poverty movies

Baraka

1992 | Documentary | USA | War

Without words, cameras show us the world, with an emphasis not on "where," but on "what's there." It begins with morning, natural landscapes and people at prayer: volcanoes, water falls, veldts, and forests; several hundred monks do a monkey chant. Indigenous peoples apply body paint; whole villages dance. The film ...

Always Outnumbered

1998 | Drama | USA

An ex-con moves to L.A. to find work and creates a disturbance by fighting for a position. More importantly he touches the lives of many of his neighbors including an older man dying of cancer, a young married couple whose husband is too proud to accept a lesser position which ...

Rocky V

1990 | Action | Sport | USA

World heavyweight boxing champion Rocky Balboa returns home to Philadelphia to a hero's welcome after defeating Ivan Drago in a brutal match. Rocky soon discovers that his match with Drago has left him with damage to his brain, and his fortune, which he had entrusted to his wife Adrian's brother ...

Fiddler on the Roof

1971 | Drama | Family | Musical | USA

Film version of the stage musical, based on the stories of Sholom Aleichem. Tevye the Milkman is a Jewish peasant in pre-Revolutionary Russia, coping with the day-to-day problems of 'shtetl' life, his Jewish traditions, his family (wife and daughters), and state-sanctioned pogroms.

Torch Singer

1933 | Drama | Musical | USA

Sally Trent has an illegitimate child, but cannot support her and gives the baby up for adoption. The father, Michael Gardner, leaves for China not knowing about the baby, and she assumes he has abandoned her for life. She gets a job as a torch singer, changes her name to ...

Waterloo Bridge

1940 | Drama | Romance | USA | War

On the eve of World War II, a British officer revisits Waterloo Bridge and recalls the young man he was at the beginning of World War I and the young ballerina he met just before he left for the front. Myra stayed with him past curfew and is thrown out ...

To Kill a Mockingbird

1962 | Crime | Drama | USA

In the rural American south during the depths of the Depression, two children watch as their principled father takes a stand against intolerance.

American Crime, An

2007 | Drama | USA

Based on a true story that shocked the nation in 1965, the film recounts one of the most shocking crimes ever committed against a single victim. Sylvia and Jennie Fae Likens, the two daughters of traveling carnival workers are left for an extended stay at the Indianapolis (3850 E. New ...

New Jack City

1991 | Crime | Drama | Thriller | USA

In 1989, Nino Brown, a small time drug dealer, is convinced by one of his fellow thugs that the wave of the future is in the cocaine derivative, crack. Brown sees potential in crack and sets out to establish himself as chief kingpin by killing off his rivals and even ...

Cinderella Man

2005 | Biography | Drama | Sport | USA

During the Great Depression, a common-man hero, James J. Braddock—a.k.a. the Cinderella Man—was to become one of the most surprising sports legends in history. By the early 1930s, the impoverished ex-prizefighter was seemingly as broken-down, beaten-up and out-of-luck as much of the rest of the American populace who had hit ...

American History X

1998 | Crime | Drama | USA

A Neo Nazi skinhead, named Derek Vineyard (Edward Norton) goes to jail for 3 years after committing a murder of 2 black guys. In the meanwhile, his younger brother, Danny Vineyard (Edward Furlong) goes in the same way and makes the same mistakes (racism and hatred) his eldest brother did ...

Trading Places

1983 | Comedy | USA

Louis Winthorpe III is a successful Philadelphia commodity broker with mansion, manservant and girlfriend to match. Billy Ray Valentine is a hustling beggar. Winthorpe's employers, the elderly Duke brothers, make a bet that by switching the lifestyle of the two Billy Ray will make good and their man will take ...