Movies like Men Don't Leave (1990)
The best movies like Men Don't Leave (1990) are A Home of Our Own (1993), The Evening Star (1996) and Tumbleweeds (1999). If Men Don't Leave hooked you with its drama and comedy, these 30 similar films are what to watch next, and every pick says why it matches.
Quick picks
- Highest ratedWhat's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993)7.7/10 from 4,444 votes
- NewestTumbleweeds (1999)Released 1999
A Home of Our Own (1993)
In 1960s Los Angeles an energetic widow and her six children try to make a dream of theirs come true: to have a home of their own. They leave L.A. and head for the countryside, all the while facing numerous difficulties and obstacles during their journey.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Evening Star (1996)
Continuing the story of Aurora Greenway in her latter years. After the death of her daughter, Aurora struggled to keep her family together, but has one grandson in jail, a rebellious granddaughter, and another grandson living just above the poverty line.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both comedy & drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisTumbleweeds (1999)
Whenever trouble strikes in one of her relationships, single mother Mary Jo Walker and her daughter, Ava, pack up and move to another city, a routine Ava is tiring of. This time, they are helped on their move to San Diego by trucker Jack Ranson. While Ava settles in, getting a leading part in the school play, Jack starts dating Mary Jo but soon reveals himself to be controlling and aggressive. Mary Jo prepares to flee again, angering Ava.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both comedy & drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisCrimes of the Heart (1986)
Three sisters try to come to grips with the meaning of their mother's suicide.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both comedy & drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisTerms of Endearment (1983)
Aurora, a finicky woman, is in search of true love while her daughter faces marital issues. Together, they help each other deal with problems and find reasons to live a joyful life.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama & comedy
Worth the HypeMovies 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: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisParenthood (1989)
The story of the Buckman family and friends, attempting to bring up their children. They suffer/enjoy all the events that occur: estranged relatives, the 'black sheep' of the family, the eccentrics, the skeletons in the closet, and the rebellious teenagers.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both comedy & drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisPlaces in the Heart (1984)
In 1935 rural Texas, recently widowed Edna Spaulding struggles to survive with two small children, a farm to run, and very little money in the bank - not to mention a deadly tornado and the unwelcome presence of the Ku Klux Klan. Edna is aided by her beautician sister, Margaret; a blind boarder, Mr. Will; and a would-be thief, Moze, who decides to teach Edna how to plant and harvest cotton.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisWhat's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993)
Gilbert Grape is a small-town young man with a lot of responsibility. Chief among his concerns are his mother, who is so overweight that she can't leave the house, and his mentally impaired younger brother, Arnie, who has a knack for finding trouble. Settled into a job at a grocery store and an ongoing affair with local woman Betty Carver, Gilbert finally has his life shaken up by the free-spirited Becky.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisStanley & Iris (1990)
An illiterate cook at a company cafeteria tries for the attention of a newly widowed woman. As they get to know one another, she discovers his inability to read. When he is fired, she takes on trying to teach him to read in her kitchen each night.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisCountry (1984)
Jewell and Gil are farmers. They seem to be working against the odds, producing no financial surplus. Gil has lost hope of ever becoming prosperous, but Jewell decides to fight for her family.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Shoot the Moon (1982)
After fifteen years of marriage, an affluent couple divorce and take up with new partners.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisSomething to Talk About (1995)
Grace King Bichon, who is managing her father's riding-stable, discovers that her husband Eddie is deceiving her with another woman. After confronting him in the middle of the night on the streets of their small home town, she decides to stay at her sister Emma Rae's house for a while to make up her mind. Breaking out of her everyday life, she starts to question the authority of everyone.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both comedy & drama
SnoozefestMovies like thisMy Family (1995)
Traces over three generations an immigrant family's trials, tribulations, tragedies, and triumphs. Maria and Jose, the first generation, come to Los Angeles, meet, marry, face deportation all in the 1930s. They establish their family in East L.A., and their children Chucho, Paco, Memo, Irene, Toni, and Jimmy deal with youth culture and the L.A. police in the '50s. As the second generation become adults in the '60s, the focus shifts to Jimmy, his marriage to Isabel (a Salvadorian refugee), their son, and Jimmy's journey to becoming a responsible parent.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both comedy & drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisBeaches (1988)
A privileged rich debutante and a cynical struggling entertainer share a turbulent, but strong childhood friendship over the years.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both comedy & drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisTwister (1989)
An oddball family on a Kansas farm are trapped in their farmhouse by an impending storm. The patriarch of the clan is a retired soda pop tycoon. He is currently dating a children's TV evangelist. Also living at the farm is his layabout daughter and her precocious 8 year old daughter, his would-be artist son, the son's fiancée, and the black maid. Also thrown into the mix is the daughter's ex-husband, a ne-er-do-well who is seeking to get back in his ex-wife's good graces.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama & comedy
SnoozefestMovies like thisThat's Life! (1986)
A wealthy architect struggles with a severe case of male menopause at the approach of his 60th birthday.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both comedy & drama
Raggedy Man (1981)
A divorced mother of two boys is stuck working as a telephone operator in a small Texas town during World War II. Her friendship with a Navy sailor on shore leave causes gossip in town.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
SnoozefestMovies like thisMurphy's Romance (1985)
Emma, a divorced single mother seeking to start her life over, moves to a small town in Arizona. She befriends Murphy, the older local pharmacist, but things turn complicated when her ex-husband shows up.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both comedy & drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisTable for Five (1983)
J.P. Tannen (Jon Voight) wants a second chance to be a father to his children ... but someone else has taken his place. Determined not to just be a friendly 'uncle' in their lives, he gets permission from his ex-wife Kathleen (Millie Perkins) and her new husband (Richard Crenna) to take the kids on a Mediterranean cruise. On the journey he comes to realise it's not that easy and, feeling overwhelmed, begins to doubt his abilities until a tragedy back home forces him to become the father he always hoped to be.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Moonstruck (1987)
37-year-old Italian-American widow Loretta Castorini believes she is unlucky in love, and so accepts a marriage proposal from her boyfriend Johnny, even though she doesn't love him. When she meets his estranged younger brother Ronny, an emotional and passionate man, she finds herself drawn to him. She tries to resist, but Ronny, who blames his brother for the loss of his hand, has no scruples about aggressively pursuing her while Johnny is out of the country. As Loretta falls for Ronny, she learns that she's not the only one in her family with a secret romance.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both comedy & drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisOnly When I Laugh (1981)
A boozy Broadway actress comes out of a 12-week cure to face the problems of her best friends as well as her needy daughter. She tries to balance the terrors of returning to work with the demands of all around her with humor and insight, while staying off the booze.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both comedy & drama
Housekeeping (1987)
In the Pacific Northwest during the 1950s, two young sisters whose mother has abandoned them wind up living with their Aunt Sylvie, whose views of the world and its conventions don't quite live up to most people's expectations.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both comedy & drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like this'night, Mother (1986)
A mother and daughter spend a night together after the daughter reveals that she will kill herself by the end of it.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisA Family Thing (1996)
Earl Pilcher Jr. runs an equipment rental outfit in Arkansas, lives with his wife and kids and parents, and rarely takes off his gimme cap. His mother dies, leaving a letter explaining he's not her natural son, but the son of a Black woman who died in childbirth; plus, he has a half brother Ray, in Chicago, she wants him to visit. Earl makes the trip, initially receiving a cold welcome from Ray and Ray's son, Virgil. His birth mother's sister, Aunt T., an aged and blind matriarch, takes Earl in tow and insists that the family open up to him.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both comedy & drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisThe Trip to Bountiful (1985)
Carrie Watts is living the twilight of her life trapped in an apartment in 1940s Houston, Texas with a controlling daughter-in-law and a hen-pecked son. Her fondest wish – just once before she dies – is to revisit Bountiful, the small Texas town of her youth which she still refers to as "home."
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisSafe Passage (1994)
Recently estranged from her husband, and mother of seven sons, Mag Singer stands poised to pursue a whole new way of life. But when one of her children is involved in an explosion while on duty in the Middle East, Mag must rexamine everything she cherishes.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Winter People (1989)
Wayland Jackson, a widower with a young daughter, moves to a small, impoverished mountain village in North Carolina, circa 1934. They are taken in by Collie Wright, a single mother with an illegitimate baby, and she and Wayland soon fall in love. Trouble starts when the identity of her baby's father is revealed.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
The 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: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisThe Hotel New Hampshire (1984)
Over the course of several years beginning in the 1950s, a man and his oddball family run hotels in New England and Vienna, as unexpected events change their lives forever.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both comedy & drama
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Frequently asked questions
What are the best movies like Men Don't Leave?
The closest matches to Men Don't Leave are A Home of Our Own (1993), The Evening Star (1996) and Tumbleweeds (1999). Below are 27 more, each with the reason it matches.
What should I watch after Men Don't Leave?
People who watched Men Don't Leave most often go on to A Home of Our Own (1993), The Evening Star (1996) and Tumbleweeds (1999).
What is the highest-rated movie like Men Don't Leave?
What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993), rated 7.7/10 by 4,444 TMDB users.
What is the newest movie like Men Don't Leave?
Tumbleweeds (1999) is the most recent release on this list.
Are there English movies like Men Don't Leave?
Yes: A Home of Our Own (1993), The Evening Star (1996) and Tumbleweeds (1999).
How are movies similar to Men Don't Leave chosen?
First come films that Trakt’s viewers watch alongside Men Don't Leave, then TMDB’s recommendations and films it rates as similar in story and genre. Each pick says which signal put it there.