Best movies like Against Her Will: The Carrie Buck Story

The story frames on 7-year-old Maisie, caught in a custody battle between her mother – a rock and roll icon – and her father. What Maisie Knew is an evocative portrayal of the chaos of adult life seen entirely from a child’s point of view.

A high-class call girl accused of murder fights for the right to stand trial rather than be declared mentally incompetent.

After his wife dies in childbirth, a doctor settles down in the small Oklahoma town of Cherokee Wells to raise his newborn daughter. Unfortunately, not all the citizens there are hospitable, especially when the doctor hires a pretty Indian teenager as his child's nanny.

Study of interracial marriage in the 1960s. A white divorcée falls in love with and marries an African-American man. When her ex-husband sues for custody of her child, arguing that a mixed household is an improper place to raise the girl, the new husband fights for his parental rights in court, fighting against a judge who represents the prejudices of the era.

An eccentric Los Angeles dowager decides to fight back when her two greedy daughters attempt to have her declared legally insane.

Adam, an awkward teen, spends a summer with his older sister, who is part of New York City's lesbian and trans activist scene. He meets the girl of his dreams but can't figure out how to tell her he's not the trans man she thinks he is.

A young couple copes with the mysterious illness of their new baby only later to discover the baby they brought home from the hospital isn't theirs. So who has their baby?

When a hard-working single mother, Sara Diaz, has her children taken from her after she is suspected of injuring her son, Ally Fisher, a recent law school graduate, is assigned to represent her case before Judge Martha Schulman, a veteran of the Family Court System.

Zoey, a cyber crime cop, and Barry, a detective, raise their son, Timmy, in a quiet suburban neighborhood. When Zoey confides in her best friend about shift work and the lack of spark in her marriage. Zoey's mind is set in motion and when she discovers Barry is screwing around, she calls him out. Willing to give him a second chance, Zoey tries to mend her marriage. When Barry is seen again with "that" woman, Zoey gets a restraining order and sole custody of Timmy. Late one night a fire in her home tragically takes the life of her son. The evidence points to Zoey taking sleeping pills and smoking - she's charged with Timmy's murder. Zoey goes to Barry for help but he's distant and blames her. Zoey fights back, convinced she was set up to take the blame for Timmy's death. As she fights to prove her own innocence she gets the biggest shock of all.

A couple, Maggie and Ben Porter, inherit an old farmhouse and move in, hoping to reinvigorate their marriage. When they learn the home was occupied long ago by a woman who was executed for practicing witchcraft, Maggie begins to have nightmares about her.

Monty is a mechanic struggling to make ends meet as he raises his three young daughters. When the court awards custody of his daughters to his shady ex-wife, Monty desperately tries to win them back with the help of Julia, a beautiful, Ivy League-educated attorney. Monty and Julia couldn't be less alike, but a flame is ignited...touching off a firestorm of love and conflict.

Sam, a neurodivergent man, has a daughter with a homeless woman who abandons them when they leave the hospital, leaving Sam to raise Lucy on his own. But as Lucy grows up, Sam's limitations as a parent start to become a problem and the authorities take her away. Sam convinces high-priced lawyer Rita to take his case pro bono and in turn teaches her the value of love and family.

In order to be reinstated to the bar and recover custody of her daughter, a hotshot lawyer, now in recovery and on probation, must take on the appeal of a woman wrongfully convicted of murder.

A pregnant single mother, with two children in foster care, embraces her Bay Area community as she fights to reclaim her family.

A day in the maternity ward from the lens of accepted morals and medical attitudes of 1932. The ward includes women from all walks of life and situations.

Based on the real story of Tom and Nicola Ray from Rutland. Their perfect life is totally ruined in a single moment after Tom had developed sepsis. While her husband was in coma, Nicola gave birth to their second child on the other side of the same hospital. Within a matter of days, sepsis would rob Tom of both his arms and legs, and left his face severely disfigured. As an ordinary man, Tom never put himself at risk — he just woke up two months later in a nightmare, a face-off quadruple amputee... This incredible story of survival shows what can be overcome when love is unconditional.

With his landlord breathing down his neck and his writing career stagnant, the last thing Harrison Tyler (Dean Winters) needs is a kid hanging around. But he's in for a surprise when his ex-girlfriend (Lorraine Ansell) leaves her precocious 6-year-old (Emily Mae Young) in his care for a few weeks. It turns out the girl possesses remarkable matchmaking skills, and soon Tyler's professional and romantic fortunes begin to turn around.

After an overnight long-distance drive, Joby has a special meeting—with lawyers and his ex-wife. A struggling musician with the prerequisite tattoos, slimy hair, goatee, and his head firmly floating in the clouds, Joby hasn’t been around to be a dad. Now is his last chance to fight for shared custody of his daughter, Ellen.

A Colorado family is thrust into the international media spotlight when they fight for the rights of their 6-year-old transgender daughter in a landmark civil rights case.

Is God really the giver of second chances? Can He take a worthless, selfish, self-serving and self-centered, drug addicted broken down life and restore it with forgiveness, mercy and love? Is he able to guide and direct someone facing hopelessly seeming impossible circumstances, and lead them through to amazing grace? TAKE TWO is the True Story about a decadent Hollywood film producer who bottoms out in Los Angeles California and loses everything. Frustrated that he continues to wake up every morning to his same failed life he decides to leave L.A. to seek a new life, only to quickly realize he has taken himself with him. In the beginning of his trek he meets a beautiful young woman in a small bar in Wyoming. Unaware that she is already married and has children, they have a one-night affair that leads to the birth of a baby girl.

Bitter over their divorce, a wealthy businessman prevents his ex-wife from seeing their child. She then takes him to custody court and a judge tries to determine what will be best for the child.

A book publisher finds his business floundering, which prompts his socially ambitious wife to desert him for a society millionaire, leaving him with their young son. The publisher's fortunes improve dramatically, however, when a best-selling romance novelist decides to publish her new book with his firm. In the meantime, his ex-wife has married the millionaire, and she and her new mother-in-law come up with a plan to sue her ex-husband for custody of the boy.

Fiona is abandoned at six months of age, raised in foster and adoptive homes, abused, and, still a teen, hustles on the streets of New York. We watch her use heroine, fall in love with other women, be pursued by men, engage in murderous violence, hide out in a crack house, and decide to leave the city. We see her mother, also a streetwalker and drug user, occasionally talk about her lost daughter. Fiona has a necklace she was clutching when a foundling. Will mother and daughter meet? Is there a silver lining?

Paul Freeman (of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK fame) and Kate O'Mara plays a couple who can't have a baby, so they go to the doctor to have an artificial insemination...blackmail, dark secrets and drama ensue.

When Kelsey remarries, her struggle to get custody of her daughter from her first marriage is complicated by her current husband being black.

Keith and Kim Lussier are a childless couple who are given custody of a 3-month-old foster child, Brittany. However, tragedy strikes when Kim dies of cancer in the middle of the adoption process, leaving Keith to fight for Brittany's custody alone.

A former prostitute kidnaps a baby boy at birth to satisfy her drug-dealing husband, who has told her that he is going to divorce her and put her out on the streets if she cannot produce him a son. Obviously the real mother becomes emotionally wrought and determined to get her baby back. Barbara Mandrell gets thrown into all of this mess as the mother's mother, who just happens to be beset with heart problems.

Showgirl Tony Landers, supported by her friend Flip Daly, fights for the custody of her son during a divorce hearing.

A lawyer fights a losing battle against the courts to overturn the death sentence for a convicted female robber/murderer despite demands from the woman that her death sentence be carried out.

Dolores Huerta bucks 1950s gender conventions by starting the country's first farm worker's union with fellow organizer Cesar Chavez. What starts out as a struggle for racial and labor justice, soon becomes a fight for gender equality within the same union she is eventually forced to leave. As she wrestles with raising 11 children, three marriages, and is nearly beaten to death by a San Francisco tactical police squad, Dolores emerges with a vision that connects her new found feminism with racial and class justice.

This documentary recounts the difficult choice actress Mary Astor had to make after learning her personal, very intimate, diaries had been stolen. The film tells the story of Astor's 1936 child custody case.

While the fight for LGBTQ Civil Rights movement was gaining momentum, the 1970s witnessed horrific custody battles for lesbian mothers. Mom's Apple Pie: The Heart of the Lesbian Mothers’ Custody Movement revisits the early tumultuous years of the lesbian custody movement through the stories of five lesbian mothers and their four children. Narrated by Kate Clinton, the documentary interviews the sons and daughters who were separated from their mothers, the mothers themselves, and one woman who made the difficult decision to flee with her children.

Janine and Sandy are a lesbian couple who decide to have a baby, but after a few years Sandy dies. This tragedy is exploited by Sandy's parents to snatch the girl from Janine's care. But then, and despite having the laws against her, Janine decides to fight in order to regain custody of her daughter.

Despite allegations of child sexual abuse against Jody's ex-husband Marcus, the court orders joint custody of their daughter Samantha. Jody faces a choice of turning Samantha over to Marcus, or taking her on the run and risk kidnapping charges. Pursued by both the FBI and a private detective, Jody and Samantha are hunted, fleeing from town to town with the help of an underground network set up to help women and children escape from abuse. Based on a true story. 

When the matriarch of the family suddenly dies, custody of a mentally disabled mother is inherited by her normal daughter.

A melodrama about a 19th-century ballet dancer who makes an unfortunate career move by marrying a taciturn Cornish farmer. She soon longs for the bright lights of the big city and for the arms of her artist lover. Unfortunately, her husband is all too aware of this.

Molly McKay is a profoundly autistic twenty-something woman who has lived in an institution from a young age following her parents' death in a car accident. When the institution must close due budget cuts, Molly is left in the care of her neurotypical, older brother, Buck McKay, an advertising executive and perennial bachelor. Buck makes her undergo an experimental medical treatment, with unexpectedly drastic results.

World famous comedienne Carol Burnett recounts her years as a working mom, trying to raise her daughter Carrie.

This documentary profiles some of the 15,000 people across America who raise monkeys, not just as pets, but as surrogate children.

Growing up among horses at her parents' stud farm, Zoé dreams of becoming a jockey and forms a deep bond with a young horse. A terrible accident threatens to end their racing careers, but they fight to reach victory together.

When Erica French opts to keep the baby she conceived in high school, she never dreamed that one day she would be fighting for custody against the child's father, Scott Stone. Scott Stone initially fought for custody when Erica threatened to cut off his access to their daughter. Scott continues to try to be a part of his daughter's life, but when Molly first breaks her arm at the playground then Scott's mother finds mysterious bruises on her granddaughter, Scott again fights for custody of young Molly, and this time he wins because the court feels his family can provide a more stable environment for Molly than a public daycare can.

Based on the true story of a modern-day witch hunt, in which a couple is falsely accused and imprisoned for molesting their own children.

A man in search of his past, and a woman who lives in the moment, are brought together when they pursue the origins of a stray parrot in this comedic and romantic drama.

A corrupt politician covers up his daughter Vicky's pregnancy by forcing her to give the baby up for adoption. The newborn is adopted by a loving couple unable to have children, but a year later Vicky, now in college, realizes she was forced into signing the papers and really wants her daughter back. After sneaking into the adoption agency to find out who the adoptive parents are, she takes them to court to fight for custody.

A young American painter and his French wife move with their small daughter to the US when the husband's father dies. His mother takes an instant dislike to the wife, and when she finds out that her daughter-in-law is a nudist who once posed naked for an artist, she declares her son's wife to be an unfit mother and sets out to break up the marriage--which may not be difficult to do, as the son is a weak-willed "mama's boy" who's terrified to stand up against his domineering mother.

This film is based on the novel, Mrs. Mike, which is based on the real life woman, Kathy O'Fallon Flannigan. A Boston teenager is sent to live with her uncle in frontier Canada because of her fragile health. She eventually falls in love with own of the few-if only-young, white males in the region. They marry and depart for the northern wilderness to set up house and home. The rest of the movie is about her struggles and joys of living and travelling in this rugged country.

When her sister dies, a nightclub singer is left with her children. In order to raise the children properly, she leaves her singing career and takes her new family to a farm. However, her greedy manager--seeing his "cash cow" slipping away--goes to court to have her declared legally incompetent.

Three bank robbers on the run happen across a woman about to give birth in an abandoned covered wagon. Before she dies, she names the three bandits as her newborn son's godfathers.

A Spanish-American boy raised by his Mexican servant, Clay Hill, Jr. vows vengeance on the three ranchers who murdered his parents.

A young married couple, Eric and Tracy Smythe, are thrilled when they adopt a baby, only to have it taken away from them when the mother turns out to be married. At a complete loss, and in debt from in vitro, they are desperate to complete their family. When Eric comes home with what seems to be the perfect solution, a young woman who is pregnant and does not want the baby, their dream of family seems to be coming true...but the dream is about to become a nightmare.