Best movies like The Old Donkey

Manchester, 1976. Tony Wilson is an ambitious but frustrated local TV news reporter looking for a way to make his mark. After witnessing a life-changing concert by a band known as the Sex Pistols, he persuades his station to televise one of their performances, and soon Manchester's punk groups are clamoring for him to manage them. Riding the wave of a musical revolution, Wilson and his friends create the legendary Factory Records label and The Hacienda club.

A Communist soldier is sent to the countryside to collect folk songs for the Communist Revolution. There he stays with a peasant family and learns that the happy songs he was sent to collect do not exist; the songs he finds are about hardship and suffering. He returns to the army, but promises to come back for the young girl, Cuiqiao, who has been spellbound by his talk of the freedom women have under Communist rule and who wants to join the Communist Army.

Lord Carlyle governs a province in India. Although he weds the beautiful Adrienne, he can't make her love him. And no wonder -- he's not only cruel, he's unfaithful. Adrienne leaves him and boards a ship with the intention of returning to England. But on the boat she meets Andrew Fabian, who is studying for the clergy. They fall in love, and he convinces her to accompany him on a pilgrimage to Damascus.

A firm of solicitors do battle with the head of the local council over a parcel of river front land, owned by the Huggett family, in order to build a lido/community center.

A doctor's sophisticated wife joins him at his remote Asian practice to try and patch up their marriage. Increasingly violent friction between local rubber plantation workers and the authorities force both parties to make decisions.

An ordinary village in Northern China, the last day of the winter vacation. Four idle, aimless adolescents gather at Zhou Zhixin's home, a friend who lives with his father, brother and nephew. Like most contemporary teenagers, these youths want to enjoy their last day of holiday and simply hang out in this place where nothing ever seems likely to happen. Their conversations are desultory and they sometimes seem to argue for argument's sake. One of them, Laowu, talks frankly with his girlfriend about how teenage love might affect their studies, while Laobao questions school's value and relevance to real life.

Sick of suburbia, Natalie and Richard Newman move to rural Vermont, where they expect the unspoiled setting and intrinsic values to rejuvenate their marriage. Natalie wants to start a family; Richard, who has grown children from a first marriage, does not. As a compromise they build a trophy house. The construction of the dreamhouse inevitably leads to a visit from the local tax assessor (lister). Enter George Lyford, a lister and farmer, who over the course of two inspections, develops a flirtation with Natalie, which results in his becoming her handyman. Description above from the Wikipedia article Nosey Parker, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.

Quietly competent young Joanna moves with her scatterbrain mother to a country village to take up her first job as District Nurse. She soon overcomes the suspicion of her patients used to someone rather older, while becoming romantically involved with a local farmer - at least until he tries to evict a newly-arrived expectant couple who park their caravan on his land.

The film tells the story of Bill, a young, successful stockbroker who zips off to Greenwich Village on his motorcycle when no one's looking to venture into the hippy counterculture world. His wife, Nancy, is the dream of every middle-class male. She is liberated enough to go around bra-less, enjoy sex, and be the perfect mother for their child. Nancy, however, is unaware of her husband's excursions and happily attends the local ecology awareness meetings without Bill. Bill soon becomes involved with Gordon, an Andy Warhol-type character whose protege, Roz, fascinates the square young businessman. After witnessing a wild party on Fire Island, Bill realizes that this crowd is not for him (shallow, lifeless) and that he does not even want to have sex with Roz because he is lonely for his wife. Nancy arrives unexpectedly on the island to reclaim her husband and together they walk off into the sunset hand in hand.

Communists blackmail a shipping executive into spying for them.

Jimmy Gralton returns from New York and reopens his beloved community hall, only to meet opposition from the local parish.

Mr. Dithers is trying to encourage a businessman to build a war-time manufacturing plant on land he owns while Dagwood tries to prevent the businessman from learning his daughter is involved in a local theatre production.

Pre-Cultural Revolution propaganda at its most lavish, this model opera depicts the history and evolution of the Communist Party of China under Mao Zedong from its founding in July 1921 to the establishment of "New China" in 1949. Detailed in the musical are several key events in CPC history such as the Northern Expedition, the KMT-led Shanghai massacre of 1927, the Nanchang Uprising and formation of the People's Liberation Army, the Long March and the founding of the PRC on October 1, 1949.

In 1980, Xu Jingshan, a wealthy Chinese-American businessman returns to China to find his son, Xu Lingjun, whom he had abandoned over 30 years earlier. Labeled a rightist because of his capitalist father, Lingjun has been forced to live as a humble herdsman on the grasslands. His bitter life has been transformed by a happy marriage to the wise and beautiful Xiuzhi, and more recently by his rehabilitation by the Party. When he goes to Beijing for their reunion, he discovers his father wants him to work for his chemical company in San Francisco. Lingjun tells the story of his life to his father, as he ponders his future.

Three laborers on a Northern California marijuana plantation become increasingly paranoid when they learn that their boss has been murdered. They know enough to run, taking with them enough of the crop to pay them for services rendered. Hooking up with go-between Lucy in the next town, they plot their next move.

"Fatty", a poor good hearted farm boy is deeply in love with Winifred, a farmer's daughter. A rich neighbor offers the farmer a large plot of land if Winifred marries his slow witted son Al. "Fatty" has less then one day to save heartbroken Winifred from the rushed ceremony.

In Milagro, a small town in the American Southwest, Ladd Devine plans to build a major new resort development. While activist Ruby Archuleta and lawyer/newspaper editor Charlie Bloom realize that this will result in the eventual displacement of the local Hispanic farmers, they cannot arouse much opposition because of the short term opportunities offered by construction jobs.

Based on real events, this historical drama is set in 19th-century Ireland, when poverty-stricken tenants dispossessed by greedy landowner Capt. Boycott (Cecil Parker) band together to assert their rights. Patriotic farmer Hugh Davin (Stewart Granger) leads the rebels. Choosing nonviolent resistance, the villagers ostracize their nemesis, who squanders his fortune to repair his ruined reputation and wagers what's left on a horse race.

Winifred Holtby realised that Local Government is not a dry affair of meetings and memoranda:- but 'the front-line defence thrown up by humanity against its common enemies of sickness, poverty and ignorance.' She built her story around six people working for a typical County Council:- Beneath the lives of the public servants runs the thread of their personal drama. Our story tells how a public life affects the private life; and how a man's personal sufferings make him what he is in public. " Corruption, intrigue and romance in a Yorkshire setting. A country squire whose wife is in a mental hospital becomes attracted to a crusading local schoolmistress.

The young adult life of Hong Yunsheng, nicknamed Little Brother, is seen as somewhat of a failure by those that know him. A Chinese national, he stowed away on a boat to the United States, where he worked as a dishwasher in the restaurant of a family from his hometown back in Fujian province. After two years in the States and after fathering an illegitimate child there named Fusheng, the child's mother Xuhui who is the restaurateur's daughter, he was deported back to China. Since, he has been floundering in life, which has caused a rift between himself and his older brother, who, with his wife, operate a street front diner and can't have children of their own. Little Brother relies on his new girlfriend, a woman he barely knows named Wu Ruifang who is a performer in a touring opera troupe, for emotional support. Despite Little Brother being the local poster boy for not stowing away, his friend named Monkey tried to do the same, but died on the voyage over due to exposure to toxic ..

After the relatively low box office takings of 'Intolerance', D. W. Griffith would revisit his epic film three years later by releasing two of the film's interlocking stories as standalone features, with some new additional footage. The second of these was 'The Mother and the Law', which demonstrates how crime, moral puritanism, and conflicts between ruthless capitalists and striking workers help ruin the lives of marginal Americans.

In the poor, desolate northern provinces of the mountainous feudal Sunni kingdom of Afghanistan (before the Soviet-engineered republican revolutions), the status of the proud men and their clans is determined less by wealth or even military power (both rare) then by victories in the ancient, though game of buskashi, a vicious form of polo dating back to Genghis Khan, in which the chapendaz (participating horsemen) use their horse-whips on both mounts and rivals in a ruthless fight for a heavy 'ball', a dead calf, which must be carried a long way, almost impossible with all the others mercilessly assailing. Tursen, a former champion, now holds the status of village notable thanks to his position as stable-keeper of the regional lord Osman Bey, and has finally bred a horse without equal, the white stallion Jahil, in time for the royal tournament on the plain of Bagrami, just outside the capital Kabul...

A scientist who is working on a cure for influenza is victimized by his unscrupulous boss, who releases the vaccine before it's ready, resulting in the death of the scientist's son.

Fly-on-the-wall treatment of an ordinary day in the life of a prisoner in Stalin's Gulag. Closely adapted from Solzhenitsyn's classic novel based on his own experiences. Shot entirely on location in northern Norway

Successful businessman Joe Lampton is married to the wealthy Susan, has two children, and lives in the mill town of Warley in northern England. But his career seems to have plateaued, leaving him disillusioned. This feeling is only exacerbated when he discovers his wife's infidelity with local man Mark. So he takes up with attractive TV host Norah and moves with her to London, aiming to reignite the fire that drove him to the top.

In World War II, an American Air Force pilot of the Flying Tigers was flying over Yunnan province of southern China on a special mission, carrying vital information. He was shot down and captured by Japanese invasion forces. A small rescue party of American GIs teamed up with resistance guerrilla fighters in the minority tribes of the south. The GIs and local guerrilla together conducted an International Rescue of the pilot and his information vital to the war effort.

When a driven doctor doesn't get the prestigious position she planned for, she unexpectedly finds herself moving to a remote Alaskan town. While she meets the locals and even starts a new romance, she has to learn to let the life she planned for give way to a love she never could have imagined, and finds this festive small town is hiding one big holiday secret.

A very incisive and hard-hitting documentary about the way in which life for farmers and other people who depend on the countryside for their livelihood is changing for the worse as a result of the decline in home-grown food and the banning of fox-hunting. Farmers are having to kill calves which it is uneconomical to keep, paying token amounts to the local fox-hunt as unofficial knackers to dispose of the carcases for feeding to the fox-hounds. Why should society seem to care so much about the fate of hunted foxes and yet apparently so little about what happens to unwanted cattle which are cross-breed or the wrong sex? There is great resentment (as typified by the Countryside Alliance marches in London) to changes that are being imposed by a government that people in the country feel is neglecting their wishes in preference to those of the city-dwellers.

Beate is an ambitious executive working at Europa, a mysterious corporation looking to expand into the Balkans region. Seemingly promoting philanthropy and investment in underdeveloped areas, Europa actually needs to buy off lands from locals in a remote valley in Southern Albania using Beate as the main negotiator for the ambiguous mission. But things don’t go as planned when she is challenged by Jetnor, a stubborn and spiritual farmer who refuses to leave the land of his ancestors.

Thirty years on from the 1984 Union Carbide plant malfunction, the consequences of which are tragically ongoing, A Prayer for Rain is the powerful and moving story of the Bhopal tragedy, one of the great corporate and environmental scandals of the last half-century. It dramatises the dependence of the local community on the chemical plant that will eventually cause catastrophe, and the series of oversights that led to an event that stands as a benchmark for corporate irresponsibility in the developing world.

Simon is an outcast from his Jewish community because he claims that the devil talks to him and he has the ability to put curses on crops. When Dovid asks the 'Squire' to sell him some land so he can build a railway station, a ruthless businessman from the neighbouring gentile community uses Simon to find out who wants to buy the land so he can 'persuade' him otherwise

In the White Deer Village in Shaanxi Province the two most important families - Bai and Lu - and their sons have always lived together in peace. But the turmoil leads to a fierce struggle for land ownership.

The film tells the story about the daughter of a Nationalist general who revisits the famous summer resort Lushan Mountain in Jiangxi province in 1980 and falls in love with the son of a senior general of the Chinese Communist Party.

Sophomore feature of Liu Miaomiao.

Bhagole and Prabhata, landless farmers, try in vain to find work in the city but return home to a village in disarray following the tiger-induced death of a local farmer. The dispute over compensation becomes heated, fueled by suicide suspicions. Rejected for work from the local brick factory, the elderly couple relies on their son, Saharsh, who secures a job with the daunting task of producing 1,000 bricks daily for the ends to meet. Amidst struggles, occasional moments of beauty offer solace, including a village play depicting Lord Vishnu's arrival, a signal of hope. After an incident at the Brick Factory threatens the family’s survival, Bhagole, driven by desperation, decides to sacrifice himself to secure his family's future. Prabhata, unwavering, joins him, and the forest, which holds 40 years of shared memories, transforms into a surreal stage for their poignant final night together.