Movies like THE ONLY SONS (2003)
The best movies like THE ONLY SONS (2003) are The River (1984), Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains (2020) and The Truth About Emanuel (2013). If THE ONLY SONS hooked you with its drama, these 30 similar films are what to watch next, and every pick says why it matches.
THE ONLY SONS
Quick picks
- Highest ratedIn Cold Blood (1967)7.5/10 from 462 votes
- NewestMexicali (2026)Released 2026
- In ChineseDwelling in the Fuchun Mountains (2020)Also in Chinese
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: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisDwelling in the Fuchun Mountains (2020)
In the Chinese town of Fuyang, four brothers go about their day-to-day lives, their destinies shaped by love and challenges.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Truth About Emanuel (2013)
A troubled young woman becomes obsessed with her mysterious new neighbor, who bears a striking resemblance to the girl's dead mother.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisDeep in the Heart (2015)
An unrecognizable, charred corpse discovered in a remote mountain village in China connects three local stories.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Safety of Objects (2002)
In a suburban landscape, the lives of several families interlace with loss, despair and personal crisis. Esther Gold has lost focus on all but caring for her comatose son, Paul, and neglects her daughter and husband. Lawyer Jim Train is devoted to his career, not his family. Helen Christianson wants to find a new spark in life, while Annette Jennings tries to rebuild hers.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisWhat Time Is It There? (2001)
A street vendor with a grim home-life forges a connection with a young woman on her way to Paris.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Rescue (2020)
A rescue unit within the Chinese Coast Guard are forced to overcome their personal differences to resolve a crisis.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisWhere the Red Fern Grows (2003)
Set in the Ozark Mountains during the Great Depression, Billy Coleman works hard and saves his earnings for 2 years to achieve his dream of buying two coonhound pups. He develops a new trust in God as he faces overwhelming challenges in adventure and tragedy roaming the river bottoms of Cherokee country with "Old Dan" and "Little Ann."
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisAdam (2020)
A hard-living salesman becomes a quadriplegic after an accident.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisHoly Lands (2019)
When lapsed Jew and former cardiologist Harry suddenly decides to spend his retirement as a pig farmer in Nazareth, Israel, the move deeply shocks his family and his new neighbours. Back in New York, Harry’s ex-wife Monica is trying to manage the lives of their adult children, Annabelle and David, as well as her own.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisAftershock (2010)
Tangshan, 1976. Two seven-year-old twins are buried under the rubble of the deadliest earthquake of the 20th century. The rescue team explains to their mother that freeing either child will almost certainly result in the death of the other. Forced to make the most difficult decision of her life, she finally chooses to save her son. Though left behind as dead, the little girl miraculously survives, unbeknownst to her brother and mother.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Hummingbird Project (2019)
A pair of high-frequency traders go up against their old boss in an effort to make millions in a fiber-optic cable deal.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisBastard Out of Carolina (1996)
A poor, struggling South Carolinian mother and daughter face painful choices with their resolve and pride. Bone, the eldest daughter, and Anney her tired mother, grow both closer and farther apart: Anney sees Glen as her last chance.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisIn Cold Blood (1967)
After a botched robbery results in the brutal murder of a rural family, two drifters elude police, in the end coming to terms with their own mortality and the repercussions of their vile atrocity.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisMexicali (2026)
A former special forces contractor is forced out of retirement as an avocado farmer in Mexico when local gangsters try to force him and his family off their farm.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisHereafter (2010)
Three people — a blue-collar American, a French journalist and a London school boy — are touched by death in different ways.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisBrotherly Love (2015)
West Philadelphia basketball star Sergio Taylor deals with the pressures of fame while his brother and sister have their own issues with ambition.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisErin Brockovich (2000)
A twice-divorced mother of three who sees an injustice, takes on the bad guy and wins -- with a little help from her push-up bra. Erin goes to work for an attorney and comes across medical records describing illnesses clustered in one nearby town. She starts investigating and soon exposes a monumental cover-up.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisAll Day and a Night (2020)
While serving life in prison, a young man looks back at the people, the circumstances and the system that set him on the path toward his crime.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisGirl in the Box (2016)
The true story of 20-year-old Colleen Stan, a hitchhiking woman abducted by a young couple and held captive for seven years, during which time she's tortured and forced to live as a slave to her captors.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisRiver Straying (2019)
A man who was hiding for 7 years to avoid creditors has embarked on his journey home because of the death of his mother. On the way back home, the childhood memories stroke him constantly just like dreams. In search of a notebook full of poems written for his ex-wife, he went to the former factory to find an old friend. Elsewhere in the city, three senior students are talking about their future plans. All the wandering man under the bridge, the little boy in his childhood and the young senior students, imperceptibly but inexorably are linked together by the river, and the memory has been revived.....
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
Wolf (2019)
Poet Wolf (Lang) chose to starve himself to death, in a beautiful flower blossoming Spring. This is a poetic, aesthetic and brutal film that adapted from the true stoy of Poet Wo Fu's suicide.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
The Love Dog (2009)
Originally conceived as the film for government propaganda but couldn't pass the censorship. Five punks found Dong Jianguo, a millionaire wearing the dog chain being trapped in the trunk. They kidnapped the millionaire and started to konw the love story between Dong Jianguo and a woman called Bobo.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
Call If You Need Me (2009)
Gentle, easy-going Or Kia moves from the countryside to Kuala Lumpur to work for his cousin and best friend Ah Soon, a mid-level gangster and enforcer. While Or Kia works hard to put a sister through school, Ah Soon cares for an unstable girlfriend prone to mysterious disappearances. As they both sink deeper into a nocturnal world of debts, drugs, and betrayal, Or Kia's loyalties are strained when Ah Soon falls out of favor with the bosses and tries to escape the business.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
A Firecracker Story (2021)
An 8-year-old boy searching for fireworks on a Chinese New Year's Eve, after the firework ban is introduced in this southern Chinese town.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
My Milk Cup Cow (2014)
The father tells his daughter Nunu a lie that there is a cow in her milk cup. She believes it and drinks up milk, but there isn't any cow. Her father tells her a variety of lies, which Nunu finds increasingly difficult to believe.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
fragile women (2018)
At a picnic in the countryside, the woman accidentally strikes a shuttlecock into water. The man leaps into the river and then I hear the mountain wind.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
On that Afternoon (2017)
On that afternoon, an old man quarrels with the driver on a bus that runs between the old town and the new.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
Burned Wings (2012)
This crime drama follows a group of young men, who at face value just appear to be nasty thugs that above all else are up for a good fight. Trying desperately to make a name for themselves and become the type of gangsters people bow down to, Zheng cleverly takes the edge off the brutality by balancing it with some charmingly dry humour.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
I Have Nothing to Say (2017)
The Chinese police visit head-teacher Chen at home. Her daughter, a dissident filmmaker living in Hong Kong, plans yet another critical film about China's colonization of the small autonomous territory. The authorities demand that Chen travel to her daughter to stop the film project. What they do not take into account is that Chen and her daughter lost contact long ago.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
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Frequently asked questions
What are the best movies like THE ONLY SONS?
The closest matches to THE ONLY SONS are The River (1984), Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains (2020) and The Truth About Emanuel (2013). Below are 27 more, each with the reason it matches.
What should I watch after THE ONLY SONS?
Start with The River (1984), the closest match to THE ONLY SONS.
What is the highest-rated movie like THE ONLY SONS?
In Cold Blood (1967), rated 7.5/10 by 462 TMDB users.
What is the newest movie like THE ONLY SONS?
Mexicali (2026) is the most recent release on this list.
Are there Chinese movies like THE ONLY SONS?
Yes: Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains (2020), Deep in the Heart (2015) and What Time Is It There? (2001).
How are movies similar to THE ONLY SONS chosen?
First come films that Trakt’s viewers watch alongside THE ONLY SONS, then TMDB’s recommendations and films it rates as similar in story and genre. Each pick says which signal put it there.