Best movies like The Magic Box

Lucia and Elena are best friends since childhood. They take a car trip from Paris to the country. Their conversations are overtly intimate, but more revealing is their tacit understanding of each others' personality and desires.

Based on a novel by Mordecai Richler, allegedly his autobiography, it tells the story of a Jewish writer, from his life as a young boy in Montreal to his more complicated grown-up life.

A filmmaker recalls his childhood, when he fell in love with the movies at his village's theater and formed a deep friendship with the theater's projectionist.

Norwegian immigrant Marta Hanson keeps a firm but loving hand on her household of four children, a devoted husband and a highly-educated lodger who reads great literature to the family every evening. Through financial crises, illnesses and the small triumphs of everyday life, Marta maintains her optimism and sense of humor, traits she passes on to her aspiring-author daughter, Katrin.

Ned is in the throes of a mid-life crisis. His work as a writer on an outrageous, semi-pornographic TV show is less than satisfying. His fifteen year old son has just told him he is gay and his eleven year old is afraid of, well pretty much everything. When his wife, Jeannie, moves her sick and embittered father from Detroit into their home in NY, it puts added stress on an already strained marriage. And when a sexy female co-worker puts the moves on Ned, the temptation sends him spiraling.

Twelve-year-old Noura dangles uncertainly in that difficult netherworld between childhood and adulthood. His growing libido has gotten him banned from the women's baths, where his mother took him when he was younger, but he's not yet old enough to participate in grown-up discussions with the men of his Tunisian village. Noura's only real friend is a troublemaker named Salih -- the village political outcast.

Although Jo Jo Dancer has achieved success as a stand-up comedian, he hasn't found happiness. After receiving severe burns in a narcotics-related incident, Jo Jo remains in a coma, and, while in this state, he looks back on his life. Drifting off into memories of his troubled childhood, Jo Jo revisits his youth, recalling his eventual rise to fame and the decadence that followed. As he considers his existence, he must decide if he wants to go on living or not.

In a dreary North London flat, the site of perpetual psychological warfare, a philosophy professor visits his family after a nine-year absence and introduces the four men - father, uncle and two brothers - to his wife.

Around the turn of the century, in England, alcoholic Uncle Willie is the bane of his family, of which his brother-in-law is the family spokesman. It is decided to let Uncle Willie buy a bicycle shop in order to impress Virginia van Stuyden, an American heiress in love with Frank. This pleases Uncle Willie's young nephew, Charles. Complications arise when stuffy lord, Sir George Probus, at whose home Virginia is staying, becomes shocked when she attends a carnival.

In New York, a struggling actress and a successful writer sing about their failed marriage from two perspectives.

Alex is going through a midlife crisis and it has become a very difficult time for him. His marriage is struggling, he's worried about his son, and his job of killing people for his family has become the most stressful part of his life. He seeks the help of a therapist and meets a woman in the waiting room that he connects with.

The story is about a married couplewith children on the verge of divorce. Their imminent divorce, like many, is due to their mutual lack of respect and compassion for each other and the effect it has on their children. When the family makes a traumatic move to New Orleans they move into an old, Victorian home. There, in the attic, the children think they have found the "magic" to solve their parent's problems. The children accidentally manage to switch the souls of their parents. Now the wife must face the perils of the lockeroom and pressures as family breadwinner and the husband must face pregnancy and bond with his children. Newfound respect and appreciation is gained as the couple finally find out what it's like to walk in the other person's shoes.

After fifteen years of marriage, an affluent couple divorce and take up with new partners.

Summer, 1984: 30 years after Duane captained the high school football team and Jacy was homecoming queen, this Texas town near Wichita Falls prepares for its centennial. Oil prices are down, banks are failing, and Duane's $12 million in debt. His wife Karla drinks too much, his children are always in trouble, and he tom-cats around with the wives of friends. Jacy's back in town, after a mildly successful acting career, life in Italy, and the death of her son. Folks assume Duane and Jacy will resume their high school romance. And Sonny is "tired in his mind," causing worries for his safety. Can these friends find equilibrium in middle age?

Rita, a middle aged New York City homemaker, finds herself in an emotional crisis which forces her to re-examine her life, as well as her relationships with her mother, her eye doctor husband, her alienated daughter and estranged son.

So called friends at a dinner party end up acting like a dysfunctional family.

A timid, insecure popular author with an overly-attentive professor husband decide to write an erotic novel. With encouragement from her sister and a bi-sexual friend, she goes to France with the intent of doing research at an inn where a diary she had been using documented erotic encounters. Instead she finds the inn is now a cloister for singing nuns. However, a young, divorced sound engineer is also there taping the nuns. While attracted, she mostly succumbs only to new fantasies until he follows her home to New York.

An autobiographical film taken from the experiences of writer-director Rob Moretti, CRUTCH is a coming-of-age tale about a young man's struggle with family problems and substance abuse. Behind a facade of suburban middle class perfection, David's home life is falling apart. As he tries to cope with the impossible situation, the troubled and impressionable teenager falls under the spell of Kenny, a georgous, thirty-something, has-been actor turned theatre coach. When Kenny's "support" escalates into seduction, David slowly decends into an abyss of drinking and drug addition from which he must escape if he is to survive. CRUTCH is a dramatic tale of the confusion of youth and the difficulties in finding oneself.

In this documentary, the director follows the day-to-day activities of his retarded, middle-aged cousin Philly, over a three-year period.

An 18 year old on the island Djerba, Aicha, is married to Said, who works in Tunis for much of the year. Aicha breaks with tradition and decides to join Said in Tunis, weaving rugs to make money. Said asks that she give him a son, so Aicha lives under the rule of her mother-in-law.

After 17 years of marriage in American suburbia, Richard and Barbara Harmon step into the new world of divorce.

Antoine has what every young single man could wish: a promising career, true and loyal friends, and an apartment of his own. However, he's a lonely man, until he meets Clara, a beautiful and exciting woman, and deeply falls in love with her. All his loneliness turns into joy... but then he learns something that makes it all extremely complicated.

Malik has a lot on his plate when he returns home to Tunisia after living in France. He's processing his father's death, he can't come out to his mother, and his childhood anxieties have resurfaced. But all of Malik's problems seem to fade away when he falls for Bilal, the dreamy houseboy at his mother's bourgeois estate.

A suburban architect loves his wife but is bored with his marriage and with his work, so he takes up with the neglected, married beauty who lives down the street.

Nerdy-looking Paul is a neurotic, failed sitcom writer with a lackluster love life. But his best pal has an idea that might turn things around when he decides to film Paul's life and turn his romantic disasters into a comedic documentary. When a beautiful young director decides to produce the real-life romantic comedy, Paul realizes that Cupid may be poised with his bow and arrow.

Twelve-year-old Mexican-American Marcos (Jose Alcala) recalls the hardships of the previous year, reflecting on the arduous trek his migrant-worker family made from Texas to the Midwest during harvest season. Along the way, Marcos learns plenty about the harsh realities of bigotry and the power of family in America of the 1950s. The coming-of-age Chicano drama is based on Tomas Rivera's semiautobiographical 1971 novella.

Finding his only escape in music, Gil Blackwell (Josh Hamilton) decides to leave his monotonous business life in Boston when his cousin dies in a car accident. Gil ignores his father's disapproval and takes the family's antique truck for the promised land of California, but on the way a chance encounter reunites him with an old college flame, Genevieve (Fried Green Tomatoes' Mary Stuart Masterson), who joins his journey.

In a last ditch effort to save their marriage, Nick and Willa visit a renowned, yet eccentric, couples therapist and embark on a month-long journey of provocative and hilarious sex assignments.

Thirty-something Elizabeth must decide whether to salvage her disappointing relationship with Drew. Meanwhile, Bea, a worrisome teenager, reconnects with her introverted childhood friend, Andy, at their high school prom. Past and present collide as two couples explore love over the course of one night at a hotel.

Family friends Sam and Kat spend every Christmas Eve at the Children's Table. They grow up together, sharing the highs and lows of young adulthood. And at thirty, Sam realizes that Kat is the one... but he's afraid that the past will get in the way.

Suffering from depression and marital problems, Alex mistakenly orders a life-size doll, whom he names "Monique". With the help of Monique, Alex turns his life around; however she soon becomes the envy of his friends and wife.

Amel is a young photographer. When she loses her husband, her life changes. Encouraged by her father-in-law, she takes a taste of life by photographing street boys. Without fear of being scandalous, she makes the choice to look at men as men look at women.

A married woman has an affair with a suicidal lover while caring for her husband's sick relatives.

H., 35, an Arabian immigrant, works as projectionist in an old cinema. One day, drawn by the music, he looks through the window of the booth and is fascinated: the dancer he sees on the screen seems to be looking straight into his eyes. He falls in love with her, but the vision last only a moment. Shortly afterwards, an elderly man storms into the projection booth and claims he is his uncle.
 H. wants to prepare a meal for him and reaches for the oil bottle: he sees the same dancer on the label…. H begins to find echoes of his own life in the images he projects. Everything changes when fiction and reality merge...

Ever since she was a little girl, Iris has wanted to be a filmmaker. For the last five years though, she's been trapped working in reality television, directing episodes for a series that's barely able to compete with Ghost Hunters. Iris sees her big chance to prove herself when gets sent on assignment to her hometown of Black Falls, a small town harboring an abandoned insane asylum that has a dark history of excessive shock therapy. Filming inside the asylum brings back childhood memories for Iris, memories of sneaking into the asylum with her friends to shoot homemade horror movies. Little does Iris know, her life is about to imitate her art.