Best movies like Heart of America

A young drug dealer watches as his high-rolling life is dismantled in the wake of his cousin's murder, which sees his best friend arrested for the crime.

Shy sixteen-year-old Stacy Collins can't believe that the most popular guy in school, an attractive athlete named Bobby Tennison, is interested in her. At first she is flattered by his constant attention, but then he becomes possessive and jealous-telling her who she can speak to and what she can wear. Threats escalate into violence when Bobby thinks Stacy has stepped out of line. Soon she is walking on egg shells and living in fear. Having seen the tell-tale bruises, Stacy's best friend convinces her to break things off with Bobby-but in a moment of weakness, Stacy goes to meet him. It will be the last time she is seen alive.

In 1976, a Mi'gMaq teenager plots revenge against the sadistic Indian agent who imprisoned her in a residential school where rape and abuse are common.

In pursuit of fantasy, five teenagers hop the fence of a now defunct amusement park. While apparently a mindless diversion, for two of them the park is the setting for a more fatal bid at escape.

A day in the life of a group of troubled 15-year-olds growing up in west London.

Beautiful Mandy Lane isn't a party girl but, when classmate Chloe invites the Texas high school student to a bash in the countryside, she reluctantly accepts. After hitching a ride with a vaguely scary older man, the teens arrive at their destination. Partying ensues, and Mandy's close pal, Emmet, keeps a watchful eye on the young males making a play for Mandy. Then two of the students are murdered.

A high school basketball player’s life turns upside down after free-falling into the harrowing world of drug addiction.

A high school outcast new to town becomes friends with a violent loner still haunted by the death of his parents.

This is a film about a troubled teen, Sean Randall, who is falsely accused of planning a Columbine shooting scenario. It all begins when an unlikely bond forms between Sean (Connor Jessup) and a preppy teenage girl named Deanna Roy (Alexia Fast). Deanna's boyfriend is deeply threatened by Sean and Deanna's friendship, resulting in a violent confrontation. Seeking to protect himself, Sean issues a death threat online - and is swiftly arrested. When the police raid Sean's home, they find rifles, shotguns, knives and ammunition - all property of Sean's father Ricky (Michael Buie), an avid hunter. They also find a supposed "hit list" with twenty names of people who have tormented Sean. The authorities and the media proclaim another Columbine has been narrowly averted, and soon Sean faces a terrifying imprisonment in a youth detention facility. Sean's only hope is to overcome his dark image, and prove his innocence to Deanna and to his community.

Five high school students from different walks of life endure a Saturday detention under a power-hungry principal. The disparate group includes rebel John, princess Claire, outcast Allison, brainy Brian and Andrew, the jock. Each has a chance to tell his or her story, making the others see them a little differently -- and when the day ends, they question whether school will ever be the same.

A pack of naïve teenagers conspire to murder a mutual friend, whose aggressive demeanor has proved too much.

School is boring, family life unbearable, and Harold and his high school friends have turned Central Park into their 'spot'. Unbeknownst to them, a revenge-seeking executioner prepares to kill them off one by one to pay for the sins of the father.

All, including school administration and a friend, turn their backs on a girl who accused a classmate of rape.

In 2009, the small town of Cohasset, Massachusetts was rocked with tragedy. A 17-year-old high school senior named Collin Mason murdered three classmates. All the murders were videotaped and uploaded to the Internet via bit torrent sites and for three days, the world viewed the murders of these three innocent teens. Through legal action, the parents of the victims were able to remove all footage from the Internet and the town tried to save face by pretending it never happened. Bootleg copies of this footage are still passed around and downloaded through illegal means. The impact of this video is still being felt in Cohasset today. The video has become infamous, and is now referred to as The Cohasset Snuff Film.

Three girls discover that two men are willing to do anything to impress Mother and what impresses Mother is watching her sons commit acts of rape and murder. Now these women are prisoners and lowered to pawns in the game of checkers between two dim wits and their Maniac Mommy and the question becomes, can any of them escape, alive?

Derwin and Derick, Neo-Nazis, plan to commit a school shooting and kill themselves after a sick joke by school jocks.

Several ordinary high school students go through their daily routine as two others prepare for something more malevolent.

A group of teachers must defend themselves from a gang of murderous kids when their school comes under siege after hours.

A group of high school outcasts get revenge on the students that torment them.

A high-school field trip takes a nightmarish turn when the students' bus breaks down and thugs come to their aid.

A teenage girl, distraught from her vain attempt to connect with her estranged mother, resorts to cutting herself. When she develops an online relationship with an older woman, she learns to accept her sexuality and the endless solitude of sprawling suburbia.

A teacher trying to break up a local drug ring is framed and arrested for possession of marijuana.

A teenager with an early onset of male-pattern baldness befriends his high school's janitor.

A wealthy Los Angeles teen and her superficial friends wants to break out of suburbia and experience Southern California's "gangsta" lifestyle. But problems arise when the preppies get in over their heads and provoke the wrath of a violent Latino gang. Suddenly, their role-playing seems a little too real.

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.

Burglary. Drugs. Assault. Rape. The students at Brandel High are more than new Principal Rick Latimer bargained for. Gangs fight to control the school using knives - even guns - when they have to. When Latimer and the head of security try to clean up the school and stop the narcotics trade, they run up against a teenage mafia. A violent confrontation on the campus leads to a deadly showdown with the drug dealer's gang, and one last chance for Latimer to save his career... and his life.

Duncan is a genius straight A student, Blade is juvenile delinquent. But because of a mix up with their school records, everyone thinks each is the other one. Now, Duncan kind of likes the attention from being thought of as a real bad dude, if only the school bully would stop trying to rough him up. And Blade definitely likes being thought of as important instead of as trouble.

Rick and Melissa are a pair of young lovers hoping to get out of the slums for good and escape the poverty and crime their families and friends have gotten involved in. All this comes to an end when Rick feels he must rejoin his old gang to avenge the killing of his brother by a rival gang. In the course of getting even, Rick is arrested, leaving Melissa without anyone to protect her. She falls in with a crack dealer and quickly becomes addicted to the drug. When she gets sold to a drug kingpin by a minor dealer to pay off a debt, only Rick can save her.

A popular high school girl is harassed by a delinquent boy until they are placed in creative writing class together. Through written words, they create a bond, but tragically a bond that cannot withstand her social pressures or his brutal home life.

Cherry Falls is a quiet little town - until the night that a serial killer begins preying on its youth. After a third teen is found slain, the killer's modus operandi emerges: the victims were all virgins. Sheriff Marken is concerned for the safety of the teens in general and in particular his own daughter Jody, who is still a virgin...

A young Brooklyn boy witnesses the brutal murder of his mother and grows up obsessed with finding her killer. Thus begins his life as a quiet, straight-A student by day and a self-appointed hero at night. But what is a real hero? And who decides what is right or wrong? As the boundaries blur, Sean's dual life wears on his psyche and his two worlds careen dangerously close to colliding. Like a graphic novel you can't put down, Boy Wonder challenges morality, distorting perceptions of what is right and what is justified, as it races to its shocking conclusion.

Barry Goldwater Elementary is on the brink of collapse: the lowest test scores in the state, teachers who are either drunk or having sex on school grounds, and a principal who extorts money from parents. It's up to Tom, the down-on-his-luck vice-principal, to rally the lazy teachers, expose the principal's corruption, and turn the school around before an end of the day board decision.

A teenage boy is sent to a juvenile reform facility in the wilderness. As we learn about the tragic events that sent him there, his struggle becomes one for survival with the inmates, counselors, and the retired war colonel in charge.

Matt is haunted by the death of a girl from a car accident he caused years ago. Matt was drunk and as he reached for the car radio, he struck the girl as she crossed the road. The guilt that he feels has altered his sense of reality, making Matt's life a mystery full of shadows and phantoms. Now, years later Matt goes away for weekend with his new girlfriend Dawn. After a wild session of lovemaking, Dawn goes for a walk. While she is away a strange man with an ax comes into the motel room and attacks Matt. After that incident Matt goes into the woods, looking for Dawn. There he encounters Dawn's family who tie him down and put him on trail for the murder of the girl years before. They find him guilty and he is sent back into the forest to be hunted down by the family. The deeper Matt runs into the forest the farther his mind is lost to the Blackwoods.

The line between reality and fiction starts to blur when two best friends start making a movie about getting revenge on bullies.

Six high school teenagers decide to commit suicide together, but their plans soon go awry when one of them has something darker in mind as well.

Peter Gifford is a likable, dedicated schoolteacher that teaches a senior life skills class. When student Janet Sommers brings up the topic of sex and dating, he asks students to write questions on the topic, and will cover them in the next class. The parents get wind of what Gifford is about to do, notify the principal, and he warns Peter not to read the questions in class. Gifford decides to go against this and is suspended. The whole student body protests, and the administration gets worried on what to do.

What is supposed to be an educational and collaborative weekend professional development session for the English Department of Prescott High School instead turns into a blood soaked nightmare when a masked killer targets them.

Cynical and intelligent Arnold Mosk, a known drug user, is put into a disciplinary program at his high school meant for the seriously disturbed where he becomes the main target of the psychopathic Doug Van Housen and his gang.

The slender premise springs from the actions of two listless 11-year-old boys, the cold, manipulative Leo, and his weaker, more impressionable friend, Mike. Contemptuous of the fallible police force (Mike has already filched a police hat from an accident scene), the boys arrange a staged knife fight outside a football stadium with the aid of a bag of stage blood and a real blade.

Martha is a businesswoman and divorced mother of two children - Augusta and Jack. However, when docile Augusta becomes a teenager, feelings of anger and self-hate cause her personality to undergo a scary transformation, and Martha realizes that this is not just typical teen angst. Augusta begins doing drugs, drinking, and ends up on the streets. Her concerned mother and father reach out to an educational consultant, who advises them to send Augusta to a strict wilderness camp for troubled teens. However, even the institution's experienced and tough administrators find Augusta a difficulty to keep under control. Martha comes to realize that there is no answer to her daughter's behavior.

From the youth directed novel of the same name by Greogor Tressnow comes a film by Detlev Buck that is a realistic portrait of life in the section of Berlin called Neukölln. It’s about power and weakness, delinquents and victims, and the difficulties a 15-year-old faces in a poor and criminal environment.

It's the end of the school year for a group of high school friends. Their senior prom was to be a night of elegance, rejoicing and celebrating, but when a psychotic killer hijacks their stretch limo, he is determined to have them Dead On Arrival. The teens are tortured while being held hostage, and soon turn on each other for survival. By the end, we learn that one of the teens had been keeping a secret that played a bigger role in their demise.

When a young girl takes her own life, Archie and the other Suicide Kids decide to follow her lead and form a pact. But as the group begin to die on by one, Archie realizes that they have all become the target of a masked killer and that his commitment to death has become a terrifying fight for survival and a battle to protect the girl he loves. But who's the killer?

Six best friends find themselves at the wrong place at the wrong time. They fight for their lives against a serial killer who has more in store for them than death.

Some students taking driver's ed during the summer. Among the students is Riko, a cocky guy; Chad, a guy from a privileged background, who's terrified to get behind the wheel; Vanessa, who's over protective mom who wouldn't allow her to take the course, who went behind her back; and Maria, a spoiled foreign student. Now the principal wants the students to pass so he tells the instructor, who's still not over his wife leaving and is not exactly up to the task, that it's important for the students to pass so he brought in a special instructor, who's very tough. And the principal also tells one of his teachers to let, one of the students Maslanski who's the school football star, pass the test he failed so that he can concentrate on driver's ed. But the teacher, seeing this as an opportunity to expose the principal as not doing his job and thus paving the way for him to be the new principal, makes Maslanski take a make up test

Ricky is just out of a young offenders institute, heading home to Hackney and determined to go straight. Instead, he heads straight for trouble when he becomes involved in a street confrontation, siding with his best friend Wisdom against a local rude boy. The trouble escalates into a series of tit-for-tat incidents that threaten to spiral out of control. Ricky's 12-year-old brother Curtis, hero-worships Ricky, though he appears smart enough to know he doesn't want to follow his example. Yet, despite the stern warnings from his mother and support from her friends in the community, might Ricky's bad boy allure be too attractive for Curtis to resist?

A bullied student sees visions of a rabbit he was forced to kill as a child, and those visions propel him into a state where his imagination causes him to carry out violent acts.

A high-school track star (Nick Stahl) watches without judgment as his two best friends (Summer Phoenix, Aaron Paul) abuse heroin.

At an elite private Border School four students form a clique to sneak out of school after hours to meet, drink and play. By trying to escape the golden cage which their wealthy parents have stuck them in, they search for the Extreme. In the course of time their excessive games grow more and more violent and soon they turn against the weakest of the group.