches for love.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisMutt (2023)
Over the course of a single hectic day in New York City, three people from Feña's past are thrust back into his life: his foreign father, his straight ex-boyfriend, and his 13-year old half-sister. Having lost touch since transitioning from female to male, Feña must navigate the new dynamics of these old relationships while tackling the day-to-day challenges that come with living a life in-between.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
The Namesake (2007)
The American-born son of Indian immigrants strives to fit in among his fellow New Yorkers despite his family's unwillingness to let go of their traditional ways.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisThe Glass Castle (2017)
A young girl is raised in a dysfunctional family constantly on the run from the FBI. Living in poverty, she comes of age guided by her drunkard, ingenious father who distracts her with magical stories to keep her mind off the family's dire state, and her selfish, nonconformist mother who has no intention of raising a family, along with her younger brother and sister, and her other older sister. Together, they fend for each other as they mature in an unorthodox journey that is their family life.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisShort Term 12 (2013)
Grace, a compassionate young supervisor at a foster care facility, helps at-risk teens. But when a new charge dredges up memories of her own troubled past, Grace's tough exterior begins eroding.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Joy Luck Club (1993)
Through a series of flashbacks, four Chinese women born in America and their respective mothers born in feudal China explore their pasts.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisSouthside with You (2016)
Chronicles a single day in the summer of 1989 when the future president of the United States, Barack Obama, wooed his future First Lady on an epic first date across Chicago's South Side.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
SnoozefestMovies like thisThe Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019)
Jimmie Fails dreams of reclaiming the Victorian home his grandfather built in the heart of San Francisco. Joined on his quest by his best friend Mont, Jimmie searches for belonging in a rapidly changing city that seems to have left them behind.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisRiceboy Sleeps (2023)
In the 1990s, an immigrant single mother raises her teenage son in the Canadian suburbs, determined to provide a better life for him than the one she left behind in South Korea.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe President's Cake (2026)
While people across 1990’s Iraq struggle to survive, 9-year-old Lamia has been selected to prepare a cake to celebrate the President’s birthday. In a landscape of fear and scarcity, where basic ingredients are nearly impossible to find, Lamia sets out on a determined journey throughout the big city in search of eggs, flour, and sugar. Accompanied by her grandmother, her loyal friend Saeed, and her pet rooster Hindi, she navigates vendors and police officers along the way.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like this
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Frequently asked questions
What are the best movies like Minari?
The closest matches to Minari are Lion (2016), Blue Bayou (2021) and The Farewell (2019). Below are 27 more, each with the reason it matches.
What should I watch after Minari?
People who watched Minari most often go on to Lion (2016), Blue Bayou (2021) and The Farewell (2019).
What is the highest-rated movie like Minari?
Lion (2016), rated 8.0/10 by 7,123 TMDB users.
What is the newest movie like Minari?
The President's Cake (2026) is the most recent release on this list.
Are there English movies like Minari?
Yes: Lion (2016), Blue Bayou (2021) and The Farewell (2019).
How are movies similar to Minari chosen?
First come films that Trakt’s viewers watch alongside Minari, then TMDB’s recommendations and films it rates as similar in story and genre. Each pick says which signal put it there.