Best movies like The Tenants

A hard-living dockworker finds religion until his brother is murdered.

By the start of World War II, Paul Robeson had given up his lucrative mainstream work to participate in more socially progressive film and stage productions. Robeson committed his support to Paul Strand and Leo Hurwitz’s political semidocumentary Native Land. With Robeson’s narration and songs, this beautifully shot and edited film exposes violations of Americans’ civil liberties and is a call to action for exploited workers around the country. Scarcely shown since its debut, Native Land represents Robeson’s shift from narrative cinema to the leftist documentaries that would define the final chapter of his controversial film career.

When workers at the Hormel meatpacking plant in Austin, Minnesota are asked to take a substantial pay cut in a highly profitable year, the local labor union decides to go on strike and fight for a wage they believe is fair. But as the work stoppage drags on and the strikers face losing everything, friends become enemies, families are divided and the very future of this typical mid American town is threatened.

Fed up with mistreatment at the hands of both management and union brass, and coupled with financial hardships on each man's end, three auto assembly line workers hatch a plan to rob a safe at union headquarters.

Maya is a quick-witted young woman who comes over the Mexican border without papers and makes her way to the LA home of her older sister Rosa. Rosa gets Maya a job as a janitor: a non-union janitorial service has the contract, the foul-mouthed supervisor can fire workers on a whim, and the service-workers' union has assigned organizer Sam Shapiro to bring its "justice for janitors" campaign to the building. Sam finds Maya a willing listener, she's also attracted to him. Rosa resists, she has an ailing husband to consider. The workers try for public support; management intimidates workers to divide and conquer. Rosa and Maya as well as workers and management may be set to collide.

Sharecropper's son Marvin tries to help his community overcome poverty and ignorance.

Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, 1876. A secret society of Irish coal miners, bond by a sacred oath, put pressure on the greedy and ruthless company they work for by sabotaging mining facilities in the hope of improving their working conditions and the lives of their families.

Filmed in the coal country of West Virginia, "Matewan" celebrates labor organizing in the context of a 1920s work stoppage. Union organizer, Joe Kenehan, a scab named "Few Clothes" Johnson and a sympathetic mayor and police chief heroically fight the power represented by a coal company and Matewan's vested interests so that justice and workers' rights need not take a back seat to squalid working conditions, exploitation and the bottom line.

Johnny Kovak joins the Teamsters trade-union in a local chapter in the 1930s and works his way up in the organization. As he climbs higher and higher his methods become more ruthless and finally senator Madison starts a campaign to find the truth about the alleged connections with the Mob.

At New Mexico's Empire Zinc mine, Mexican-American workers protest the unsafe work conditions and unequal wages compared to their Anglo counterparts. Ramon Quintero helps organize the strike, but he is shown to be a hypocrite by treating his pregnant wife, Esperanza, with a similar unfairness. When an injunction stops the men from protesting, however, the gender roles are reversed, and women find themselves on the picket lines while the men stay at home.

It’s 2017 in Bisbee, Arizona, an old copper-mining town just miles from the Mexican border. The town’s close-knit community prepares to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Bisbee’s darkest hour: the infamous Bisbee Deportation of 1917, during which 1,200 striking miners were violently taken from their homes, banished to the middle of the desert, and left to die. Townspeople confront this violent, misunderstood past by staging dramatic recreations of the escalating strike. These dramatized scenes are based on subjective versions of the story and “directed,” in a sense, by residents with conflicting views of the event. Deeply personal segments torn from family history build toward a massive restaging of the deportation itself on the exact day of its 100th anniversary.

Naive Stanley Windrush returns from the war, his mind set on a successful career in business. Much to his own dismay, he soon finds he has to start from the bottom and work his way up, and also that the management as well as the trade union use him as a tool in their fight for power.

A black laborer turns preacher after accidentally killing a man.

This film documents the coal miners' strike against the Brookside Mine of the Eastover Mining Company in Harlan County, Kentucky in June, 1973. Eastovers refusal to sign a contract (when the miners joined with the United Mine Workers of America) led to the strike, which lasted more than a year and included violent battles between gun-toting company thugs/scabs and the picketing miners and their supportive women-folk. Director Barbara Kopple puts the strike into perspective by giving us some background on the historical plight of the miners and some history of the UMWA.

An Iowa pajama factory worker falls in love with an affable superintendent who had been hired by the factory's boss to help oppose the workers' demand for a pay raise.

In the 1920s, the rights of American workers to join a labor union was still considered an open question, and African-Americans were routinely denied their civil and economic rights. 10,000 Black Men Named George, the title, refers to the fact Pullman porters were often called "George" by white passengers, which was considered a racial slur.

The film is a stark and graphic portrayal of the conditions that existed at the State Prison for the Criminally Insane at Bridgewater, Massachusetts. TITICUT FOLLIES documents the various ways the inmates are treated by the guards, social workers and psychiatrists.

Three working-class Manila women — Stella, Ailing and Choleng — are hired as paid mourners at a traditional Chinese funeral.

A new inmate at a juvenile reformatory tries to organize a mass breakout.

A grade school English teacher Sarah Gonzales joins the 150,000 Pinoy OFWs working in the United Kingdom to support her Husband, Teddy Gonzales in making a better living for their family. More than just a chronicle of the Filipinos experience working as nurses and caregivers in the UK, this story also charts Sarah's journey to self-discovery from a submissive wife who makes sacrifices for her Husband; Teddy's aspirations to an empowered woman who finds dignity and pride in a humbling job as a Caregiver in London.

This 1959 film-noir take on "Othello," filmed in Puerto Rico, stars Mari Blanchard as flirtatious Jean, who marries an older man, plantation owner Don Luis, for financial security and finds herself falling for his virile foster son, Carlos. Fearing that Jean will inherit Luis's money, his greedy cousin, Miguel, poisons the bridegroom against his new wife, informing him about her passion for another.

A young woman nabbed in a drug bust chooses to work on a sugarcane plantation with other convicts instead of going to jail.

Oro, Plata, Mata follows two aristocratic families in Negros during World War II. It is structured in three parts: Oro a life of luxury and comfort in the city, Plata a still-luxurious time of refuge in a provincial hacienda, and finally Mata a toilsome retreat deeper into the mountains.

A Kentucky woman whose mine-worker husband is nearly killed in a cave-in, and whose father is slowly dying of black lung disease, joins the picket lines for a long, violent strike.

A look at the lives of migratory farm workers, focusing on one family.

In this movie, the abuwak race is being threatened by extinction. The only way they can grow in numbers again is through the rare ability that only the soon-to-be queen of the abuwaks, Hasmin (Lovi Poe) possesses.

Crusading newspaperman Cliff Roberts masquerades as a prison guard to document inhuman conditions.

True story of a CAFGU.

A biography of the civil-rights activist and labor organizer Cesar Chavez. Chronicling the birth of a modern American labour movement, Cesar Chavez tells the story of the famed civil rights leader and labour organiser torn between his duties as a husband and father and his commitment to securing a living wage for farm workers. Passionate but soft-spoken, Chavez embraced non-violence as he battled greed and prejudice in his struggle to bring dignity to working people.

Director William A. Wellman adds another to his long line of salutes-to-aviation films in this bio of an aviation pioneer, John Montgomery (Glenn Ford.) In 1883 he built a practical glider despite the opposition of his friends, who thought he was crazy, and of his family, who were afraid that his dreams of flying would hurt his father's political ambitions. He pursues his education at Santa Clara University where the Jesuits lend a helping and understanding hand. An earthquake destroys what appears to be a working model for an airplane, but a gold-sorting machine Montgomery invented, and then neglected, promises to provide for his financial needs to keep working on his aircraft until he gets involved in costly lawsuits defending his invention.

Real Time is a comedic drama about a compulsive gambler given one hour to live by the man hired to kill him.

A nun who acts as a counselor in a home for unwed mother undergoes political awakening when her friend and namesake belonging to the same congregation as hers inspires her to get involved in the struggle for justice and freedom of striking workers in a cooking oil company.

A poor farmer's daughter dreams to go to college and become a doctor; to make this possible, her father mortgages his farm to a rich land owner. The girl finishes college and becomes and takes back her father's land.

"MN" stands for Marissa Navarro, a character played onscreen by screen legend Carmen Rosales. It tells of a story of Marissa, a strict, heartless, domineering and fiery heiress and daughter of a wealthy landowner, who instills and sows fear among its populace.

Chuck and Greg's father works as a security guard for a company that is closing down in December 1996. On his final shift, he sets out to record any paranormal activity he encounters during the night.