Best movies like East of Middle West

The lives of an Iowa farmer's three daughters are shattered when he suddenly decides to bequeath them the family's fertile farm.

When 11-year-old Gitty discovers that her father, Abe, a good and beloved farmer, is holding a wealthy man hostage in their abandoned silo in order to save their suffering farm, she befriends the captive in secret. As the truth unfolds about who he is and what will happen if he escapes, Gitty chooses to confront the thin line between reality and fiction.

A teenage girl with nothing to lose joins a traveling magazine sales crew, and gets caught up in a whirlwind of hard partying, law bending and young love as she criss-crosses the Midwest with a band of misfits.

When Elizabeth is abducted by a fugitive sexual predator, she realizes she must take matters into her own hands and plot her escape. Based on a true story.

Belle Bennett plays as the widowed mother of seven children living in Sioux City, Iowa. She moves with them to Cambridge, Massachusetts in order to educate her children with culture and give them every advantage. Bennett, who is unversed in financial matters, soon faces poverty for herself and her children. She takes out a loan from an unscrupulous lender (played by Richard Tucker), who is so impressed by the charm and valiant spirit of Bennett than he neglects to ask her for collateral. Bennett, however, is only able to partially pay her creditors. Marion Nixon, Bennett's eldest daughter, is shocked by her mother's actions and attempts to sacrifice herself to Tucker in order to clear her mother's obligations, even though she is engaged to marry a well to do Harvard undergraduate, played by Rex Bell. This film is believed lost.

Four friends find themselves trapped in their small hometown after they discover their friends and neighbors going quickly and horrifically insane.

Abandoned by her father, a young woman embarks on a thousand-mile odyssey through the backroads of America where she meets a disenfranchised drifter. But despite their best efforts, all roads lead back to their terrifying pasts and to a final stand that will determine whether their love can survive their otherness.

Decorated soldier Kyle Martin returns home after WW2 to discover his family farm is in foreclosure. With only a silver star to his name, Kyle is in dire straits until gambler Johnny O' offers to give him money in exchange for killing a gangster.

An expermintal gun powered by an atomic reactor is misplaced when the transport carrying it crashes into a river. The weapon soon falls into the hands of a bullied teen named Zeke, who uses it to get even with his persecutors. An army team led by the overzealous Lt. Dalton is sent to recover the weapon before it's unstable reactor overloads and causes a meltdown.

When two youngsters meet and fall for each other, they must go on the run from the girl's corrupt father, who is also the sheriff of the town.

When the Solomons trade in the craziness of big-city life for the quiet of a North Dakota farm, little do they expect the nightmare that follows. Soon after arriving, teenage Jess (Kristen Stewart) and her younger brother see terrifying apparitions and endure attacks from a supernatural source. Jess must warn her disbelieving family before it is too late to save them.

Training his lens on a once ubiquitous but now fading slice of Americana, documentarian Mike Mills profiles six paperboys who call Stillwater, Minn., home. Featuring interviews and footage of the youngsters pedaling through their daily rounds, the film is a paradigm of America's changing face as adults assume a role formerly filled by pubescent entrepreneurs.

A woman is forced to go on the run when her superhuman abilities are discovered. Years after having abandoned her family, the only place she has left to hide is home.

An up-and-coming heavyweight fighter, George Wilson, arrives in Vulcan City, a small mid-western town over-run by racketeers, to fight a heavily-favored Frankie Sebastian. George arrives but his manager Dolan is nowhere to be found. But Ma and Pa Karlsen, owners of Karlsen's Kozy Kottages motel and restaurant take him under their wing. He meets Miss Gormley who is also there to meet the no-show manager who is blackmailing her brother. Dolan still hasn't arrived by the date of the fight but, to the surprise of sports-promoters Tom Healy and Dominic Guido, George shows up and wins the fight. This wins him the friendship of trainer Al Muntz and the enmity of Willie Foltis, a punchy ex-fighter and a Healy henchman. This leads George to a fight with "Soldier" Freeman, whose manager Scotty Cameron has made arrangements for the favored-Freeman to take a dive, so he and Healy and Guido can clean up betting on the underdog. But Honest George has other plans.

Two brothers who are forced off their farm in the debt stricken mid-west become folk heroes when they begin robbing the banks that have been foreclosing on farmers.

An examination of the infamous thirty-year-old cold case of Iowa paperboy Johnny Gosch, the first missing child to appear on a milk carton. The film focuses on Johnny’s mother, Noreen Gosch, and her relentless quest to find the truth about what happened to her son. Along the way there have been mysterious sightings, bizarre revelations, and a confrontation with a person who claims to have helped abduct Johnny.

Zachary Hallock and his son Joshua are farmers who live in a frontier town that suffers the assaults of a band of outlaws. After the murder of a Pinkerton's detective, the farmers decide to unite against the bandits, but Hallock rejects the proposal. To the astonishment of his son and his fiancée, Hallock decides to join the outlaws.

After a tragic accident caused by the truck of the middle-aged Carl Lee where a woman dies with a crushed stern, he is arrested and sent to the county jail. His son PJ, who works washing dishes and cleaning tables in a restaurant, feels lost, without financial support to keep his father's house, and is fired from his job and evicted from his house.

Accusations of guilt turns a father into a fugitive, leaving his son to find and bring him home after struggling to put the pieces together.

On the 2-year anniversary of George Floyd's death, Candace revisits Minneapolis and the violent, racially-divided aftermath that fueled BLM's global rise-and filled its coffers.

A teenage girl living in 1908 rural Indiana attends high school despite her mother's fierce opposition of her life, the friendship of a free-spirted older woman helps her stick to her goals.

Aliens attack Earth with deadly electrical tornadoes, and it’s up to a farmer, his smart high-school daughter and a tornado blogger to thwart the horrific invasion.

A hitman in hiding struggles to keep his monsters at bay when his dark past comes calling. Some days your LUCK just goes BLACK.

Dramatization of the true story of the so-called Willmar Eight, a group of Minnesota bank workers who braved freezing conditions whilst picketing their branch in a struggle for union rights.

Siblings Geoff and Rich Brewer have competed all their lives for parental affection, career ambitions, and romantic pursuits. Rich, the elder brother, always comes out on top leaving Geoff to struggle in his shadow. Tragedy strikes their family in a freak accident. In a panic, Geoff seeks out a backwoods cult rumored to have supernatural powers. The bumbling cult's ritual initially solves the problem, but it soon becomes apparent that they have unleashed a sinister force on their unsuspecting, Midwestern town.

A European countess, after being betrayed by her lover, goes to live in small town Middle America with her cousins and causes havoc among the rather puritanical community members.

Drowning in debt, child support and bills all while white knuckling it through sobriety, Francis is coming undone. When his roommate, Shelly, goes missing, Francis is thrown headlong into her private world; a slip stream of money, violence and terrifying allegiances.

In WWII, many men who were professional athletes went to war. The women filled in on the baseball field like they did in the factories. See the ten teams and the women who made up the women's baseball league.

Brandon, a surveyor, dreams of building a railway to the west. He sets off with his son, Davy, to survey a route. They discover a new pass which will shave 200 miles off the expected distance, but they are set upon by a party of Cheyenne. One of them, a white renegade with only two fingers on his right hand, kills Brandon and scalps him. Davy is all alone now.

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.

Uptight Millie Haven has always followed the rules, but when she has doubts before her big Kansas City wedding, her attitude-prone little sister Emma, the least likely of heroes, comes to the rescue. They embark on a spontaneous roadtrip to their grandmother’s farm where, with the help of Grandma Mildred, they rediscover their bond.

After her two younger sisters leave home, Maren, a Midwest sod farmer by day, and a drummer by night, is left alone to take care of her depressed, narcotic-abusing father. Eventually recognizing her unhappiness, Maren's father insists she pursue her dreams of becoming an Americana musician.

A swarm of locusts appears on the horizon near a Midwestern town and the inhabitants must find a way to destroy or divert them before the insects devour the area's valuable crops

Emma is the bright, attractive and funny widowed mother of teen honor-student Charlie. She has a drinking problem that seemingly increases exponentially, and Charlie has problems of his own, chief among them the pregnancy of his girlfriend Lauren...

A musical drama set in small-town Iowa, SAINTS REST tells the story of two estranged sisters, who over the course of one summer, form a connection through their shared love of music, as they grieve the recent death of their mother.