Best movies like Shadows
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A unique, carefully handpicked, selection of the best movies like Shadows Starring Ben Carruthers, Lelia Goldoni, Hugh Hurd, Anthony Ray, and more. If you liked Shadows then you may also like: Within Our Gates, Nothing But a Man, Once Upon a Time... When We Were Colored, One Potato, Two Potato, The Josephine Baker Story and many more popular movies featured on this list. You can further filter the list even more or get a random selection from the list of similar movies, to make your selection even easier.
The relationship between Lelia, a light-skinned black woman, and Tony, a white man is put in jeopardy when Tony meets Lelia’s darker-skinned jazz singer brother, Hugh, and discovers that her racial heritage is not what he thought it was.
Shadows
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Nothing But a Man
A proud black man and his school-teacher wife face discriminatory challenges in 1960s America.
Once Upon a Time... When We Were Colored
This film relates the story of a tightly connected Afro-American community informally called Colored Town where the inhabitants live and depend on each other in a world where racist oppression is everywhere, as told by a boy called Cliff who spent his childhood there. Despite this, we see the life of the community in all its joys and sorrows, of those that live there while others decide to leave for a better life north. For those remaining, things come to a serious situation when one prominent businessman is being muscled out by a white competitor using racist intimidation. In response, the community must make the decision of whether to submit meekly like they always have, or finally fight for their rights.
One Potato, Two Potato
Study of interracial marriage in the 1960s. A white divorcée falls in love with and marries an African-American man. When her ex-husband sues for custody of her child, arguing that a mixed household is an improper place to raise the girl, the new husband fights for his parental rights in court, fighting against a judge who represents the prejudices of the era.
The Josephine Baker Story
Biography of the African-American who became a major performer in the Paris cabarets of the 1920s and 1930s. The film follows her life beginning as a struggling performer in 1917 St. Louis, her frustrations leading to her move to France, and follows to her death in 1975. Written by John Sacksteder
Jungle Fever
A successful and married black man contemplates having an affair with a white girl from work. He's quite rightly worried that the racial difference would make an already taboo relationship even worse.
The Cool World
A fifteen-year-old boy wants to buy a gun from an adult racketeer named Priest, in order to become president of the gang to which he belongs, and to return them to active "bopping" (gang fighting) which has declined in Harlem.
The Cotton Club
Harlem's legendary Cotton Club becomes a hotbed of passion and violence as the lives and loves of entertainers and gangsters collide.
I Passed for White
A young woman falls in love and marries, but withholds from her husband information about her family.
A Raisin in the Sun
Walter Lee Younger is a young man struggling with his station in life. Sharing a tiny apartment with his wife, son, sister and mother, he seems like an imprisoned man. Until, that is, the family gets an unexpected financial windfall.
Motherless Brooklyn
New York City, 1957. Lionel Essrog, a private detective living with Tourette syndrome, tries to solve the murder of his mentor and best friend, armed only with vague clues and the strength of his obsessive mind.
The Exiles
The story of one night in the lives of a group of young Native American men and women who have left their reservations and are now living in the Bunker Hill district of Los Angeles.
Pinky
Pinky, a light skinned black woman, returns to her grandmother's house in the South after graduating from a Northern nursing school. Pinky tells her grandmother that she has been "passing" for white while at school in the North. In addition, she has fallen in love with a young white doctor, who knows nothing about her black heritage.
Green Book
Tony Lip, a bouncer in 1962, is hired to drive pianist Don Shirley on a tour through the Deep South in the days when African Americans, forced to find alternate accommodations and services due to segregation laws below the Mason-Dixon Line, relied on a guide called The Negro Motorist Green Book.
Imitation of Life
A struggling widow and her daughter take in a black housekeeper and her fair-skinned daughter. The two women start a successful business but face familial, identity, and racial issues along the way.
Imitation of Life
In 1940s New York, a white widow who dreams of being on Broadway has a chance encounter with a black single mother, who becomes her maid.
Sapphire
Two Scotland Yard detectives investigate the murder of a young woman of mixed race who had been passing for white. As they interview a spate of suspects -- including the girl's white boyfriend and his disapproving parents -- the detectives wade through a stubbornly entrenched sludge of racism and bigotry.
A House Divided
In the aftermath of the terrible Civil War which has devastated the South, Amanda America Dixon returns home to find she has become the sole heir to a vast cotton plantation. But the dreadful secret which has blighted her life threatens to deprive her of the birthright which her beloved father David had struggled for so long to create. Raised by her father and grandmother to be the perfect white Southern Belle, Amanda's true mother was a black slave Julia. Confronted with the forces of greed and bigotry, Amanda has to face not only the hatred of a racist world, but the complex truth of a family whose lives have been built on a lie.
The Wedding
Shelby Coles (Halle Berry) is engaged to marry talented white jazz musician Meade Howell, but the pair face opposition from both Meade's family, who object to an inter-racial marriage, and Shelby's parents, who want her to marry a professional. As Shelby is afflicted by pre-marital doubts, handsome Lute McNeil arrives on the scene, determined to make Shelby his at any cost.
Sunday in New York
Eileen is 22 and is smarting from her breakup with Russ. She comes to New York to visit her brother, Adam, who is an airline pilot. Eileen confides to her brother that she thinks she may be the only 22 year old virgin left in the world. Adam assures her that sex is not what all men look for and insists he hasn't slept around. Of course, Adam is lying and is in hot pursuit of a tryst with his occasional girlfriend Mona. However, Adam's date with Mona has a series of job related interruptions. Meanwhile, Eileen decides to see if she can have some fun for herself in New York, and seems to find the perfect candidate in Mike, a man she meets on the bus. But things get complicated when Russ pops in with a proposal and a mistaken assumption.
Lost Boundaries
A light-skinned African-American family are "passing" in an all-white New England town. When the truth comes out, the more prejudiced neighbors demand their expulsion from the community.
Halls of Anger
An all-black inner city school has to become an integrated school. Few dozen white kids are transfered there, but the black students are aggressively opposed to this. The school then approaches a tough black teacher for help.
Alpha Males Experiment
When Ethan, the needy nice guy, is dumped by his fiancée, he asks his misogynist older brother, Kyle, to help him win her back.
A Man Called Adam
A famous jazz trumpeter finds himself unable to cope with the problems of everyday life.
The Black Klansman
After his daughter is killed by the KKK, a black man seeks revenge by passing as white and becoming a Klansman.
My Sweet Charlie
A pregnant white Southern girl and a black New York lawyer, both on the run in rural Texas, meet up in a boarded-up, abandoned house and realize they both need each other in order to survive.
The Sweetest Gift
Two neighboring families in Florida, one black and one white, struggle with the problems of race, poverty, prejudice, and absent fathers, as their children become friends over the course of one summer and fall.
Marcus Garvey: Look for Me in the Whirlwind
Marcus Garvey: Look for me in the Whirlwind uses a wealth of archival film, photographs and documents to uncover the story of this Jamaican immigrant, who between 1916 and 1921 built the largest black mass movement in world history. It explores Garvey’s dramatic successes and failures before his fall into obscurity. Among the film’s most powerful sequences are interviews with people who were part of the Garvey movement decades ago. These interviews communicate the appeal of Garvey’s revolutionary ideas to a generation of African Americans, and reveal how he invested hundreds and thousands of black men and women with a newfound sense of pride.
Christmas in Canaan
Set in the 1960s, Christmas in Canaan is a drama about a black family and a white family that learn to love each other out of their Christian beliefs.
The relationship between Lelia, a light-skinned black woman, and Tony, a white man is put in jeopardy when Tony meets Lelia’s darker-skinned jazz singer brother, Hugh, and discovers that her racial heritage is not what he thought it was.
Shadows
A unique, carefully handpicked, selection of the best movies like Shadows Starring Ben Carruthers, Lelia Goldoni, Hugh Hurd, Anthony Ray, and more. If you liked Shadows then you may also like: Within Our Gates, Nothing But a Man, Once Upon a Time... When We Were Colored, One Potato, Two Potato, The Josephine Baker Story and many more popular movies featured on this list. You can further filter the list even more or get a random selection from the list of similar movies, to make your selection even easier.
Within Our Gates
Abandoned by her fiancé, an educated black woman with a traumatizing past dedicates herself to helping a near bankrupt school for impoverished black children.