Movies Like Black August (2007)

Scum

1979

Powerful, uncompromising drama about two boys' struggle for survival in the nightmare world of Britain's notorious Borstal Reformatory.

7.1

Made in Britain

1983

After being sent to a detention centre, a teenage skinhead clashes with the social workers who want to conform him to the status quo.

7.0

Pressure Point

1962

An African-American prison psychiatrist finds the boundaries of his professionalism sorely tested when he must counsel a disturbed inmate with bigoted Nazi tendencies.

6.5

Truth or Consequences, N.M.

1997

Raymond Lembecke is a con just out of prison after serving time for selling drugs for his mob boss Tony Vago. (Lembecke was innocent and took the rap for Vago.) Lembecke thinks Vago owes him big time so, when his former boss gets him a measly job in a warehouse, he decides on revenge and plans to steal a million dollars worth of drugs from him.

6.1

The Jericho Mile

1980

A runner, serving a life sentence at Folsom Prison, works at becoming the world's fastest miler and wins a chance to compete for a spot on the Olympic team.

6.0

Bringing Down the House

2003

Uptight lawyer Peter Sanderson wants to dive back into dating after his divorce and has a hard time meeting the right women. He tries online dating and lucks out when he starts chatting with a fellow lawyer. The two agree to meet in the flesh, but the woman he meets — an escaped African-American convict named Charlene — is not what he expected. Peter is freaked out, but Charlene tries to convince him to take her case and prove her innocence. Along the way, she wreaks havoc on his middle-class life as he gets a lesson in learning to lighten up.

6.0

Nightmare in Badham County

1976

Two UCLA coeds have engine trouble in small Southern town. When they spurn the local sheriff's advances he arranges for them to be taken to the women's prison on trivial charges (the judge is a cousin), where they must endure atrocities at the hands of the administrators of the prison and the prison guards.

5.7

13th

2016

An in-depth look at the prison system in the United States and how it reveals the nation's history of racial inequality.

7.9

#10

Bride of the Orient

1989

After the death of his mother, a lonely farmer in rural Switzerland considers finally starting a family of his own. Eventually he pays for a bride from Thailand. The couple don't share a language, but being to know each other. However the village neighbors are suspicious of foreigners.

9.6

#11

Green Book

2018

Tony Lip, a bouncer in 1962, is hired to drive pianist Don Shirley on a tour through the Deep South in the days when African Americans, forced to find alternate accommodations and services due to segregation laws below the Mason-Dixon Line, relied on a guide called The Negro Motorist Green Book.

#12

Bound by Honor

1993

Based on the true life experiences of poet Jimmy Santiago Baca, the film focuses on two Indigenous Latino American half-brothers Paco and Cruz, and their bi-racial (half-Indigenous Latino American and half-European American) cousin Miklo. It opens in 1972, as the three are members of an East L.A. gang known as the "Vatos Locos", and the story focuses on how a violent crime and the influence of narcotics alter their lives. Miklo is incarcerated and sent to San Quentin, where he makes a "home" for himself. Cruz becomes an exceptional artist, but a heroin addiction overcomes him with tragic results. Paco becomes a cop and an enemy to his "carnal", Miklo.

#13

The Help

2011

Aibileen Clark is a middle-aged African-American maid who has spent her life raising white children and has recently lost her only son; Minny Jackson is an African-American maid who has often offended her employers despite her family's struggles with money and her desperate need for jobs; and Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan is a young white woman who has recently moved back home after graduating college to find out her childhood maid has mysteriously disappeared. These three stories intertwine to explain how life in Jackson, Mississippi revolves around "the help"; yet they are always kept at a certain distance because of racial lines.

#14

Django Unchained

2012

With the help of a German bounty hunter, a freed slave sets out to rescue his wife from a brutal Mississippi plantation owner.

#15

Full Metal Jacket

1987

A pragmatic U.S. Marine observes the dehumanizing effects the U.S.-Vietnam War has on his fellow recruits from their brutal boot camp training to the bloody street fighting in Hue.

#16

La Haine

1995

After a chaotic night of rioting in a marginal suburb of Paris, three young friends, Vinz, Hubert and Saïd, wander around unoccupied waiting for news about the state of health of a mutual friend who has been seriously injured when confronting the police.

#17

The Hate U Give

2018

Raised in a poverty-stricken slum, a 16-year-old girl named Starr now attends a suburban prep school. After she witnesses a police officer shoot her unarmed best friend, she's torn between her two very different worlds as she tries to speak her truth.

#18

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

2017

After seven months have passed without a culprit in her daughter's murder case, Mildred Hayes makes a bold move, painting three signs leading into her town with a controversial message directed at Bill Willoughby, the town's revered chief of police. When his second-in-command Officer Jason Dixon, an immature mother's boy with a penchant for violence, gets involved, the battle between Mildred and Ebbing's law enforcement is only exacerbated.

#19

Hidden Figures

2016

The untold story of Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson – brilliant African-American women working at NASA and serving as the brains behind one of the greatest operations in history – the launch of astronaut John Glenn into orbit. The visionary trio crossed all gender and race lines to inspire generations to dream big.

#20

To Kill a Mockingbird

1962

Scout Finch, 6, and her older brother Jem live in sleepy Maycomb, Alabama, spending much of their time with their friend Dill and spying on their reclusive and mysterious neighbor, Boo Radley. When Atticus, their widowed father and a respected lawyer, defends a black man named Tom Robinson against fabricated rape charges, the trial and tangent events expose the children to evils of racism and stereotyping.

8.0