Best movies like As I Lay Dying

The story of a mentally anguished high school history teacher going through a complete reassessment of his life. His method for reassessing his life is to narrate it to his class and interweave in it three generations of his family's history.

While on a train, a teenage boy thinks about his life and the flamboyant aunt whose friendship acted as an emotional shield from his troubled family. This film evokes the haunting quality of memory while creating a heartfelt portrait of a boy's life in a rural 1940s Southern town.

In the 1940s a 40-year-old woman with five healthy children gives birth to a girl with Down's syndrome.

During the Irish revolution, a family earns a big inheritance. They start leading a rich life, forgetting what the most important values of life really are. At the end, they discover they will not receive that inheritance; the family is destroyed and penniless. They must sell their home and start living like vagabonds.

The death of the Kimbrough family matriarch affects the three male survivors of the clan. Widower Easy tries to reconnect with his old flame, Marg. Eldest son and struggling musician Guy moves back to town, feeling guilty that he missed the funeral. His brother, Beagle, who was his mother's caretaker, falls for Marg's granddaughter, Georgia, a chronically ill girl who fears her time is growing short.

An alcoholic ex-football player drinks his days away, having failed to come to terms with his sexuality and his real feelings for his football buddy who died after an ambiguous accident. His wife is crucified by her desperation to make him desire her: but he resists the affections of his wife. His reunion with his father—who is dying of cancer—jogs a host of memories and revelations for both father and son.

Three girlhood friends now at college share first loves, first kisses and first betrayals. At the center of it all is the best-looking boy on campus. Can a self-conscious dreamer hook the biggest fish in the pond?

Owen Legate, a railroad official, comes to Dodson, Mississippi to shut down the local railway - the town's main income. But Owen unexpectedly finds love with Dodson's flirt and main attraction, Alva Starr.

In the post–World War II South, two families are pitted against a barbaric social hierarchy and an unrelenting landscape as they simultaneously fight the battle at home and the battle abroad.

Accused barn burner and conman Ben Quick arrives in a small Mississippi town and quickly ingratiates himself with its richest family, the Varners.

Set in the fields of Devon and the WW1 battlefields of Flanders, two brothers fall for the same girl while contending with the pressures of their feudal family life, the war, and the price of courage and cowardice.

A wealthy businessman Perry Krohn attempts to juggle the needs of his dedicated wife, demanding mistress and grown children while facing his own certain death from lung cancer.

Two brothers cannot overcome their opposite perceptions of life. One brother sees and feels bad in everyone and everything, subsequently he is violent, antisocial and unable to appreciate or enjoy the good things which his brother desperately tries to point out to him.

A shy boy is unable to make friends in Yazoo City, Mississippi in 1942, until his parents give him a terrier puppy for his ninth birthday. The dog, which he names Skip, becomes well known and loved throughout the community and enriches the life of the boy, Willie, as he grows into manhood. Based on the best-selling Mississippi memoir by the late Willie Morris.

Based on the novel by Truman Capote, this often-witty coming-of-age drama looks at a young man growing up with an unusual family in the Deep South in the 1940s. Becoming an orphan in 1935, Collin moves to his dad's cousins Verena and Dolly. Verena is a rich, bossy businesswoman. Dolly, Collin and the maid revolt, moving to a tree house.

Teenagers Rose and Bennett were in love, and then a car crash claimed Bennett's life. He left behind a grieving mother, father and younger brother, and Rose was left all alone. She has no family to turn to for support, so when she finds out she's pregnant, she winds up at the Brewer's door. She needs their help, and although they can't quite admit it, they each need her so they can begin to heal.

Harry Collings returns home to his farm after drifting with his friend, Arch. His wife, who had given up on him, reluctantly allows him to stay, and soon believes that all will be well again. But then Harry has to make a difficult decision regarding his loyalties and priorities.

School nurse Alice Goodwin lives with her husband and two daughters on a dairy farm in a small Wisconsin community. After an accident on her property involving a friend's child, the town turns against her and Alice finds herself fighting charges of child abuse.

After the death of her father, Natalie Travers discovers he was married to a rodeo star before he married Natalie’s mother. Upset that her father kept part of his life a secret from her and bewildered over how a prominent judge could fall for a cowgirl, she sets out to find Maggie Mae Jarrett. But Natalie meets her daughter Jessie Mae Jarrett who is struggling to keep the wild horses on her land alive and safe.

Thrown for a loop by the unexpected news that Dad has suddenly gone to his reward, the grieving eccentric Scanian clan are drawn together in a test of familial endurance that soon has them at each other's throats.

At an isolated log cabin in the harsh wilderness of Indiana circa 1817, the rhythms of love, tragedy, and the daily hardships of life on the developing frontier shaped one of our nation’s greatest heroes: Abraham Lincoln. Abe is a thoughtful and quiet boy who spends his days at the side of his beloved mother while learning to work the land from his stern father. When illness takes his mother, Abe's new guardian angel comes in the form of his new stepmother, who sees the potential in the boy and pushes for his further education.

The difficult relationship between a british postal officer and his adoptive son.

In the early 1900's Tennessee, a loving family undergoes the shock of the father's sudden, accidental death. The widow and her young son must endure the heartache of life following the tragedy, but slowly rise up from the ashes to face the hope of renewed life.

Corbin plays a fictional Menard County sheriff who uses country savvy and cowboy logic to straighten out his angry teen-aged grandson, Clay, a high school senior who can't seem to stay out of trouble.

Josh is an ordinary teen living in an ordinary suburb. One morning he finds his friend's dead body. Next, he discovers that three more friends also have killed themselves, leaving him out of their pact. As the sole survivor, Josh becomes more and more detached from the world around him. It is a modern portrait of today's teens: invincible yet fragile, clear-thinking yet confused...

When a school bus driving woman (Tyne Daly) has a heart attack, she makes one request of her three daughters (Ally Sheedy, Marla Sucharetza, Marceline Hugo) - she wants them to find their long lost brother, who was taken away by their father (Jack Davidson) 16 years ago. What they discover is that while they have struggled, their father has become a wealthy man and their brother is in school at Harvard.

The Ryries have suffered a loss: the death of a baby just fifty-seven hours after his birth. Without words to express their grief, the parents, John and Ricky, try to return to their previous lives. The couple's children, ten-year-old Biscuit and thirteen-year-old Paul, responding to the unnamed tensions around them, begin to act out in exquisitely idiosyncratic ways. But as the family members scatter into private, isolating grief, an unexpected visitor arrives, and they find themselves growing more alert to the hurt, humor, warmth, and burdens of others—to the grief that is part of every human life but that also carries within it the power to draw us together.

Beautiful Katie Lapp has always felt something missing in her simple Amish existence -- until a mysterious "Englisher" comes to Lancaster County looking for the baby girl she gave up for adoption 19 years ago.

A young couple faces the realities of life with their child who is diagnosed with AIDS.

A young man returns to the family farm after being gone for six years. But it is not until he fights shoulder to shoulder with his father to save the farm from a flood that his father finally forgives him for leaving.

A single mother and her embattled son struggle to subsist in a small Mississippi Delta township. An act of violence thrusts them into the world of an emotionally devastated highway store owner, awakening the fury of a bitter and longstanding conflict.

A new version of Truman Capote's 1956 tale based on his own bittersweet upbringing in Alabama. The story deals with a seven-year-old who forms a special friendship with his simple, older cousin whose two sisters and bachelor brother feel he needs better influences and role models and decide to send him to military school after the Christmas holidays.

Oliver Barrett IV is emotionally devastated by the death of his wife Jenny, and, while he tries to lose himself in his work as a lawyer, the long hours don't ease his pain, especially when he finds that his leftist views conflict with those of the senior partners at the firm. Eventually, Oliver's inconsolable grief begins to alienate those around him, until he finds new love with Marcie Bonwit, the wealthy and beautiful heiress to the Bonwit Teller fortune. Despite his affection for her, Oliver finds it difficult to leave the memory of Jenny behind, which causes major problems in their relationship.

The third installment of the Sarah trilogy provides a glorious and touching story of a family drawn together by adversity. On a cold winter day a stranger shows up at the farm. He is slow to reveal his identity. When they find out he is Jacobs father, John Witting, thought long ago dead, hard questions about the past are difficult to get answered.

Isaac Geldhart is a Holocaust survivor who, overcome by grief at the recent death of his wife, seems determined to run his publishing firm into the ground by printing books that have no hope of financial success. His son Aaron, who also works at the company, grows frustrated with Isaac's emotional decline and attempts to take over the firm. The resulting crisis involves Isaac's other two children, his daughter Sarah and his dying son Martin.