Best movies like Woman With a Past

After getting into a car accident while drunk on the day of her sister's wedding, Gwen Cummings is given a choice between prison or a rehab center. She chooses rehab, but is extremely resistant to taking part in any of the treatment programs they have to offer, refusing to admit that she has an alcohol addiction.

Joan is loved by a young man of the village and they are married. In a few weeks the husband, a soldier, is sent to the war-front along with his three brothers. Word is received that her husband has been killed in battle and Joan's first impulse is suicide by she is pregnant and her prospective motherhood makes her realize her new responsibility. The military authorities start a movement to get the young women of the country to marry departing soldiers, so that the empire may have another generation of fighting men. Word is received that the King is to pass through their village and Joan organizes the women in a general protest against the war. She leads them all, dressed in black, in a long procession to meet the Monarch. The soldiers threaten to shoot her unless she turns the women back, buy Joan comes face-to-face with the ruler and kills herself, as her message from the women that they refuse to make another generation victims of a ruthless militarism.

Chris Anderson and his wife Pam live a fairly normal life until Chris loses his job on the police force and secretly turns to robbing banks to make his wife's dreams come true. Upon discovering his secret, she joins his deadly crime wave and together they terrorize an unsuspecting suburban town.

When Chance (Brian Presley) returns home after five years in jail, he is determined to escape his past, start a new life and make peace with his father, (Ed Harris, Golden Globe® winner), who is the head of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang and serving a life sentence for murder. Upon his release, his dreams of a crime-free future begin to disintegrate when he is forced to assume his best friend's outrageous debt to a local mobster. Despite being thrust back into a world of organized fighting, drug dealing and ties to corrupt police agents, Chance falls in love with Pearl (Academy Award® nominee Taraji P. Henson) and the prospect of living a normal life seems almost within reach. But will he be able to escape the crimes of his father and his past?

Her goldfish dead, her lover exposed as a rat, Shawn Holloway leaves her bank post and goes to the roof intent on suicide. Before she can leap, she's taken hostage by Charlie Anders, a fleeing bank robber. He and his partners have stolen a million in cash and plan to escape to Venezuela. Shawn agrees to cooperate if Charlie promises to kill her once he's in the clear. Parts of the plan go awry, so Charlie has time to try to pierce her bleak manner and self pity, and she has time for reflection. As night falls, their interlude ends: they're each alone, Charlie facing prison as the police close in, and Shawn staring down at a river from atop a high bridge.

Ralph and Annabell Willart are a feuding couple who are constantly bickering over their worthless, good-for-nothing son Berry-Berry. When Berry-Berry begins yet another meaningless love affair, this time with an older woman named Echo O’Brien, he really gets his parents at each others’ throats.

A couple who can't stop fighting embark on a last-ditch effort to save their marriage: turning their fights into songs and starting a band.

A bitter young man sets out to get back at the gangsters who murdered his father.

Longinotto's documentary is about Brenda Myers-Powell, who fights against sexual exploitation and supports prostitutes in Chicago. Brenda knows what she is talking about: her own story, involving teenage prostitution and a life of violence and abuse, is in stark contrast to her dauntless energy and optimism.

A minister dispenses justice on three convicts who take his family hostage.

Locked up for a minor crime, 19 year old JR quickly learns the harsh realities of prison life. Protection, if you can get it, is paramount. JR soon finds himself under the watchful eye of Australia's most notorious criminal, Brendan Lynch, but protection comes at a price.

A young street artist in East Los Angeles is caught between his father's obsession with lowrider car culture, his ex-felon brother and his need for self-expression.

Eddie Macon is running from a nightmare... running to a dream... running for his life and his time is running out. He's escaped a Texas prison for the second time (risking life imprisonment if caught) to make it back to his wife and son. Relentlessly pursued by ruthless truant officer, Carl Marzack, who feels he must prove he can still 'get his man' by returning Macon to jail at any cost.

Young Jeremiah lives in a stable environment with loving foster parents until the day his troubled mother, Sarah, returns to claim him. Jeremiah becomes swept up in his mother's dangerous world of drugs, seedy hotels, strip joints and revolving lovers. Salvation comes in the form of the boy's ultrareligious grandparents, but soon Jeremiah's mother returns. Maternal love binds the pair together on the road until Sarah's desperate and depraved lifestyle finally consumes her.

Fact-based story about a tracker who searches for a little girl who was lost in the desert, but suffers internally because her own children were kidnapped by her ex-husband.

An educated, upscale young black musician marries a woman from a lower socioeconomic class to get her out of the clutches of her stepfather.

Elijah has been bounced from group home to group home throughout his turbulent young life. What has sustained him is his art. After a promised scholarship is taken away, Elijah ends up in a fight that result in the death of another boy. Now, sentenced to a minimum of fifteen years, the young man must find a way to keep his soul alive behind bars or turn into a hardened bitter criminal.

A recent widow invites her husband's troubled best friend to live with her and her two children. As he gradually turns his life around, he helps the family cope and confront their loss.

A drama set in the 1920s, where free-spirited Janie Crawford's search for happiness leads her through several different marriages, challenging the morals of her small town. Based on the novel by Zora Neale Hurston.

Termini Station is a Canadian made drama, released in 1989 and directed by Allan King. The film stars Colleen Dewhurst and Megan Follows as Molly and Micheline Dushane, a mother and daughter living in a small Northern Ontario town. Molly is an alcoholic, which creates tension between her and Micheline and inspires Micheline's fantasies of escaping her stifling small-town life. The cast also includes Gordon Clapp and Debra McGrath as Molly's son and daughter-in-law. Termini Station was the only film besides the Anne of Green Gables movies in which Follows and Dewhurst worked together. The film was nominated for six awards at the 11th Genie Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actress nods for both Dewhurst and Follows. Filmed on location in Kirkland Lake Ontario.

Fox Rich, indomitable matriarch and modern-day abolitionist, strives to keep her family together while fighting for the release of her incarcerated husband. An intimate, epic, and unconventional love story, filmed over two decades.

Overeducated and underemployed, 28 year old Megan is in the throes of a quarterlife crisis. Squarely into adulthood with no career prospects, no particular motivation to think about her future and no one to relate to, Megan is comfortable lagging a few steps behind - while her friends check off milestones and celebrate their new grown-up status. When her high-school sweetheart proposes, Megan panics and- given an unexpected opportunity to escape for a week - hides out in the home of her new friend, 16-year old Annika and Annika's world-weary single dad Craig.

A divorced couple's teen-age daughter stands trial for stabbing her mother's latest lover.

Chronicling one story of courage born out of the highly mediatized and controversial Prop 8 2008 election results in California. A Californian married gay couple and their two adopted children fight back against discrimination, ignorance and hate through home videos posted on their YouTube channel, Gay Family Values. As they pursue their American Dream, the opposing political, social and religious opinions that pervade society attempt to strip it from them.

Victoria marries David, the man of her dreams. After a number of years and two children, the marriage turns out not to be what she had expected. Then she discovers her faith, and everything turns out for the best. In several scenes Victoria has visions of love and marriage throughout history: she appears in the Stone Age, with a tribe of Amazonians, in the Middle Ages and in the Roman era.

Childhood friends Diana, Neville and David are caught in a love triangle as adults. Diana and Neville have long been smitten with each other, but her father disapproves of the relationship, resulting in her eventual marriage to David. It's not long after their wedding, however, that tragedy strikes, sending Diana on a downward spiral. When Neville reappears in her life, will he be able to save her from her own misery?

In Czarist Russia, attractive Anna Ivanovna has consecrated her life to work among Russia's persecuted poor. She dispenses food, medicine, and funds to the needy, from a busy charity headquarters. Two men, separate in station, are in love with Ivanovna: Poor doctor Paul helps as much as he can, and wealthy merchant Serge donates money. The relentless and lascivious Chief of Police, also attracted by Ivanova's beauty and virtue, determines to possess her, and sentences all three to fifteen years in Siberia and East Russia on false charges.

In the back streets of a tourist town in present-day Southeast Asia, we find a filthy cinder block room; a bed with soiled sheets; a little girl waits for the next man. Alex (Dermot Mulroney), a human trafficking investigator, plays the role of her next customer as he negotiates with the pimp for the use of the child. Claire (Mira Sorvino), Alex's wife, is caught up in the flow of her new life in Southeast Asia and her role as a volunteer in an aftercare shelter for rescued girls where lives of local neighborhood girl's freedoms and dignity are threatened. Parallel story lines intertwine and unfold twists against the backdrop of the dangerous human trafficking world, in a story of struggle, life, hope and redemption in the "TRADE of INNOCENTS."

Fifteen-year-old Deena Marten wants the same freedom every teenager craves. But when she can't have her way, her rebellious temperament erupts in violence. Her parents, Cynthia and Todd, fear her new boyfriend, Garret, 17, is the cause. Distraught, Stephanie turns to alcohol, and Todd escapes in his work. They're unaware their Boy Scout son Adam, 13, sips from a vodka bottle hidden in his bedroom. And the problems in this dysfunctional family continue to worsen.

When his drinking problem takes control of his life, a father tries to leave the bottle behind while putting his and his family's lives back together.

In Oregon, two sheriff deputies arrest three teenagers for robbery but are overpowered and taken hostage while forest fires rage all around them.

Three novels - three dramatic stories in the walls of the women's prison. The first story - a brand new, first went to prison inmates. The second - about a mother whose son has ceased to go to prison for visits. The third - about the experiences of women on the eve of its release.

A young woman is on trial for murder. In flashback, we learn of her struggles to overcome poverty as a teenager -- a mistaken arrest and prison term for shoplifting and lack of employment lead to involvement with gangsters. In a brothel, she meets a young lawyer, scion of a wealthy and prestigious family, who falls for her and helps her turn around her life. But her past catches up with her, and she must face the music rather than cause him scandal.

Brooke's marital life with Eric takes a downturn when she starts suspecting that her husband is starving his son from a prior marriage to death in order to claim his inheritance.