Best movies like Drylanders

Ben Tyler has been diagnosed with cancer. With a grim chance of survival in the best case scenario even if he immediately begins treatment, he instead decides to take a motorcycle trip from Toronto through the Canadian prairies to British Columbia.

It's the winter of 1935 and Max Brown is newly arrived in Willowgreen, Saskatchewan - a rural Canadian prairie town - on his first teaching job in a one room schoolhouse. He quickly realizes that this is not a dream situation: the winter is harsher than he's ever experienced, he's living in the basement of the school, the older of his students treat him poorly and his wages are paltry if and when he ever does get paid.

John and Mary Sims are city-dwellers hit hard by the financial fist of The Depression. Driven by bravery (and sheer desperation) they flee to the country and, with the help of other workers, set up a farming community - a socialist mini-society based upon the teachings of Edward Gallafent. The newborn community suffers many hardships - drought, vicious raccoons and the long arm of the law - but ultimately pull together to reach a bread-based Utopia.

In Depression-era New England, a miserly businessman named Benedict Slade receives a long-overdue attitude adjustment one Christmas Eve when he is visited by three ghostly figures who resemble three of the people whose possessions Slade had seized to collect on unpaid loans. Assuming the roles of the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future from Charles Dickens' classic story, the three apparitions force Slade to face the consequences of his skinflint ways, and he becomes a caring, generous, amiable man.

A newlywed couple journeys west to make their fortune, and begins a banking empire.

Billy Coleman works hard and saves his earnings for two years to achieve his dream of buying two red-bone coonhound pups. He develops a new trust in life as he faces overwhelming challenges in adventure and tragedy roaming the river bottoms of Cherokee country with his dogs, Old Dan and Little Ann.

The oldest son of a loving and strong family of black sharecroppers comes of age in the Depression-era South after his father is imprisoned for stealing food.

Follows the Walton family as they prepare enthusiastically for the annual Harvest Festival Fair on Walton Mountain in 1934, but their lives are dramatically changed after a young boy arrives.

The story of the love affair between FDR and his distant cousin Margaret Stuckley, centered around the weekend in 1939 when the King and Queen of the United Kingdom visited upstate New York.

The screenplay for this mystery is based upon a story suggested to Liberty Magazine by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. It is the tale of a prominent lawyer who shocks his snooty friends, family and colleagues by abruptly abandoning his successful practice and his wife to find true happiness. He soon falls in love with another woman and continues to keep a low profile until he learns that his first wife stands accused of murdering him

America is in the midst of the Depression, and the Kamp family is struggling to get by, especially after Mrs. Kamp's untimely death. Now little Ruthie, with her mother gone and her father overwhelmed by doctor bills resulting from her brother's polio, expects another Christmas without presents or festivities. But when her father brings home one dollar in change and lets the children use it to buy special gifts for each other, the Kamps come to find that money isn't what fills Christmas with joy, love, and miracles.

Viennese surgeon Dr. Braun and his daughter Leni come to a small town in North Dakota as refugees from Hitler. When the winds of the Dust Bowl threaten the town, John Phillips leads the townsfolk in moving to greener pastures in Oregon. He falls for Leni, but she is betrothed to the man who helped her and her father escape from the Third Reich. She must decide between the two men.

A hockey player in a small town begins to lose his grip on reality, and starts to believe that he is a gunslinger in the Old West.

A truck driver and a gold-digger meet at a swank hotel and both think the other is wealthy. A drama of greed and society.

Roscoe the Rainmaker is invited to California (with sidekick "Billy") to relieve a terrible dry spell and to save the community from an unscrupulous businessman who stands to profit from the drought

Quebec Bill Bohomme is a hardy schemer and dreamer, who, desperate to raise money to preserve his endangered herd through the rapidly approaching winter, resorts to whiskey-smuggling, a traditional family occupation. Quebec Bill takes his son, Wild Bill, on the journey. Also Henry Coville, an inscrutable whiskey smuggler, and Rat Kinneson, Quebec Bill's perpetually disconsolate ex-con hired man. Together, they cross the border into vast reaches of Canadian wilderness for an unforgettable four days "full of terror, full of wonder."

Love happens between the son of Polish immigrants settled in Maine and the daughter of a neighboring farm family.

A period piece about the McIver family trying to protect there home from Civil War deserters. Actor Jodie Foster, then approximately 8, plays Suellen McIver. Actor Mitch Vogel, Jamie, is their protector.

Clark Davis struggles to maintain his land and support his family during a long drought. With a bank loan to repay, his wife, Ellen, takes a job in town as a seamstress, but soon becomes ill with scarlet fever. Devastated to lose his beloved wife, Clark and his young daughter Missie turn to his parents Irene and Lloyd for support. Clark must find a way to save his farm and survive Ellen's death without losing the person he loves most: his daughter.

The Thomsons - parents Thomas and Francie, and children Willa, Arthur, Beatrice (nicknamed Booky) and Jakey - are a loving working class family living in the Depression era in Toronto. Arthur is showing aptitude in drawing, and although his parents want to support his skill, Thomas in particular wants him to take up a vocation that is a little more stable. Willa, the part time librarian, is attracted to Russell, the medical student she meets at the library. And 11-year old Booky is happy that she has been asked to tutor the new older sixth grade student, Georgie Dunlop, in spelling, since she has a crush on him, her first ever. She just can't wait for him to ask her to the school dance. But she begins to have mixed feelings about Georgie based on a gift he gives to her. Digging a little deeper, Booky begins to understand both the good and bad of Georgie.

By 1929, Canada's west, which had been home to generations of Métis, was taken over by the railroads and new settlers. The Métis became a forgotten people, relegated to eking out a living as best they could. In Places Not Our Own, Rose l'Esperance, a Métis, is determined that her children will have a normal life and an education. Her hopes reside in her daughter Flora, but the harshness of their situation culminates in a devastating and dramatic event.

It's Christmas Eve, early 1930s on Walton's Mountain. As the family prepares for the holiday, they anxiously await Pa's return home from his job in the city some 50 miles away. He is late, and Ma and the grandparents hear on the radio a report of a bus accident that worries them. Oldest son John-Boy must step up to help grandfather cut down a Christmas tree, and upon learning the concern about Daddy sets out to find him.

Booky does everything she can to make an enjoyable Christmas, for her family, during the depression as her father is out of work.

In a post-apocalyptic future, a wheat farmer embarks upon a journey and encounters a variety of unusual characters, while traveling across the land.

Depression Era story set in London about a wealthy shop owner who goes bankrupt and is forced to fire his faithful staff.

Saga about a proud band of Sioux Indians, and the efforts of one brave to save his people from destruction through the use of mysterious powers handed down by ancestors.

Laura, her husband Almanzo and their daughter Rose leave South Dakota and head for Missouri in search of a better, more financially stable life. It's a daunting journey, but they're sustained by their resolve. However, they're faced with an even greater challenge after their arrival: an ailing and bedridden Almanzo is unable to tend their new land. With winter fast on its way, Laura attempts to clear the land herself and plant the acres of apple trees that they hope will ensure their future.

An intimate portrait and saga of four film pioneers--Harry, Albert, Sam and Jack who rose from immigrant poverty through personal tragedies persevering to create a major studio with a social conscience.

Naive Iowa farm boy Lewis Tater dreams of being a famous Western novelist like his hero, Zane Grey. He leaves home to answer a writing correspondence course's ad for on-campus classes, only to discover that the school consists of a row of postboxes at an isolated Nevada train depot. On the run from the con men responsible, Lewis stumbles across "real" cowboys--cowboy actors shooting a movie in the desert. The would-be writer soon finds himself instead acting in Westerns, for the rundown Tumbleweed Productions studio, in Depression-era Hollywood.

The drought in the American West is predicted to be the worst in 1,000 years. Join five Academy Award-winning filmmakers as they explore the environmental crisis of our time and how to fix it before it's too late.

Youngsters express their thoughts about the Great Depression of the 1930s and what they believe it was all about. Some learn more about that period of American life by interviewing individuals who lived through the dreaded times.

In this Janette Oke sequel to "Love Comes Softly," the eldest child in an 1800s frontier family, Missie Davis is a bright and beautiful elementary schoolteacher whose love for the prairie is matched only by her passion for books. When Missie encounters Grant, a handsome New England railroad executive, she feels as though she's met a hero from one of her novels.

The lives of the average Quebecois Plouffe family during the final years of the depression and through World War II.

The Thomsons, like many families, have hit hard times as Thomas can't find steady work. Fifteen year old Booky takes the family situation in stride, being matter-of-fact about being poor. Beyond her loving family, there are some things about her life she likes, such as being the president of her local Deanna Durbin fan club, and going out with a boy named Lorne.

The Bergers, a blue-collar Jewish family living in an overstuffed tenement and undone by the Depression, struggle through hard times and dream of a better future in this 1972 production of Clifford Odets' pungent play. Personalities and politics clash as Odets' mélange of characters try to survive on pennies a day. Walter Matthau plays cynical World War I amputee Moe Axelrod, and Leo Fuchs portrays the family's iron-willed leftist grandfather.