NoBadPicks

Movies Like This Transient Life

If you loved This Transient Life's Drama storytelling, these films deliver a similar experience — carefully selected for tone, themes, and emotional depth. Each pick includes where to watch it right now.

Top Picks

The Insect Woman
7.2

The Insect Woman

1963

A woman, Tome, is born to a lower class family in Japan in 1918. The title refers to an insect, repeating its mistakes, as in an infinite circle. Imamura, with this metaphor, introduces the life of Tome, who keeps trying to change her poor life.

Miss Oyu
7.2

Miss Oyu

1951

Shinnosuke is introduced to Shizu as a prospective marriage partner, but he falls in love with her widowed sister Oyu. Convention forbids Oyu to marry because she has to raise her son as the head of her husband's family. Oyu convinces Shinnosuke and Shizu to marry so that she can remain close to Shinnosuke.

Happiness
7.4

Happiness

1998

The lives of several individuals intertwine as they go about their lives in their own unique ways, engaging in acts which society as a whole might find disturbing in a desperate search for human connection.

Bunny Drop
7.1

Bunny Drop

2011

Daikichi learns that his recently deceased grandfather has an illegitimate daughter with an unknown mother. The girl's name is Rin and she is just 6 years old. Everybody in Daikichi's family looks at the girl as an embarrassment and wants no part of her. Daikichi, annoyed by his family's attitude, decides to raise Rin by himself. Even though Daikichi himself has no experience raising a child and is still single.

Intentions of Murder
7.0

Intentions of Murder

1964

The neglected common-law wife of a Japanese librarian is repeatedly harassed by a young man with a heart condition who seduces her with the prospect of a better life.

Me and You and Everyone We Know
7.0

Me and You and Everyone We Know

2005

Single dad Richard meets Christine, a starving artist who moonlights as a cabbie. They awkwardly attempt to start a romance, but Richard’s divorce has left him emotionally damaged. Meanwhile, Richard’s sons—one a teenager, the other 6-years-old—take part in clumsy experiments with the opposite sex.

Undercurrent
5.9

Undercurrent

1946

After a rapid engagement, a dowdy daughter of a chemist weds an industrialist, knowing little of his family or past. He transforms her into an elegant society wife, but becomes enraged whenever she asks about Michael, his mysterious long-lost brother.

Priest
6.3

Priest

1995

The deeply held religious convictions of an idealistic young priest are challenged when he must face extraordinary events within his own congregation.

More Movies Like This Transient Life

The Pillow Book
6.3

The Pillow Book

1995

Nagito has a fetish for calligraphy on the human body and meets her ideal soulmate Jerome, an English translator sent to Japan. However, once Nagiko's father's gay publisher rejoins the scene, the story is overtaken by treachery and bloodlust.

Kinds of Kindness
6.5

Kinds of Kindness

2024

A triptych fable following a man without choice who tries to take control of his own life; a policeman who is alarmed that his wife who was missing-at-sea has returned and seems a different person; and a woman determined to find a specific someone with a special ability, who is destined to become a prodigious spiritual leader.

Sister Cities
6.3

Sister Cities

2016

Based on the internationally-acclaimed play by Colette Freedman, the story of 4 estranged sisters who reunite for their mother’s alleged suicide.

Memoirs of a Geisha
7.6

Memoirs of a Geisha

2005

In the years before World War II, a penniless Japanese child is torn from her family to work as a maid in a geisha house.

The Taste of Tea
7.5

The Taste of Tea

2004

A spell of time in the life of a family in rural Tochigi prefecture. Yoshiko is not an ordinary housewife, instead working on an animated film project. Uncle Ayano, a successful music producer, is looking to get his head together after living in Tokyo. Meanwhile, Sachiko is concerned with why she seems to be followed by a giant version of herself. As the lazy days pass by, each member of the family is followed in a series of episodic vignettes.

Restless
6.5

Restless

2011

Two outsiders, both shaped by the circumstances that have brought them together, forge a deep and lasting love.

The Glass House
6.0

The Glass House

2001

When Ruby and Rhett's parents are killed in a car accident, their carefree teenage lives are suddenly shattered. Moving to an incredible house in Malibu with the Glasses', old friends of the family, seems to be the beginning of a new life for them.

Sound of the Mountain
7.3

Sound of the Mountain

1954

An ingratiating bride develops warm ties to her father-in-law while her cold husband blithely slights her for another woman.

The Transgressor
6.4

The Transgressor

1974

18 years after the mysterious death of her mother, Maya takes religious vows to find out what terrible things happened to her mother inside the Sacred Heart Convent. As soon as the door closes to the nunnery, the nuns start torturing her. She also has to deal with a lecherous archbishops and a lesbian mother superior.

Inventing the Abbotts
6.3

Inventing the Abbotts

1997

In the 1950s, brothers Jacey and Doug Holt, who come from the poorer side of their sleepy Midwestern town, vie for the affections of the wealthy, lovely Abbott sisters. Lady-killer Jacey alternates between Eleanor and Alice, wanting simply to break the hearts of rich young women. But sensitive Doug has a real romance with Pamela, which Jacey and the Abbott patriarch, Lloyd, both frown upon.

In the Realm of the Senses
6.6

In the Realm of the Senses

1976

A passionate telling of the story of Sada Abe, a woman whose affair with her master led to an obsessive and ultimately destructive sexual relationship.

The Client
6.7

The Client

1994

A street-wise kid, Mark Sway, sees the suicide of Jerome Clifford, a prominent Louisiana lawyer, whose current client is Barry 'The Blade' Muldano, a Mafia hit-man. Before Jerome shoots himself, he tells Mark where the body of a Senator is buried. Clifford shoots himself and Mark is found at the scene, and both the FBI and the Mafia quickly realize that Mark probably knows more than he says.

Why These Movies Are Similar

These recommendations share core qualities with This Transient Life (1970): Drama themes, similar narrative structure, and comparable emotional depth. NoBadPicks uses a combination of TMDB collaborative filtering, genre matching, and AI analysis to surface films most likely to resonate with fans of This Transient Life.

See full details for This Transient Life (1970)

People Also Search For