Movies Like Laurel Canyon
If you loved Laurel Canyon's Drama and Romance 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

Elena Undone
The wife of a pastor who preaches against homosexuality embarks on an affair with a female writer.

Mammal
After Margaret, a divorcée living in Dublin, loses her teenage son, she develops an unorthodox relationship with Joe, a homeless youth. Their tentative trust is threatened by his involvement with a violent gang and the escalation of her ex-husband's grieving rage.

The Souvenir
A shy but ambitious film student falls into an intense, emotionally fraught relationship with a charismatic but untrustworthy older man.

The Mother
A grandmother has a passionate affair with a man half her age, who is also sleeping with her daughter.

Good Dick
A fidgety, wisecracking video store clerk develops a fixation on a particularly reclusive customer, a frequent visitor to the pornography section of Cinefile, the video store where he works in Los Angeles. After multiple failures to impress her during their brief daily transactions, he finds her street address in the store's database, drives to her apartment building and initiates an unconventional campaign to win her affections.

Step Up
Delinquent Tyler Gage receives the opportunity of a lifetime after vandalizing a performing arts school, gaining him the chance to earn a scholarship and dance with up-and-coming dancer Nora.

Appropriate Behavior
Shirin is struggling to become an ideal Persian daughter, politically correct bisexual and hip young Brooklynite but fails miserably in her attempt at all identities.

Camp Belvidere
Camp Belvidere is a lesbian romance set in the 1950s about the coming of age of Camp Leader Rose and her forbidden encounter with Nurse Gin. It depicts the journey and evolution of a friendship into a romance between two women when their rapport would have been unlikely.
More Movies Like Laurel Canyon

The Graduate
A disillusioned college graduate finds himself torn between his older lover and her daughter.

A Perfect Ending
This intimate drama follows Rebecca, a woman who has kept her sexuality a secret from her friends but chooses to reveal it to a stranger. While Rebecca's revelations may not yield the results she expects, a perfect ending is still in reach.

Shirley
A famous horror writer finds inspiration for her next book after she and her husband take in a young couple.

Departure
An English mother and her teenage son spend a week preparing the sale of their remote holiday house in the South of France. Fifteen-year-old Elliot struggles with his dawning sexuality and an increasing alienation from his mother, Beatrice. She in turn is confronted by the realisation that her marriage to his father, Philip, has grown loveless and the life she knows is coming to an end. When an enigmatic local teenager, Clément, quietly enters their lives, both mother and son are compelled to confront their desires and, finally, each other.

My Awkward Sexual Adventure
A hyper-repressed and schlubby accountant (Jonas Chernick) strikes a deal with a worldly but disorganized stripper (Emily Hampshire): he'll help her with her crushing debt if she helps him become a better lover.

Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
In a sleepy Louisiana parish, a group of lifelong friends stage a rather unorthodox intervention to help a young playwright unravel the truth about her complicated mother and let go of her painful past.

Tortilla Soup
A Mexican-American master chef and father to three daughters has lost his taste for food but not for life.

Newness
In contemporary Los Angeles, two millennials navigating a social media–driven hookup culture begin a relationship that pushes both emotional and physical boundaries.

20th Century Women
In 1979 Santa Barbara, California, Dorothea Fields is a determined single mother in her mid-50s who is raising her adolescent son, Jamie, at a moment brimming with cultural change and rebellion. Dorothea enlists the help of two younger women – Abbie, a free-spirited punk artist living as a boarder in the Fields' home and Julie, a savvy and provocative teenage neighbour – to help with Jamie's upbringing.

If These Walls Could Talk 2
The stories of three lesbian couples -- who live in the same house at different periods of time -- who are at a crossroads in their lives. In 1961, Edith loses her lover, Abby, to a stroke. Linda and Amy struggle with feminist issues in 1972. And, in 2000, Kal and Fran try to have a baby with the help of sperm donor.

My First Mister
Leelee Sobieski is brash, abrasive and vulnerable as a teenage child of divorce who hides her pain behind a mask of hard-edged gothic rebellion. Albert Brooks plays a man who is her total opposite, a precise and well-ordered menswear store owner of forty-nine who manages limited expectations and protects lonely secrets with pleasant ritual and quiet, ironic reserve. These two total opposites collide in conflict then come together in a surprising alliance, changing each other's lives forever.
Why These Movies Are Similar
These recommendations share core qualities with Laurel Canyon (2003): Drama and Romance 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 Laurel Canyon.
See full details for Laurel Canyon (2003)
