Highest-Rated Movies about 'Down Syndrome'

Rain Man (1988), Adam's Apples (2005), The White Ribbon (2009), Santa Sangre (1989), I Am Sam (2001), Café de Flore (2011), Notes on a Scandal (2006), Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995) ... Let's take a look at the ranked list of the best Down Syndrome movies.

#1. Rain Man (1988)

Storyline: Charles Sanford "Charlie" Babbit is a self-centered Los Angeles-based automobile dealer/hustler/bookie who is at war with his own life. Charlie, as a young teenager, used his father's 1949 Buick convertible without permission and as a result, he went to jail for two days on account that his father reported it stolen. It is then that Charlie learns that his estranged father died and left him from his last will and testament a huge bed of roses and the car while the remainder will of $3 Million goes into a trust fund to be distributed to someone. Charlie seemed pretty angry by this and decides to look into this matter. It seems as if that "someone" is Raymond, Charlie's unknown brother, an autistic savant who lives in a world of his own, resides at the Walbrook Institute. Charlie then kidnaps Raymond and decides to take him on a lust for life trip to the west coast as a threat to get the $3 Million inheritance. Raymond's acts and nagging, including repeated talks of "Abbott & Costello",...

Plot Keywords: road movie, road accident, railway station, railroad crossing, premarital sex, photograph, motel ...

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#2. Adam's Apples (2005)

Storyline: Ivan is a priest in a rural church known for the apples that grow on a large tree in front. He's odd: seeing the world through rose-colored glasses, in denial about personal facts, and convinced he's at war with Satan. The rectory is a half-way house for recently paroled convicts. Adam arrives for 12 weeks, a large, tough neo-Nazi, first baffled by Ivan's thick-headed optimism, then angry. He vows to break Ivan's faith. Meanwhile, in exasperation at Ivan's insistence, Adam sets a personal goal: to bake an apple pie. All goes awry for the tree: crows, worms, lightening. The Book of Job gives Adam perverse insight, and his hooligan mates provide the resolution's spring.

Plot Keywords: priest, widower, religion, beating, orchard, gang, faith ...

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#3. The White Ribbon (2009)

Storyline: From July, 1913 to the outbreak of World War I, a series of incidents take place in a German village. A horse trips on a wire and throws the rider; a woman falls to her death through rotted planks; the local baron's son is hung upside down in a mill; parents slap and bully their children; a man is cruel to his long-suffering lover; another sexually abuses his daughter. People disappear. A callow teacher, who courts a nanny in the baron's household, narrates the story and tries to investigate the connections among these accidents and crimes. What is foreshadowed? Are the children holy innocents? God may be in His heaven, but all is not right with the world; the center cannot hold.

Plot Keywords: year 1914, sexual abuse, repression, fatal accident, patriarchy, patriarch, verbal abuse ...

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#4. Santa Sangre (1989)

Storyline: A young man -- starving, nearly catatonic and barely responsive -- is confined in a sanitarium. He is taken on a field trip along with other residents to the city's red-light district. There, he encounters by chance a woman from his past, triggering a series of flashbacks. We see that he was traumatized as a child, when he and his family were circus performers, and when he witnessed a murder/suicide: his father -- an American expatriate living in Mexico under suspicious circumstances -- cuts off the arms of his beloved mother, a possessive wife and religious fanatic who led a heretical church called "Santa Sangre (Holy Blood)," the members of which worshipped a martyred girl whose arms were severed by her father following her rape, and then commit suicide. Back in the present, buttressed by shock of his remembrance, he escapes the sanitarium and, in a series of hallucinations and dream-fulfillments, believes he has rejoined his armless mother. He "becomes her arms" and the "two" ...

Plot Keywords: circus, surrealism, father son relationship, violence against a child, blood, sideshow, severed arm ...

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#5. I Am Sam (2001)

Storyline: Sam Dawson has the mental capacity of a 7-year-old. He works at a Starbucks and is obsessed with the Beatles. He has a daughter with a homeless woman; she abandons them as soon as they leave the hospital. He names his daughter Lucy Diamond (after the Beatles song) and raises her. But as she reaches age 7 herself, Sam's limitations start to become a problem at school; she's intentionally holding back to avoid looking smarter than him. The authorities take her away and Sam shames high-priced lawyer Rita Harrison into taking his case pro bono. In the process, he teaches her a great deal about love and whether it's really all you need.

Plot Keywords: child custody, single father, custody battle, foster parent, father daughter relationship, f rated, kiss ...

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#6. Café de Flore (2011)

Storyline: A love story about people separated by time and place but connected in profound and mysterious ways. Atmospheric, fantastical, tragic and hopeful, the film chronicles the parallel fates of Jacqueline, a young mother with a disabled son in 1960s Paris, and Antoine, a recently divorced, successful DJ in present day Montreal. What binds the two stories together is love - euphoric, obsessive, tragic, youthful, timeless love. In 1960s Paris, a working class woman gives birth to her first child, Laurent - a Down Syndrome son. Undaunted she embraces the challenge of raising her beloved offspring as normally as one would any other child. Her husband abandons them both. She bravely brushes this additional hiccup aside as Laurent replaces her spouse as the perfect man of her dreams. As Laurent approaches school age Jacqueline's aplomb becomes obsessive and cloying. Her increasingly self-destructive attachment to her son is raised to a fever pitch when, at the age of seven, he meets a Down ...

Plot Keywords: breasts, divorced parents, divorced couple, divorcee, panties, black panties, female nudity ...

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#7. Notes on a Scandal (2006)

Storyline: The bitter, cynical and lonely Barbara Covett is a tough and conservative teacher, near to retirement, who is loathed by her colleagues and students. In the loneliness of her apartment, she spends her spare time writing her journal, taking care of her old cat Portia and missing her special friend Jennifer Dodd. When Sheba Hart joins the high-school as the new art teacher, Barbara dedicates her attention to the newcomer, writing sharp and unpleasant comments about her behavior and clothes. When Barbara helps Sheba in a difficult situation with two students, the grateful Sheba invites her to have lunch with her family. Sheba introduces her husband and former professor Richard Hart, who is about twenty years older than she; her rebellious teenager daughter Polly; and her son Ben that has Down's Syndrome. Barbara becomes close to Sheba, but when she accidentally discovers that Sheba is having an affair with the fifteen year-old student Steven Connolly, Barbara sees the chance to ...

Plot Keywords: teacher student relationship, pedophile, sex with a minor, age difference, based on novel, scandal, secret ...

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#8. Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995)

Storyline: Seventh-grade is no fun. Especially for Dawn Weiner when everyone at school calls you 'Dog-Face' or 'Wiener-Dog.' Not to mention if your older brother is 'King of the Nerds' and your younger sister is a cutesy ballerina who gets you in trouble but is your parents' favorite. And that's just the beginning--her life seems to be falling apart when she faces rejection from the older guy in her brother's band that she has a crush on, her parents want to tear down her 'Special People's Club' clubhouse, and her sister is abducted....

Plot Keywords: school, social outcast, first crush, bullying, teen angst, brother sister relationship, dysfunctional family ...

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#9. Precious (2009)

Storyline: In Harlem, 1987. Sixteen year old Claireece Jones - who goes by her middle name Precious - is illiterate and overweight. She is pregnant with her second child, both children fathered by her biological father, who has continually raped her since she was a child, but who she doesn't see otherwise. Her infant daughter, Mongo - such named since she has Down Syndrome - lives with Precious' grandmother. Precious lives with her mother Mary, who abuses Precious both physically and emotionally. Mary does nothing but smoke, watch television and collect welfare through fraud (as she doesn't ever look for a job) and believes that education does nothing for Precious, who she would rather also collect welfare if only to bring money into the household. To escape her life, Precious often daydreams of herself in glamorous situations. Because of her current pregnancy, Precious' principal transfers her into an alternative school. In dealing with the school's sympathetic teacher Miss Blu Rain, Precious ...

Plot Keywords: lesbian couple, lesbian, bad mother, teacher student relationship, female protagonist, mother daughter relationship, black american ...

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#10. Breakfast on Pluto (2005)

Storyline: A young transwoman, Patrick "Kitten" Braden, comes of age in the 1970s. She leaves her Irish town, in part to look for her mother and in part because her transgender nature is beyond the town's understanding. She's taken in by a rock band, falls for the lead singer, has brushes with the IRA, is arrested by the London police, works in a peep show, and poses as a survey researcher for the phone company. Throughout, her nationality and her nature put her at great risk. In her search for her mother, she makes surprising discoveries of friendship and family. But, will she survive?

Plot Keywords: irish, 1970s, ira, based on novel, adoption, transgender, friendship ...

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#11. The Virgin Suicides (1999)

Storyline: A man about forty years of age tells the story from when he was a teenager in upscale suburban Detroit of his and three of his friends' fascination with the mysterious and doomed Lisbon sisters. In 1974, the sisters were seventeen year old Therese, sixteen year old Mary, fifteen year old Bonnie, fourteen year old Lux, and thirteen year old Cecilia. Their fascination still remains as they try to piece together the entire story. The sisters were mysteries if only because of having a strict and overprotective upbringing by their father, who taught math at the girls' private co-ed school, and overly devout Catholic mother, who largely dictated the household rules. The story focuses primarily on two incidents and the resulting situations on the girls' lives. The first was an action by Cecilia to deal with her emotions over her life. And the second was the relationship between Lux - the sister who pushed the boundaries of the household rules most overtly in doing what most teenagers want to...

Plot Keywords: suicide, catholic, 1970s, teen suicide, gas mask, house arrest, michigan ...

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#12. Wild (2014)

Storyline: With the dissolution of her marriage and the death of her mother, Cheryl Strayed has lost all hope. After years of reckless, destructive behavior, she makes a rash decision. With absolutely no experience, driven only by sheer determination, Cheryl hikes more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, alone. Wild powerfully captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddens, strengthen, and ultimately heals her.

Plot Keywords: hiking, grief, male full frontal nudity, female rear nudity, sex standing up, based on true story, death of mother ...

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#13. Treeless Mountain (2008)

Storyline: What is the nature of childhood resilience? Sisters Jin and Bin, ages 6 and 3, live with their mother. Jin likes school and does well. One day, their mother leaves the girls with their father's sister, a woman they do not know. The mother seeks a reconciliation with their father. She leaves them a plastic piggy bank, promising to return when the bank is full. The girls scrub and clean for their aunt, a tippler who's often cranky and complaining. She gives them a few coins for their work. They earn more money catching, grilling, and selling grasshoppers. They miss their mother. The bank fills. They watch for her from a mound of dirt. Will she return? Will stoic faces give way to a smile?—<jhailey@hotmail.com>

Plot Keywords: sister sister relationship, single parent, dinner, chopsticks, down syndrome, child's point of view, singing ...

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#14. Waiting... (2005)

Storyline: It's the dinner shift at Shenanigan's. Dan, the clueless boss, assigns Mitch, 22, a trainee, to Monty, the smooth talker who chases girls for one-night stands. Dean, a waiter, also 22, feels that life is passing him by. Dan offers him the assistant manager job and gives him until midnight to decide. Other waiters, cooks, and bus boys have their issues and personalities. Bishop, the dishwasher, is their counselor. During this shift, Monty may learn something, Dean makes his decision, Dan makes a play for the not-yet-18 hostess, customers get their comeuppance, the guys all play the in-house homophobic flashing game, the gals demonstrate why they won't, and Mitch gets the last word.

Plot Keywords: waiter, waitress, male frontal nudity, restaurant, cook, dishwasher, interracial friendship ...

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#15. Palindromes (2004)

Storyline: A fable of innocence: thirteen-year-old Aviva Victor wants to be a 'mom'. She does all she can to make this happen, and comes very close to succeeding, but in the end her plan is thwarted by her sensible parents. So she runs away, still determined to get pregnant one way or another, but instead finds herself lost in another world, a less sensible one, perhaps, but one pregnant itself with all sorts of strange possibility. She takes a road trip from the suburbs of New Jersey, through Ohio to the plains of Kansas and back. Like so many trips, this one is round-trip, and it's hard to say in the end if she can ever be quite the same again, or if she can ever be anything but the same again.

Plot Keywords: morality, mother daughter relationship, suicide, teenage pregnancy, jewish, funeral, death of father ...

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