Best movies like Maruyama, The Middle Schooler

Thirteen-year-old Kayla endures the tidal wave of contemporary suburban adolescence as she makes her way through the last week of middle school — the end of her thus far disastrous eighth grade year — before she begins high school.

Carter, a troubled teen stays with a friend of his dads and starts flirting with her son Danny. After the weekend school returns, however Carter a school jock tells Danny he does not want to be seen with him at school. Their relationship grows outside school hours though & soon enough Danny falls in love with Carter & after Danny is attacked romance ensures, but can it last.

An unattractive 7th grader struggles to cope with suburban life as the middle child with inattentive parents and bullies at school.

An acclaimed college hoops coach is demoted to a junior varsity team after a public meltdown.

Aimi and her father move into an old, apartment building and learn quickly that things are not as they seem.

Punk-rocker turned suburban mom, Kelly, is nostalgic for a life she can no longer have and uncertain of a future she doesn’t yet fit in. Seventeen-year-old Cal is frustrated at his lack of control over the hand he's been dealt. When the two strike up an unlikely friendship, it's the perfect spark needed to thrust them both back to life.

A lonely boy befriends a stray dog who has a natural talent for basketball and together they experience the highs and lows of life as their friendship remains solid through a series of escapades.

Charts the troubled teenage years of students Yūichi Hasumi and Shūsuke Hoshino, exploring the shifting and complex power dynamics of their relationship against the backdrop of Yūichi's love for the dreamy and abstract music of fictional pop star Lily Chou-Chou.

After a chain of deaths at a junior high school, new transfer student Koichi Sakakibara turns to a mysterious girl who holds the key to the dark mystery.

Charlie Boyle finds that even his high IQ can't solve all of his problems when he takes on a double life in order to make friends his own age.

When Will Browning is threatened with military summer school if he doesn't get better grades, he decides to do a science project that will definitely get an A. So he buys some Ocean Pups, unhatched sea creatures that will look spectacular, but he hasn't bargained for the cloning agent that the unscrupulous manufacturers have put in the kit. Next thing he knows there's another him.

A high-school girl is kidnapped by gang lords and held captive for several months. Over this time, she repeatedly beaten, raped, and tortured. On the 25th of November 1988, four youths abducted and held Furuta Junko in the house of one of the captors. Subjected to rape, torture, and humiliation, Junko had no hope of escape as the manhunt was stalled by the captors forcing her to tell her parents that she was ok. For 41 harrowing days, Junko had to endure unimaginable suffering at the hands of these four individuals. Finally, after losing in a game of mahjong solitaire, they beat her with an iron dumbbell and set on fire with lighter fluid. She died later that day from shock. In an attempt to hide their crime they buried her in cement and thus the name 'Concrete Encased High School Murder Case' was born as Japan had to confront the horrors of this crime. The perpetrators disposed the drum in a tract of reclaimed land in Koto, Tokyo.

Like some other kids, 12-year-old Trevor McKinney believed in the goodness of human nature. Like many other kids, he was determined to change the world for the better. Unlike most other kids, he succeeded.

Kevin, an intelligent guy helps out Maxwell to improve his reading skills. In return, Kevin wants Maxwell to take him out places since he is not authorized to go out. Being the social outcasts of the town, Kevin and Maxwell come to realize that they are similar to each other and accept that they are "freaks" and nothing will stop them.

Based on an autobiography by Hiroshi Tamura, the film follows story of the author's experience of homelessness when this father suddenly decides to abandon his family. Hiroshi and his older siblings do all what they can to withstand the trouble they encounter along their way.

Whitwell, TN is a small, rural community of less than two thousand people nestled in the mountains of Tennessee. Its citizens are almost exclusively white and Christian. In 1998, the children of Whitwell Middle School took on an inspiring project, launched out of their principal's desire to help her students open their eyes to diversity in the world and the horrors and enormity of the holocaust.

Shuhei Horikawa, a poor schoolteacher, struggles to raise his son Ryohei by himself, despite neither money nor prospects.

Based on the infamous "Concrete-encased high school girl murder case" that took place from November 1988 to January 1989 in Japan. Junko Furuta, a female 17 year old high school student, was kidnapped and confined in a house by four other male high school students (all juvenile) in the Ayase district of Adachi-ku, Tokyo, where she was repeatedly raped, sexually humiliated and tortured in an extremely brutish manner for 41 days before she finally died after a particularly severe beating. The boys hid her body in a drum and filled it with concrete, but the body was nonetheless discovered a few months later.

The Golden Trio of junior high school soccer players, Toshi, Kenji and Kazu, enroll at the new Kakegawa High School merely because they want to play with Kubo, the legendary player who learned his superb soccer techniques in Germany and who helped the Kakegawa team, which then consisted of freshmen only, win eight place in the all-Japan....

A troubled boy becomes addicted to heroin, and his mother and foster father help him fight it.

A psychic housewife and her husband accidentally find a kidnapped girl. But instead of informing the police, they hatch a scheme to get famous by working with the police as a psychic consultant to "find" the girl. And then, things start to go terribly wrong.

Inner city kids are given new direction when they are convinced to join the school chess team.

Fifteen-year-old Chris Mills isn't too happy with his divorcing parents. In fact, he doesn't want them to split at all, so he hires car repair shop owner -- and former attorney -- Archie Corelli to run interference for him and put a stop to the proceedings. It's a match made in heaven because Chris and Archie both have a deep desire to see the right thing done.

In the year 199X, on the dark, shady streets of New Kabuki Town, the free-for-all between gangs of young delinquents and a corrupt police force is further complicated by the appearance of a mysterious girl named Asuka.

A beginning editor, Odamachi, slips back in time to the year 1973 and meets Osamu Tezuka. Tezuka, then, is out of luck. He has failed in animation business. His company has gone bankrupt. He has declined in popularity. Tezuka in front of Odamachi is in the miserable situation. Still Tezuka never loses his energy for creation. He cuts out sleeping and continues drawing manga. Odamachi is gradually involved in such Tezuka’s energy and encounters various people who support Tezuka, including Kabemura, an editor who trusts and waits for Tezuka till he finally receives manuscripts. Fun and excitement of creation are surely in Tezuka’s atelier. Focusing on how “Black Jack”, the watershed work for Tezuka, is created, and how Tezuka challenges to make animations again. The drama depicts Tezuka’s way of life. ~~ Based on manga series "Black Jack Sousaku Hiwa - Tezuka Osamu no Shigotoba kara" by Yoshimoto Koji and Miyazaki Masaru.

A group of young teenagers plan the perfect heist by breaking into their middle school to change their failing test grades.

A graduate student named Stan becomes the manager of an apartment complex which is quite uncommon. The tenants are all quite eccentric and uncommon characters, and the place is quite run down in certain spots. The previous manager had disappeared in mysterious circumstances. When cleaning the mucky pool, Stan encounters a corpse. The odd detectives that come to investigate seem to blame him. Then more bizarre, potentially deadly occurrences happen. Soon, Stan's life is in danger, if not his sanity. However, the odd tenants all befriend him and may be his only hope

Travel into Japan's nuttiest apartment house and meet its volatile inhabitants: Kyoko, the beautiful and mysterious new apartment manager; Yusaku, the exam-addled college student; Mrs. Ichinose, the drunken gossip; Kentaro, her bratty son; Akemi, the boozy bar hostess; and the mooching and peeping Mr. Yotsuya.

A teen obsessed with horror films befriends a vampire who leads him to a whole coven of vampires that hide beneath the New York subways.

Nagisa is transgender. She grew up in Hiroshima as a man, but now lives in Shinjuku, Tokyo as a woman. Due to an incident, she begins to live with middle school student Ichika, who is a distant relative. Ichika has been neglected by her mother Saori. From living in solitude by herself, to now living with Ichika, Nagisa develops maternal instincts for the first time.

In a housing complex, a college prep student is spying on his neighbor, a former peace activist, who now leads an ordinary life as a housewife, having a secret affair with an ex-lover.

Sayaka is a sexually frustrated housewife whose husband rarely talks and is always busy with work. But she soon finds an antidote to her loneliness and boredom in the form of a door-to-door salesman in this erotic drama.

A 5th grade elementary school student meets a transfer student who has a mysterious charm about her. He then learns her big secret.

A mysterious code written with letters and numbers is found on a street in Kyoto. Yoshito Takuma (Tsuyoshi Kusanagi) and Chinami Anekoji (Kaho Minami) begin to investigate. They discover that something happened at the place where the code was found on stickers and they also discover a dead body. A man known as "Writer" is suspected of being the culprit. To find the man known as "Writer," Yoshito Takuma infiltrates into Shiga central prison. --asianwiki

Shu Kubota is killed by someone with a baseball bat. A metal bat and an old toy are found at the crime scene. Detective Yoshito (Tsuyoshi Kusanagi) with the special investigation unit goes to the crime scene to investigate. There, Detective Yoshito realizes that he made the old toy about 10 years ago when he worked at the public relations divsion of the Kyoto Prefectural Police Department. Detective Yoshito decides to solve the case by himself and without the help of his partner Detective Chinami (Kaho Minami). --asianwiki