Best movies like Dreams on Fire

When America's last standing roller rinks are threatened with closure, a community of thousands battle in a racially charged environment to save an underground subculture.

Through the experiences of two amateur Bigfoot researchers in Appalachian Ohio, we see how the power of a dream can bring two men together and provide a source of hope and meaning that transcend the harsh realities of life in a dying steel town.

The wealthy Rodney Langford, who dreams of going on the stage, hopes to fulfil his ambitions by buying a failing revue called 'Raise the Roof', starring Maisie Grey. His father, fearing scandal, bribes amoral actor Atherley Armitage to sabotage the show. But, when all hope seems lost, Maisie comes up with an ingenious idea to try and save the day.

Jim Morris never made it out of the minor leagues before a shoulder injury ended his pitching career twelve years ago. Now a married-with-children high-school chemistry teacher and baseball coach in Texas, Jim's team makes a deal with him: if they win the district championship, Jim will try out with a major-league organization. The bet proves incentive enough for the team, and they go from worst to first, making it to state for the first time in the history of the school. Jim, forced to live up to his end of the deal, is nearly laughed off the try-out field--until he gets onto the mound, where he confounds the scouts (and himself) by clocking successive 98 mph fastballs, good enough for a minor-league contract with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Jim's still got a lot of pitches to throw before he makes it to The Show, but with his big-league dreams revived, there's no telling where he could go.

Alex Owens, a teen juggling between two odd jobs, aspires to become a successful ballet dancer. Nick, who is her boss and lover, supports and encourages her to fulfil her dream.

When the fleet puts in at San Francisco, sailor Bake Baker tries to rekindle the flame with his old dancing partner, Sherry Martin, while Bake's buddy Bilge Smith romances Sherry's sister, Connie. But it's not all smooth sailing—Bake has a habit of losing Sherry's jobs for her and, despite Connie's dreams, Bilge is not ready to settle down.

When a couple decides to adopt a stray cat their perspective on life changes radically, literally altering the course of time and space and testing their faith in each other and themselves.

Tommy Riley has moved with his dad to Chicago from a 'nice place'. He keeps to himself, goes to school. However, after a street fight he is noticed and quickly falls into the world of illegal underground boxing - where punches can kill.

Brantley Foster, a well-educated kid from Kansas, has always dreamed of making it big in New York, but once in New York, he learns that jobs - and girls - are hard to get. When Brantley visits his uncle, Howard Prescott, who runs a multi-million-dollar company, he is given a job in the company's mail room.

Shiratori Tatsuhiko works as a scout for Burst, a talent agency in Kabukichō, Shinjuku's red light district. In a business where money means everything Tatsuhiko finds himself in a constant struggle between rival talent scouts and the yakuza.

Kihachi, an unemployed worker, wanders around the industrial flatlands of Tokyo's Koto district with his two young sons, Zenko and Masako. He is unable to find a job and has to rely on his sons catching stray dogs to earn reward money for their meals. As days go by, Kihachi and the boys no longer have enough money to stay at an inn for the night. Luckily for him, he encounters an old friend, Otsune, who finds him a job and allows them to stay at her eatery house.

Danger lurks around every corner. A psychopathic serial killer is tying up, raping and murdering Tokyo's sexy young women! Kathy is trying to divorce her husband, all the while conducting a hot affair with her divorce attorney, Sean. As she walks through the park one day, she witnesses the killer disposing of the dead body of his latest victim. The killer begins stalking her, throwing her otherwise normal life into a paranoid frenzy.Mr. Pink (Yutaka Ikejima) masterfully directs this suspenseful Pink-Film retelling of Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy.

The year is 1987 and Japan is just reaching the peak of its economic success. Eighteen-year old Yonosuke Yokomichi arrives in Tokyo from Nagasaki. Ordinary in every way possible, he lives in a suburb far from the excitement of the big city and commutes to a university in the center of Tokyo.

The stage emulates life and compresses it, setting free skills learned over lifetimes in brief but dazzling displays for the amusement and judgment of others. For the performers, it is the ultimate risk, and some will rise while others must fall. Nowhere is this truer than at the Seisho Music Academy, where music, dance and real weapons all come into play in the creation of the next great Star. Karen and Hikari’s destinies have been linked since a childhood promise, but their journeys here have taken very different paths. Now, after Hikari leaves, Karen must discover who she is without her opposite, while Hikari must rediscover her own course. Nor are they the only girls who must reassess and change if they want to achieve their dreams, as the dance, magic, and swordplay continue!

Twenty-two year old David has it all – he’s young, hot, and he’s just got into the prestigious dance school of his dreams. But he has a secret: for two years he’s been sleeping with his sister’s husband, Jules. After an argument between the two lovers, David throws himself into a one-night stand with Sam, a casual encounter which fast becomes something much stronger.

At the prompting of his diplomat friend, Alex, writer Ted Fletcher takes his wife, Laura, and daughter, Amy, on an extended working holiday. Alex finds a house for them in Kyoto, Japan, and the Fletchers move in, laughing off rumors that the place is haunted. But the ghost of 19th-century samurai Shigero turns out to be very real, and is intent on making the family re-enact an ancient murder-suicide.

When Irene gets suspended, she must endure two weeks of community service at a retirement home. Following her passion for cheerleading, she secretly signs up the senior residents to audition for a dance-themed reality show to prove that you don't need to be physically "perfect" to be perfectly AWESOME.

Fired from her job as a reality TV host, Natalie returns home for Valentine's Day, only to find herself running the town festival's auction with her ex-fiancé thanks to two scheming mothers.

A documentary film by Peter I. Chang which traces the life of the Japanese musician Hisao Shinagawa through his early years as a folk singer in Tokyo to his current occupation as a street performer in Los Angeles.

Baton is a collection of three 20-minute Sci-fi anime films dedicated to the 150th anniversary of the establishment of Yokohama city. On Planet Abel, human-like robot Apollo (Ichihara Hayato, Rookies) and robot-like human Mikaru (Ueto Aya, Azumi) come upon a stowaway robot with a mysterious "Cipher" chip. Not knowing Cipher's powers, Apollo takes the chip for fun, throwing both him and Mikaru headfirst into a mind-boggling mystery that affects the past, present, and future.

Coal miner Isamu Oba is forced to quit his village and leave his mother and siblings behind. Mining buddy Ichiro accompanies him to Tokyo, and the pair enjoy several "fish-out-of-water" sequences before finding employment at a boxing gym with trainer Sawada and his spunky sister Tomoko. The boys also find part time night jobs as roving minstrels in the club district courtesy of benevolent gang boss Asakawa. Of course, they run afoul of boss Karasawa's cruel gang. Karasawa also has it in for Asakawa, and this indirectly throws a spanner into the works as far as Isamu's burgeoning success as a kickboxer. When Asakawa 's HQ is burned to the ground by Karasawa's men, Asakawa tries to kill Karasawa - which, of course, leads to his own gruesome death. Isamu goes on the rampage with his sword, wiping out Karasawa and men.

Aki isn’t a brave little boy, but he’s dedicated nonetheless to safeguarding his sickly, mute friend Fuyu. They and their little gang live deep underground, in the concrete warrens to which survivors have fled following the eruption of Mt. Fuji. The community is in decline, however, as illness and despair take their toll. Fuyu dreams of the outside world, which he is too frail to ever reach. But what colour is the sky out there?

Kanichi works at wet tissue company in Mito, Japan. He runs into Gondo. 10 years ago, Gondo was fired from his job as a teacher for secretly filming others. He is now with Mihari who works as a hostess. He took away her away from Tokyo. Kanichi falls in love with Mihari at first sight and takes her away from Gondo. Meanwhile, due to a female student on the video Gondo secretly shot, an unexpected disturbance is created.

In the spring of 1913, Parisian businessman Gabriel Astruc opens a new theater on the Champs Elysées. The first performance is the premiere of Igor Stravinsky's 'The Rite of Spring', danced by the Ballet Russes. The rehearsal process is extremely fraught: the orchestra dislike Stravinsky's harsh, atonal music; the dancers dislike the 'ugly' choreography of Vaslav Nijinsky. The volatile, bisexual Nijinsky is in a strained relationship with the much older Sergei Diaghilev, the Ballet Russes' charismatic but manipulative impresario. Public expectation is extremely high after Nijinsky's success in 'L'apres-midi d'un faune'. Finally, 'The Rite of Spring' premieres to a gossip-loving, febrile, fashion-conscious Parisian audience sharply divided as to its merits.

Adapted from a sex-stuffed cult novel, LALAPIPO (a play on the phrase “A Lot of People”) follows divergent seedy strands of sexual and narrative spaghetti through the sticky Tokyo night. There’s a chubby freelance writer who’s so obsessed with masturbating to the sound of his upstairs neighbors going at it that he forgets to deal with his own love life and when he finally does have sex he is immediately filled with self-loathing. The upstairs neighbor’s story then splits off like an amoeba: she’s an office lady seduced by a “talent scout” who is falling down the sex industry ladder, moving from hostess, to massage girl, to private karaoke attendant. The talent scout’s story then splits off and runs in its own direction, revealing the sorry state of this young pimp’s soul. From there, the movie takes more and more time to consider the lives of more and more characters until the entire Japanese sex industry is filled with the wailing of lost souls.

A 30 Year old woman, a hostess past her time working at a shady club and an aspiring actress living in Tokyo. Betrayed by her lover and her dreams crushed, the broken woman leaves Tokyo for her hometown in the countryside after five years of no contact with her family. There she reconnects with an old flame but is also forced to confront some unpleasant truths about her past.

An unadorned perspective on impoverished life in Okinawa, an island in southern Japan whose modern history was tainted by the bloody battle for the Pacific. 17-year-old Aoi works as a nightclub hostess in order to earn rent money and to provide for her little boy. She also supports her lazy husband Masaya, who has no qualms about giving her a few slaps, particularly after he loses his job. What chance does this young family have to scrape their way out of the social mire, where they were driven by poverty and the imprudence of youth? How dark does reality have to get before it stifles the rays of hope that filter through? An intimate story that presents a less glitzy picture of Japan than is customary, demonstrating that social inequality impacts all corners of the globe.

A ruined businessman was forced to sell his daughter, Hisano, to a brothel in Yoshiwara, the largest red-light district in Tokyo. The owner of the brothel has hopes to make her a great new addition which will attract the richest of customers. But after several months of training, she tries to flee Yoshiwara when the time has come for her to take her first customer...

A former athlete, Kōhei is a swimmer with a wife and child. One day his wife asks him to sign the divorce papers. From shock, he escapes to alcohol, finding himself one night in Tokyo’s gay district, Shinjuku Ni-chōme, where his fateful meeting awaits with Yūtaka, a beautiful twink. Yūtaka makes a living from live sex webcams with men, but his dream is to become an anime creator. Yūtaka however is tortured because he still hadn't come out to his father who collapsed from illness. Kōhei and Yūtaka both carry a cross. They hesitate but can't stop being drawn to each other as if they need each other. The two fall for each other, even at times hurting the other. Kōhei however begins to struggle about what it means "to love somebody" and questions his "sexuality", through his contacts with different personalities in the gay district. Meanwhile, Yūtaka encounters his gay ex Atsushi, and starts to realize he will never be able to be with Kōhei, who is gay-for-pay.

A jobless young couple, Yoshigi and Tsutue, wind up at the outskirts of the Suzaki red-light district in Tokyo. Tsutue talks her way into a job pouring sake for male customers at a small bar run by a sympathetic older woman, while Yoshigi is shunted off into a nearby noodle shop, where he gets a job delivering noodles. Tsutue charms and runs off with one of her clients. Yoshigi, ignoring the attentions of a sweet co-worker, pursues Tsutue.

It is difficult to stand out at a Ginza club where every hostess wants to be number one. It is competitive. One of them is a virgin and also just eighteen years old. She wants to become the number one hostess to help pay the bills for her family. She advertises herself as 'virginity for sale.' It is an auction and the prize goes to the highest bidder. She doesn't have hostess skills however. The club's manager was the number one hostess in all of Ginza and helps the younger woman.

In the formally ravishing Every-Night Dreams, set in the dockside neighborhoods of Tokyo, a single mother works tirelessly as a Ginza bar hostess to ensure a better life for her young son—until her long-lost husband returns.

Kazu attacks a bar in Kabukicho, a Tokyo red-light district, and flees to his hometown with abducts Machiko, a pole dancer he's been stuck on. They begin living together, but their happiness is short lived as their pasts torment them both.

Mikio and his older brother Saneo, who is mentally handicapped, live together and have just buried their father. One day, Mikio hires a hooker named Marin for his brother. Marin is an underground singer who goes by the name Fala. A video producer who is filming Fala's documentary finds out about her double life, and proposes to film her and Saneo's sex life. Dreaming about leaving Tokyo with Saneo with a huge sum of money from the film, Mikio and Marin agree to the offer.

In Tokyo, a young man, Tomo, and his companion, Hiroko, have hardly any money left to their name. Convinced that their misfortune is part of a larger, unexplainable joke, they agree to throw themselves into all the encounters that come their way with the singular hope of defeating this joke before it plays out.