The 400 Blows (1959), Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), Night Is My Future (1947), Sleepers (1996), Song for a Raggy Boy (2003), Kongen av Bastøy - The King of Devil's Island (2010), Adoption (1975) ... Let's take a look at the ranked list of the best Reform School movies.
Storyline: Seemingly in constant trouble at school, 14-year-old Antoine Doinel returns at the end of every day to a drab, unhappy home life. His parents have little money and he sleeps on a couch that's been pushed into the kitchen. His parents bicker constantly and he knows his mother is having an affair. He decides to skip school and begins a downward spiral of lies and theft. His parents are at their wits' end, and after he's stopped by the police, they decide the best thing would be to let Antoine face the consequences. He's sent to a juvenile detention facility where he doesn't do much better. He does manage to escape however.
Plot Keywords: dysfunctional family, paris france, teenage boy, teenager, coming of age, school, juvenile delinquent ...
Movie Details Click Here!Storyline: Two boyhood friends, Rocky Sullivan and Jerry Connolly have taken different paths in life. After Rocky is arrested he is sent to a juvenile facility and becomes a lifelong tough guy and criminal. Jerry on the other hand goes straight and becomes a Catholic priest ministering to people in the same neighborhood when he and Rocky grew up. When Rocky is released from prison he resumes his criminal lifestyle and becomes much admired by many of the local kids. Worried that the kids will follow Rocky into the criminal world, Jerry works hard to keep them on the straight and narrow. When Rocky is convicted and sentenced to the electric chair, Jerry asks him for one last favor.
Plot Keywords: priest, juvenile delinquent, church, irish catholic, redemption, cult film, childhood friend ...
Movie Details Click Here!Storyline: Thymian is raped by her father's assistant. When she becomes pregnant and bears a child but refuses to marry her assaulter, her outraged father sends her to a brutal reformatory. Thymian soon escapes with a friend, Erika (Edith Meinhard), only to learn that her child has died. She then finds Erika working at a brothel and, with no option, joins her. Gradually, Thymian works her way higher by marrying a count, but her past haunts her.—Canon y mus
Plot Keywords: pregnancy, rape, diary, innocence, melodrama, father daughter estrangement, brothel ...
Movie Details Click Here!Storyline: The ambitious Stanton "Stan" Carlisle works in a sideshow as carny and assistant of the mentalist Zeena Krumbein, who is married with the alcoholic Pete. The couple had developed a secret code to pretend to read minds and was successful in the show business before Pete starts drinking. Stan stays with them expecting to learn their code and leave the carnival to be a successful mentalist. Stan also flirts with the gorgeous Molly that lives in the carnival with the strong Bruno. Zeena and The Savage, an alcoholic man that eats live chickens that the audiences believe that is a savage, are the greatest attractions of the sideshow. When Stan gives booze to Pete and he dies, Stan finds that Pete had drunk methyl alcohol and not his booze, but he feels guilty for the death of him. Zeena teaches the code to him and Molly helps Stan to learn them. After an incident, Stan is forced to marry Molly and he decides to move to Chicago with her to become a sensation in a night club. One day, he meets the psychologist Lilith Ritter and he finds that she tapes the sessions with her clients from the high-society. The trickster Stan envisions a scheme to raise a high amount of money swindling rich people. But his ambition brings him back to the life in the sideshow.—Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Plot Keywords: blackmail, con artist, mind reading, tarot card, psychologist, carnival, alcoholic ...
Movie Details Click Here!Storyline: As children, Lorenzo Carcaterra - Shakes to his friends - Michael Sullivan, Tommy Marcano, and John Reilly were inseparable. They grew up in Hell's Kitchen, a far from perfect neighborhood, one filled as Shakes says with scams and shake downs, but one where the rules were known by its residents. The one adult who they admired was Father Bobby Carelli, who understood them as kids more than most adults and more than he himself would like to admit. In 1967, their lives would change forever when a typical teenage prank went wrong which led to the four of them being sentenced to various terms at Wilkinson Home for Boys, a reformatory. There, they were physically, emotionally and sexually abused primarily by Sean Nokes, the head guard of their cell block, and fellow guards Ralph Ferguson, Henry Addison, and Adam Styler, although there were other caring figures of authority at the home including other guards. Their time at the home affected the four, not all who were able to emerge from the ...
Plot Keywords: sexual abuse, kicked in the crotch, gang rape, library, bar, coffin, cocaine ...
Movie Details Click Here!Storyline: In 1939 William Franklin, an anti-Franco veteran of the bloody Spanish Civil War, arrives as first-ever lay teacher in a strict Catholic Reformatory and Industrial School for wayward boys. He soon learns the academic challenge is formidable, many boys being still illiterate, but gradually earns their trust, respect, in time almost devotion, with 'paternal' kindness, making the layman the opposite of the cruel prefect, brother John, who frequently administers painful and humiliating punishments, even the gentle, old superior Father Damian has no authority against his disciplinary mandate from the grim bishop Conlon. Slowly even class rebel Liam Mercier is turned around, trough his gift for literature. After Franklin dares stop the sadist's penny-weighted strap severely striking 'sinful scum' for a futility, the whole dorm is treated to an icy night outdoors, arms outstretched wearing only shorts. Brother Mac's mind may mean to educate well, his flesh is too weak for celibacy, so the coy, pretty new boy becomes his latest pederastic lust-object, sworn to suffer sodomy in silence- even devoutly confessing to Father O'Driscoll his fear to have lost his innocence during painful rape costs him an endless cold shower, shivering stark-naked before his tormentor. Constructing a nativity stall for the village church allows Franklin's class to grow close, have fun and earn praise, but after the Peters brothers cross the forbidden red lines to hug each-other on Christmas night across the wall separating the age sections, John punishes their 'blasphemous abomination' (?!) by publicly flogging their bare backs to bloody pulp till Franklin arrives. Still the prefect is capable of viler abuse: Liam, who sent a boy to get Franklin and received a book with dedication from that 'communist', privately gets the sturdy strap in the face till even secret-blackmailed brother Mac can't watch the orgy of child-abuse any more, but now Franklin arrives so late...—KGF Vissers
Plot Keywords: abuse, child molestation, child rape, corporal punishment, discipline, priest, reform school ...
Movie Details Click Here!Storyline: Based on a true story: Norwegian winter, early 20th century. On the island Bastoy, located in the Oslo fjord live a group of delinquent, young boys aged 11 to 18. The boys daily, sadistic regime is run by the guards and the principal who bestow both mental and physical abuse on them. Instead of the boys being straightened out with education they end up being used as cheap, manual labor. The boys attempt to survive by adapting to their inhumane conditions. One day a new boy, Erling (17), arrives with his own agenda; how to escape from the island. How far is he willing to go in order to get his freedom?
Plot Keywords: island, sexual abuse, norway, escape attempt, humiliation, swimming, beating ...
Movie Details Click Here!Storyline: Single factory worker Kata, 43, wants to have a child with her long-time secret lover, a married man called Joska. He doesn't like the idea. Kata befriends teenage schoolgirl Anna, abandoned by her parents at the age of six. Anna runs away from the local children's home and moves in with Kata so that she can keep on seeing her boyfriend Sanyi. Kata goes to see Anna's parents and persuades them to give the young lovers their permission to marry. Through Anna, Kata becomes interested in neglected children and decides to adopt a baby from the children's home.—Markku Kuoppamäki
Plot Keywords: child abandonment, adoption, intergenerational friendship, love triangle, reform school, love, title directed by female ...
Movie Details Click Here!Storyline: Mary Keaton, Vivian Kirkwood (née Revere), and Ruth Westcott have just run into each other having not seen each other in ten years since they graduated from Public School 62 together, and become friends of sorts in their re-acquaintance. Their intervening lives went much as probably would have been predicted when they were in public school: Mary, the troublemaker who almost didn't graduate with her class, spent some time in a reformatory but went straight and became a showgirl; Vivian, the popular beauty with a charmed life, married wealthy and renowned lawyer Robert Kirkwood, the two with an adolescent son, Robert Jr.; and Ruth, the quiet, hard-working, smart one, who became a stenographer. While Mary's life took a positive turn since her reformatory years, Vivian has come to the realization that she is unhappy with her life, its path a little too easy in its predetermination. She realizes she probably never loved Robert. Her quest for pleasure, with a blessing of sorts from Robert who doesn't want his wife, whom he still loves, to be as distant as she seems, will affect Mary, as well. Their collective destinies may be foreshadowed by an old wives' tale about three sharing a single match, from which the film takes its name.—Huggo (updated by R.M. Sieger)
Plot Keywords: pre code film, childhood friend, drug addiction, suicide, kidnapping, divorce, gangster ...
Movie Details Click Here!Storyline: Francie and Joe live the usual playful, fantasy filled childhoods of normal boys. However, with a violent, alcoholic father and a manic depressive, suicidal mother the pressure on Francie to grow up are immense. When Francie's world turns to madness, he tries to counter it with further insanity, with dire consequences.—yusufpiskin
Plot Keywords: dysfunctional family, catholic church, psychosis, mental hospital, child molestation, bullying, antihero ...
Movie Details Click Here!Storyline: When 17-year-old Butch is sent to the Enola Vale Youth Correctional Center in Montana for blinding an abusive correctional officer, he brings with him a deep-seated intolerance for injustices and a penchant for meting out retributions on his own. No one had better mess with him or anyone else while he's there. Unfortunately, many do.—statmanjeff
Plot Keywords: male nudity, strip search, teenage boy, juvenile detention, male rear nudity, shower, teenage sexuality ...
Movie Details Click Here!Storyline: Five members of a teen-age gang, including leader Jimmy Smith, are sent to the state reformatory, presided over by the melodramatically callous Thompson. Soon, Patsy Gargan, a former gangster appointed deputy commissioner as a political favor, arrives - complete with hip flask and blonde. Gargan falls for activist nurse Dorothy and, inspired by her, takes over the administration to run the place on radical principles. But Thompson, to conceal his years of graft, needs a quick way to discredit Gargan.—Rod Crawford <puffinus@u.washington.edu>
Plot Keywords: nurse, politician, political corruption, judge, hideout, gunfire, guard ...
Movie Details Click Here!Storyline: Mickey Rooney and Spencer Tracy return in this sequel to the original Boys Town. This time the school faces financial trouble as Father Flanagan tries to help every little boy he meets. Larry Nunn and Dwayne Hickman join in this time around as Flanagan discovers a reform school that has neither reforming nor schooling. It's up to Flanagan, Whitey, and the rest of the school to teach them there's no such thing as a bad boy.—meeris
Plot Keywords: ham radio, adoption, financial crisis, escape, regeneration, graduation, self sacrifice ...
Movie Details Click Here!Storyline: Lady of the Night ~ the story of two baby girls, born near in proximity, but worlds apart in life, - Molly Helmer, the daughter of a thief, and Florence Banning the daughter of the judge who would send Molly's father to prison. The girls' lives come together as young women at eighteen as Florence leaves the security of the exclusive Girls Select School, and Molly, now orphaned, begins her life free from reform school. Norma Shearer plays both young women, but the apparent differences in their worldliness will also make them most unfamiliar in appearance. Molly's new world consists of nights at Kelly's Dance Hall and her ever-present worshiper, Chunky Dunn. On one of her nightly dance hall outing's Molly meets David Page, an up and coming inventor, whom she quickly falls in love with. Molly persuades David to seek an honest buyer for his new safe-cracking device; against the advice of Chunky whose shadier side see's this as an opportunity for himself, and to corrupt David in the process. Following Molly's advice, David meets with a group of investors, including the now retired Judge Banning, father of Florence. While at the Judges' home, David meets Florence and is instantly engaged by her charm and innocence, a characteristic not so present in Molly, although she tries hard to become such. We then begin to watch the personal struggles of two young women, both in love with David, yet both willing to give him up; Florence thinking the other has a stronger claim and Molly believing she is not good enough. Through strong direction and subtle acting intermixed with false bravado, we see Molly mature into one who sacrifices all for the sake of others, and become the person she so often imitated. -- Very sentimental - Excellent movie for the person who believes there is no good silent film.—glenn
Plot Keywords: lesbian kiss, romantic rivalry, police, marriage proposal, handcuffs, graduation, fight ...
Movie Details Click Here!Storyline: Allison is a "square" good girl who has decided she wants to be bad and falls hard for Cry-Baby Walker, a Greaser (or "Drape" in John Waters parlance). Spoofing Elvis movies and Juvenile Delinquency scare films of the '50s, this movie follows the adventures of Cry-Baby who, though he is sent to juvie, is determined to cross class (and taste) boundaries to get Allison back.
Plot Keywords: 1950s, forbidden love, dysfunctional family, juvenile delinquent, wrong side of the tracks, teen movie, greaser ...
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