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Movies that feel like Bad Education (2004)

If you loved Bad Education, the closest films we have are Talk to Her (2002), Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) and 21 (2008). All three share Bad Education's contemplative and warm feel, which is what we rank on before quality. 5 of the 12 picks below are included with a subscription right now on Paramount Plus Premium, Criterion Channel and Hoopla and others, checked against today's data.

When an old friend brings filmmaker Enrique Goded a semi-autobiographical script chronicling their adolescence, Enrique is forced to relive his youth spent at a Catholic boarding school. Weaving through past and present, the script follows a transvestite performer who reconnects with a grade school sweetheart. Spurred on by this chance encounter, the character reflects on her childhood sexual victimization and the trauma of closeting her sexual orientation.

🍅 88% Rotten Tomatoes7.4 IMDb ↗TMDB ↗dir. Pedro Almodóvarcontemplativegrittywarm

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If Bad Education hit the spot, these will too

Talk to Her poster
Talk to Her
2002 · dir. Pedro Almodóvar
🍅 91%7.9drama · romance

Both are Pedro Almodóvar's work, and they rhyme

The difference: Not nearly as gritty as Bad Education

Two men share an odd friendship while they care for two women who are both in deep comas.

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Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown poster
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
1988 · dir. Pedro Almodóvar
🍅 94%7.5comedy · drama

Pedro Almodóvar working the same nerve twice

The difference: None of the grit Bad Education is built on

After being dumped by her lover, Pepa finds her life and the lives of those around her spiraling out of control in a deliciously chaotic series of events.

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21 poster
21
2008 · dir. Robert Luketic
🍅 36%6.8drama · crime

Common ground: friendship

The difference: Reviewed a good deal more coolly

Ben Campbell is a young, highly intelligent student at M.I.T. who strives to succeed. Wanting a scholarship to transfer to Harvard School of Medicine to become a doctor, Ben learns that he cannot afford the $300,000 tuition as he comes from a poor, working-class background. But one evening, Ben is introduced by his unorthodox math professor to a small but secretive club of five students, Jill, Choi, Kianna, and Fisher, who are being trained by Professor Rosa to count cards at blackjack.

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Trainspotting poster
Trainspotting
1996 · dir. Danny Boyle
🍅 93%8.1drama · crime

One thread runs through both: drug abuse

Heroin addict Mark Renton stumbles through bad ideas and sobriety attempts with his unreliable friends --Sick Boy, Begbie, Spud and Tommy. He also has an underage girlfriend, Diane, along for the ride. After cleaning up and moving from Edinburgh to London, Mark finds he can't escape the life he left behind as Begbie and Sick Boy come knocking.

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Pain and Glory poster
Pain and Glory
2019 · dir. Pedro Almodóvar
🍅 96%7.5drama

Madrid shapes both of them

Salvador Mallo, a filmmaker in the twilight of his career, remembers his life: his mother, his lovers, the actors he worked with. The sixties in a small village in Valencia, the eighties in Madrid, the present, when he feels an immeasurable emptiness, facing his mortality, the incapability of continuing filming, the impossibility of separating creation from his own life. The need of narrating his past can be his salvation.

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The Yards poster
The Yards
2000 · dir. James Gray
🍅 64%6.4crime · drama · thriller

Contemplative where it counts, gritty underneath

The difference: Sits closer to thriller than Bad Education does

In the rail yards of Queens, contractors repair and rebuild the city's subway cars. These contracts are lucrative, so graft and corruption are rife. When Leo Handler gets out of prison, he finds his aunt married to Frank Olchin, one of the big contractors; he's battling with a minority-owned firm for contracts.

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All About My Mother poster
All About My Mother
1999 · dir. Pedro Almodóvar
🍅 98%7.8comedy · drama

Common ground in both: transvestism and transsexuality

Following the tragic death of her teenage son, Manuela travels from Madrid to Barcelona in an attempt to contact the long-estranged father the boy never knew. She reunites with an old friend, an outspoken transgender sex worker, and befriends a troubled actress and a pregnant, HIV-positive nun.

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Wendy and Lucy poster
Wendy and Lucy
2008 · dir. Kelly Reichardt
🍅 85%7.1drama

The same preoccupation in both: friendship

A near-penniless drifter's journey to Alaska in search of work is interrupted when she loses her dog while attempting to shoplift food for it.

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In a Better World poster
In a Better World
2010 · dir. Susanne Bier
🍅 77%7.6drama

Warm drama, and it commits to that

The lives of two Danish families cross each other, and an extraordinary but risky friendship comes into bud. But loneliness, frailty and sorrow lie in wait.

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Shane poster
Shane
1953 · dir. George Stevens
🍅 97%7.6drama · western

Contemplative crime in both cases

The difference: 51 years apart, and the 1950s show

A weary gunfighter attempts to settle down with a homestead family, but a smouldering settler and rancher conflict forces him to act.

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Ernest & Celestine poster
Ernest & Celestine
2012 · dir. Stéphane Aubier
🍅 98%7.8animation · family · crime

Drama with a pulse of grit, in both cases

Celestine is a little mouse trying to avoid a dental career while Ernest is a big bear craving an artistic outlet. When Celestine meets Ernest, they overcome their natural enmity by forging a life of crime together.

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Close-Up poster
Close-Up
1990 · dir. Abbas Kiarostami
🍅 89%8.2crime · drama

Both are built on the same subject: movie business

This fiction-documentary hybrid uses a sensational real-life event—the arrest of a young man on charges that he fraudulently impersonated the well-known filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf—as the basis for a stunning, multilayered investigation into movies, identity, artistic creation, and existence, in which the real people from the case play themselves.

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The best-reviewed films that share Bad Education’s defining feeling.