Best movies like Beautiful Dreamers

A petty criminal fakes insanity to serve his sentence in a mental ward rather than prison. He soon finds himself as a leader to the other patients—and an enemy to the cruel, domineering nurse who runs the ward.

This film, originally made for tv, stars William H. Macy as a mute superintendent of a apartment building that is falling apart who becomes the unwilling guardian to a young girl with a bit of an attitude. The film is an updated and Americanized version of the 1962 feature film Gigot starring Jackie Gleason, who also wrote the original story.

A new doctor from Moscow arrives at a provincial mental institution. His interest is the peculiarities of the psyche of a patient who believes that he is Yakov Yurovsky, the man who assassinated the last Russian tsar. In the course of their conversations it transpires that the patient is a kind of philosopher, not without a gift for suggestion. In a while the doctor himself falls under his patient’s influence: he tends to relive that fatal night of June 16-17, 1918 when, without any investigation or trial, Tsar Nicholas II, who had recently abdicated, was murdered, together with his wife, daughters and incurably ill heir. Soon the doctor realizes that the tragedy of the last Russian tsar is in part his own tragedy, too...

A young psychiatrist applies for a job at a mental asylum, and must pass a test by interviewing four patients. He must figure out which of the patients, is in fact, the doctor that he would be replacing if hired.

Trevor Blackburn is accused of murdering his girlfriend, Faith, in a brutal ritual. He's sentenced to live in an experimental rehabilitation community and falls into a coma. When he wakes up, he meets the mysterious Dr. Ek, who tortures Trevor in an attempt to learn the whereabouts of a powerful occult book. As other patients start to disappear, Trevor begins to wonder who and where he really is.

Dr. Malcolm Sayer, a shy research physician, uses an experimental drug to "awaken" the catatonic victims of a rare disease. Leonard is the first patient to receive the controversial treatment. His awakening, filled with awe and enthusiasm, proves a rebirth for Sayer too, as the exuberant patient reveals life's simple but unutterably sweet pleasures to the introverted doctor.

Jack Palmer is a social worker whose job has taken precedence over his personal life. Mainly, his job is to help four mentally challenged men live regular lives in a home. They consist of: Norman, who works at a donut shop and has a thing for keys; Barry, who thinks he is a golf pro and doesn't communicate well with his father; Arnold, who is into all things Russian and has a habit of spending money; and Lucien, who is into Spider Man and must testify before the state senate. Jack wants to help them, but he also thinks it is time to move on with his life. The hard part is trying to say goodbye to the guys he cares about.

Set in the changing world of the late 1960s, Susanna Kaysen's prescribed "short rest" from a psychiatrist she had met only once becomes a strange, unknown journey into Alice's Wonderland, where she struggles with the thin line between normal and crazy. Susanna soon realizes how hard it is to get out once she has been committed, and she ultimately has to choose between the world of people who belong inside or the difficult world of reality outside.

The true story of Dr. Hunter "Patch" Adams, who in the 1970s found that humor is the best medicine, and was willing to do just anything to make his patients laugh—even if it meant risking his own career.

Ken Harrison is an artist that lives to make sculptures. One day he is involved in a car accident, and is paralyzed from his neck down. All he can do is talk and move his head, and he wants to die. Whilst he is in hospital he makes friends with some of the staff, and they support him when he goes to trial to be allowed to die.

A teenager with cerebral palsy attempts to become pen pals with her idol, Elvis Presley.

John Arnold DeMarco is a man who believes he is Don Juan, the greatest lover in the world. Clad in a cape and mask, DeMarco undergoes psychiatric treatment with Dr. Jack Mickler to cure him of his apparent delusion. But the psychiatric sessions have an unexpected effect on the psychiatric staff and, most profoundly, Dr Mickler, who rekindles the romance in his complacent marriage.

A psychiatrist is drawn into a complex mind game when he questions a disturbed patient about the disappearance of a colleague.

A young psychiatric nurse goes to work at a lonesome asylum following a murder. There, she experiences varying degrees of torment from the patients.

Vincent Bruce, a war veteran, begins working as an occupational therapist at Poplar Lodge, a private psychiatric facility for wealthy people where he meets Lilith Arthur, a charming young woman suffering from schizophrenia, whose fragile beauty captivates all who meet her.

Pink Eye is set in a small town in upstate New York, at a prison-like, dilapidated insane asylum where secret drug testing has gone inexplicably wrong. Patients are dying in sick and twisted ways and those who survive are becoming raging, homicidal lunatics. It's only a matter of time before all hell breaks loose and the patients begin to crave freedom to take their vengeance out on the world outside. When one patient does escape deformed, angry and far beyond insane, he brings death and terror to an unsuspecting town and everyone in it.

Follows the fate of Lyle, a violent adolescent who, in lieu of prison, is placed in a juvenile mental institution where he encounters a group of equally troubled teens. This motley crew - abused, sexually confused, violent, and yet hanging on by their grit and anger - becomes Lyle's last lifeline as he fights to find meaning in a world that seems to defy understanding.

An elderly widow must find meaning and activity in her life when her son suggests she is no longer capable of handling her own affairs.

Backwoods bombshell Myrtle marries George, only to find out that George neither can nor wants to satisfy her desires. Lots of heavy breathing, roughing-up and weirdo moralism ensues.

An intimate and turbulent relationship develops between Chase, a woman recovering from a nervous breakdown and Elizabeth, the caretaker employed to look after her.

The Faust legend retold (loosely) and applied to a mentally disturbed patient in a hospital run by a doctor of dubious sanity himself. The patient offers the innocent orderly vast riches if he'll help him escape.

A young woman is brought to an asylum to receive special treatment from a mysterious doctor. Dr. Spector does more than just run the hospital -- he offers his patients as sacrifices to Satan.

A private investigator endures the rigors of an insane asylum in order to locate $1 million in stolen loot.

A grieving nurse finds comfort and inspiration in her new assignment, where she meets a terminally ill woman with a quick with and strong faith.

When Lori Reimuller learns that her young son Robbie has epilepsy, she first trusts the judgment of the hospital staff in how best to bring it under control. As Robbie's health slides radically downhill, however, she becomes frustrated and desperate, and so does her own research into the existing literature on treatments. When she decides to try an alternative treatment called the Ketogenic Diet, devised long ago by a doctor from Johns Hopkins, she is met with narrow-minded resistance from Robbie's doctor, who is prepared to take legal action to prevent Lori from removing him from the hospital.

Asylum is a taut psychological thriller about a deranged fearsome killer running lose in an abandoned high security Asylum. Pitting the county psychiatrist Dr. Maggie Belham against the psychotic maniac, Dr Belham is trapped in a maze of corridors, and her only help is the janitor, Quitz who may in fact be a forgotten asylum inmate.

College students exploring an abandoned insane asylum accidentally shatter canisters holding the cremains of former mental patients. Inhaling the dusty ash filling the air, they're soon possessed by the souls once held within them. One is a convicted serial killer from 1950.

Robert Patrick stars as a private investigator traumatized by his father's suicide who goes undercover in a mental institution to uncover the murderer of his psychiatrist.

A taped version of the stage play about a hideously deformed 19th-century London man and how he managed to triumph over his disease.

The true story about the Canadian cancer amputee hero who decided to run across Canada on only one leg to raise money for cancer research.

Dr Dennis Slamon, an American oncologist, discovers a treatment that could possibly cure breast cancer without radiation or chemotherapy. He tries to look for ways to fund the medication.

Ludwig Guttmann, a renowned German neurosurgeon who fled Nazi Germany in the early days of WWII, takes a position at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Buckinghamshire, England in 1944 and begins to transform the lives of his patients, paralyzed soldiers that have been written-off and who are facing death from neglect. A breakthrough comes when Dr. Guttmann introduces sport into their rehabilitation, a breakthrough that leads to the founding of the Paralympic Games.

This is the story of actress Frances Farmer, her struggles with mental illness and involuntary confinement in an insane asylum.

A cynical young man, diagnosed with cancer, meets a brash young leukemia patient in the hospital who more than matches his distaste for IV drips and weepy sentimentality.

A shocking exposé of the deplorable conditions and abuses from the Willowbrook State School for children with intellectual disabilities.

Documentary which tells the fascinating and poignant story of the closure of Britain's mental asylums. In the post-war period, 150,000 people were hidden away in 120 of these vast Victorian institutions all across the country. Today, most mental patients, or service users as they are now called, live out in the community and the asylums have all but disappeared. Through powerful testimonies from patients, nurses and doctors, the film explores this seismic revolution and what it tells us about society's changing attitudes to mental illness over the last sixty years.

Nellie Bly, a 23 year-old reporter for Joseph Pulitzer, goes undercover in the notorious Blackwell's Island women's insane asylum in order to expose corruption, abuse and murder.

This movie chronicles the trials of the mentally ill and their care-givers in an over-crowded ward of a hospital.

The true story of a single mom who overcomes many of life's obstacles.

"The Miracle of the Cards" is based on the true story of Marion Shergold and her son, Craig, an eight-year-old English boy who had a brain tumor. Several events convinced Marion that God was leading her to a cure for Craig and that the get-well cards he was receiving had the power to keep him alive, so she launched a worldwide campaign to break the Guinness record for receiving the most get-well cards. At the time, the world record seemed an impossible 1,000,265, but Craig received over 350 million cards from all over the world. Against the advice of her doctors, Marion followed one of those cards to America for Craig's miraculous cure.

Female prisoners train dogs to aid people with disabilities in a program started by a nun (Laura Dern).

Anesthesist Doug Peeno hopes to pay for the legal costs of preventing his son Bryan being left in his first wife's bad custody with he proceeds of his present wife Linda's new job. She's the first graduate in her family and eagerly accepted a posting as medical officer in a coldly-greedy medical insurance company. Bening confronted with the medically unacceptable consequences of technically denied treatments, she rebels and finds even payments she approved were often withheld anyway.

Donna Lee Shelby, a mentally challenged girl who lives in Forest Haven, an institution for the developmentally disabled, meets Ricardo Thornton, a fellow resident. When Forest Haven is closed by a court order, Donna and Ricardo venture into the real world on their own.

After killing and cannibalizing several men and being found unfit for trial, Regina Stevens desperately tried to convince her psychiatric caregivers that she wasn't mentally ill, but was in fact slowly becoming a real life zombie.

James Bishop is a young psychology resident, excited about his new job at St. Andrews Mental Hospital and the chance to help severely ill patients. The excitement changes to puzzlement, concern and finally terror as some of those patients mysteriously die and James' efforts to find the cause results in increasingly strange behavior from the St. Andrews staff. Things begin to clarify when James finally encounters the Harvester...

Malcom McDowell, Lou Diamond Phillips and Robert Englund star in three separate stories set in an eerie mental asylum.

When a group of psychiatric hospital nurses invoke the spirit of Bloody Mary -- a supposed urban myth -- the slaughter begins. The legend is real, her vengeance is fatal, and to free her, all you have to do is say her name.

Within the confines of an insane asylum languish many would-be seers and messiahs. Medical students meet them day in, day out. But when Eve meets Don Wake, she discovers he's not your run-of-the-mill paranoic. In fact, his visions of her life on the outside tread the line between fantasy and reality as a stalker becomes known to her. She could be in danger; it could all be in her head.

After 12 years in an asylum, as she is reunited with friends and family, Dana begins to realize the events that led to her stay there may not have been imaginary.

Man and woman (Peter Dobson and Samantha Mathis) fall in love in a heart transplant facility. They are both attracted to a little girl (Mary Matilyn Mouser) who turns out to be the orphan of their heart donors...