Best movies like Valley of Hell

For young Parisian boy Antoine Doinel, life is one difficult situation after another. Surrounded by inconsiderate adults, including his neglectful parents, Antoine spends his days with his best friend, Rene, trying to plan for a better life. When one of their schemes goes awry, Antoine ends up in trouble with the law, leading to even more conflicts with unsympathetic authority figures.

Yann, a cook, and Nadia, a waitress and mother of 9-year-old child, decide to risk everything on the purchase of a restaurant. With plenty of talent, energy, love and dreams, but no finance of their own, they find themselves forced into a jungle of financing and bank loans that quickly overwhelms them. To bail them out, Nadia has to take a job in Canada, while Yann is forced to stay behind to save the restaurant. Together, he and the child confront a relentless avalanche of creditors, an uncaring system and the daily grind from which there is no respite… Yann finally understands that his only chance of salvation lies in joining his lover – as well as reuniting mother and child – by following Nadia to Canada and a better life.

An aimless young man, Johnny, is sent prison. He entrusts his beloved dog, Evie, to the care of his former lover and best friend, Frank. When he gets out of prison, he has to face difficulties at home. Added to this, is the fact that he may have to give up Evie to Frank.

Lucienne Delamare and Pierre Maury are having an affair. Lucienne's husband Paul is the mayor, and a French deputy. Pierre's wife Clotilde has been weak and sickly for years. Lucienne's husband holds no excitement for her, and he is always away in Paris on business. Pierre is now the vice-mayor, thanks to Paul. Lucienne and Pierre have a secret meeting spot by a lake along a country lane. Pierre's wife dies suddenly, by suicide the town gossips believe. Pierre confesses otherwise to Lucienne. Paul proposes a shady land deal which will "benefit the town", and wants Pierre's political support and collusion. Then Paul discovers proof of his wife's affair...

Out of prison after a five-year stretch, jewel thief Tony turns down a quick job his friend Jo offers him, until he discovers that his old girlfriend Mado has become the lover of local gangster Pierre Grutter during Tony's absence. Expanding a minor smash-and-grab into a full-scale jewel heist, Tony and his crew appear to get away clean, but their actions after the job is completed threaten the lives of everyone involved.

In 1914, in the first months of World War I, Louise Jarraud loses her husband, killed on the front. Shortly after, she gives birth to a baby, who soon dies. Devastated by this double misfortune, Louise decides to dedicate her life to caring for the children of others. She becomes a nurse with several employers, giving her affection to little boys or girls. A widower and another man propose to her but she refuses twice determined as she is to live only for the children in her charge.

Two septuagenarians go to Tuscany to prevent their old friend from killing the man who cuckolded him fifty years ago.

A retelling of Tristan and Isolde set in 1940s France.

In this revisionist drama, the film delves into the family lineage of Wyatt Williams, the character made famous by Peter Fonda in the original Easy Rider Movie. Centering around the Williams family, and their internal family struggles throughout the eras of the 40's to present day, as they struggle to connect with one another through the only way they know how. Their love of motorcycles and the freedom of the ride.

Three years after his wife, acclaimed photographer Isabelle Reed, dies in a car crash, Gene keeps everyday life going with his shy teenage son, Conrad. A planned exhibition of Isabelle’s photographs prompts Gene's older son, Jonah, to return to the house he grew up in - and for the first time in a very long time, the father and the two brothers are living under the same roof.

Class barriers threaten the budding romance of two young lovers striving to realize their artistic ambitions.

A film about the early part of the French Revolution, shown from the eyes of the citizens of Marseille, counts in German exile and, of course, the king Louis XVI, each showing their own small problems.

Elderly woman Berthe leaves her house to live with her daughter Emilie. Emilie and her brother Antoine had a falling out three years ago and have not seen each other since, but Emilie invites him for Christmas. Memories will resurface and impact both Berthe's destiny and the strange relationship between Emilie and Antoine.

Out of jail for a crime she did not commit, Madelon turns to prostitution and thievery to send her illegitimate son to medical school.

A slice of life of a group of young working class friends in a Northern French village coming to the end of their school years and embarking upon adult life. The film follows the choices and decisions made for their futures.

During a family reunion in 2000, guests decide to read out laud their "Where I See Myself in 10 Years" wish lists which they wrote down during their 1990 family reunion.

At Baycrest, an old-age home in Toronto, we follow a social worker as she talks to residents, particularly Max, Claire, Ida, and Rachel. The film opens on Claire's birthday, she's 89; Max, a tiny cheerful man, is her close friend. Rachel is lonesome, missing her son, complaining he rarely visits. Ida relies on memory for her solace. Helen has no memory and doesn't recognize her daughter; her moods swing. Murray keeps his cap on and likes women. Staff members bring medication, provide care, and offer small talk. Memory is fleeting: Claire re-experiences the death of a close companion several times, each time without remembering her previous grieving. Lives are circumscribed

Floyd, the owner of a bar on the Texas coast, has been depressed for a year after his wife disappeared in a swimming accident. He lives with his senile father-in-law "The General" and is helped by Jimmy, a former asylum inmate, and the good-natured Louise. The bar is rapidly losing money and Charlie wants to buy it cheaply before it becomes publicly known that a nearby bridge is to be built. Louise offers her savings to go into partnership with Floyd, but Floyd decides to sell when he is forced to pay his back taxes.

Nicholas is the eldest son of a wealthy suburban family, whose businesswoman mother makes deals from a helicopter and has an affair with her business partner. His cheerful, alcoholic father, on the other hand, is reduced to a prisoner in his room with his devoted dog and electric train set. Unbeknownst to his parents, Nicholas works as a window cleaner and dish washer in a Parisian cafe. He is also in love with the daughter of another cafe's owner, who, however, has an abusive boyfriend. One night, Nicholas sneaks a few drunken drifters into his family wine cellar and his father unexpectedly takes a liking to the stranger.

On the island of Jersey, off the French coast, Mélanie, a beautiful woman gifted with a captivating personality, enjoys having unimportant love affairs that her husband Victor, a perfumer older than her, seems to endure with total indifference.

In The Family I Had, a mother recalls how her brilliant teenage son came to shatter their idyllic family through one horribly violent and shocking act. Now, left to pick up the pieces, the survivors test the boundaries of their newly defined reality in this moving true crime exploration of the nature and limits of familial love.

Ombline, a 20-year-old woman, is sent to prison for three years after committing a violent assault on a police officer. Just when she has lost all hope for the future, she discovers that she is pregnant. The law allows her to rear her newborn for the first 18 months of its life, after which time the child must be given up and placed into state care. Ombline has no intention of surrendering her beloved little boy and is prepared to do anything to convince the authorities that she is capable of rearing the child after she has left prison. As her maternal instincts assert themselves, the young woman finds she has a cause worth fighting for, and an opportunity to rebuild her shattered life…

For more than 15 years, two Marseille friends and criminals battle the law, rival gangs, prison authorities and even mined beaches in order to survive.

Fanny and Jean have everything, they are the ideal couple: fulfilled in their professional lives, they live in a magnificent apartment in the high-end districts of Paris and seem to be as in love as the first day they met. But when Fanny crosses, by chance, Alain, a former high school friend, she is immediately hooked. They see each other again, and, very quickly, get closer and closer…

Paul is a sweet man-child, raised — and smothered — by his two eccentric aunts in Paris since the death of his parents when he was a toddler. Now thirty-three, he still does not speak. Paul's aunts have only one dream for him: to win piano competitions. Although Paul practices dutifully, he remains unfulfilled until he submits to the interventions of his upstairs neighbour. Suitably named after the novelist, Madame Proust offers Paul a concoction that unlocks repressed memories from his childhood and awakens the most delightful of fantasies.

In the tenement slums of Paris between the world wars, impoverished street singer Albert yearns for beautiful Romanian immigrant Pola. Pola's boyfriend, local hoodlum Fred, grows jealous of Albert's constant attention to his woman and frames the hapless musician for one of his own petty crimes. But while Albert is in prison for Fred's misdeed, Pola ends up falling for Albert's faithful best friend, Louis.

Director André Téchiné brings his usual obsessions -- including a preoccupation with the fortunes of the bourgeoisie -- to this episodic drama, which serves as a thinly-veiled portrait of France's economic peaks and valleys from the 1930s through the 1970s. Jeanne Moreau stars as Berthe Pedret, a simple laundry woman who marries Hector (Michael Auclair), son of a wealthy, upper class, Spanish immigrant family that owns a successful farm machinery factory. Through a series of vignettes, Techine depicts the passage of years, during which the ambitious working class woman blooms through several bold moves, such as negotiating a workers' strike settlement and using her alliance with the war-time French Resistance movement to increase the enterprise's prestige.

A man becomes the lover of his former persecutor's wife.

Set in 1899 Paris, a young police sergeant is chosen to infiltrate a group of anarchists, an opportunity he sees to rise through the ranks. However, he soon finds himself becoming attached to the group.

Nora, a cleaning lady in her fifties, looks after her small family in a housing estate in the northern part of Marseille. She is worried about her grandson Ellyes, who has been in prison for several months for robbery and is awaiting his trial with a mixture of hope and anxiety. Nora does everything she can to make this wait as painless as possible.

Gilles Lantier, a young reporter on the AFP newspaper, is suffering from a nervous breakdown. Realising that neither his friend Jean nor his girlfriend Eloïse can help him, he decides to stay with his sister Odile, who lives near Limoges. At a party one evening he meets a wealthy bourgeois woman named Nathalie Sylvener. It is love at first sight, and on his return to Paris, Gilles tells Eloïse that he is now devotedly attached to another woman. Although Nathalie agrees to live with him in Paris, she rejects Gilles' offer of marriage. It is not long before the couple have settled into a routine and their passion begins to cool. Then Nathalie suddenly disappears from Gilles' life...

Medical intern Robert Morley is distraught after his wife dies in childbirth. He's resentful of his new son and wants nothing to do with him. He leaves the child with his aunt and uncle and heads off to Europe to pursue his medical studies. Morley returns to his hometown six years later, now a successful doctor and engaged to be married to a beautiful socialite. He also feels differently about the boy and attempts to gain custody from his aunt and uncle.

François Cardinaud is one of the richest shipowners in the region. But this success arouses resentment and jealousy. When Marthe, his wife, leaves the home without warning, Cardinaud sees her life cracking little by little.

A man from a wealthy family falls in love with a florist, but the lover has to go to war and to leave his darling crying... and giving birth to a child.

Vincenzo, a railwayman who works on the Rome-to-Paris line, has a wife in Italy and a mistress in France: Ginette, a widow with a four-year-old daughter. When he's offered a job in Paris he decides to move, but unfortunately his wife and petulant brother-in-law insist on accompanying him to Paris, and he must decide between the two women in his life.