Want to watch more films like Hillbilly Elegy? Try these movies about rural American life.

Rural America on film, from Appalachia to the Ozarks, coal miners to sharecroppers.

Let’s not mince words: Netflix’s new Oscar-bait Hillbilly Elegy is not the ode to vanishing rural American life it seems to want to be.

There are so many better films that tackle the subject matter of rural American identity that we felt compelled to round them up for anyone who wants cinematic insight into hillbillies, rednecks, and rural life generally.

As a statement on rural American life, it’s unique, unforgettable, and deeply empathetic.

Where to watch: Amazon Prime, Hulu, YouTube.

Through assembled footage of a rural Alabama county and stunning cinematography, Ross provides a close read of everyday Black life powerful enough to rival anything since Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep.

The result: a film that transforms the mundanity of normal American life into a beautiful, Tarkovsky-esque epic.

It’s incredibly rare to find any film about Black communities in rural America that’s not using racism as the central conflict.

Where to watch: Amazon Prime, YouTube.

Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 film about a dying southwestern town is a beautiful, devastating masterpiece — a film ostensibly about slow rural decay and the boredom of small-town life that seethes with tension and repressed emotion.

Where to watch: Amazon Prime, YouTube?

Where to watch: Amazon Prime, YouTube.

Where to watch: YouTube.

Where to watch: Amazon Prime, YouTube.

Where to watch: YouTube.

Where to watch: Amazon Prime, Hulu, YouTube.

Where to watch: Amazon Prime, YouTube.

Part of what makes this film so good is how tactile it is: The emphasis on all that mud doubles as an obvious metaphor for the drudgery and impossible cycle of poverty that besieges rural America, but it’s also an equally trenchant metaphor for plain old world-weary exhaustion; this is a film that looks and feels heavy.

This is, perhaps, a film that embodied a familiar cycle: one of rural American dreams set alight, then smothered, only to smolder again thanks to a heady cocktail of faith, resilience, and ideology

Where to watch: YouTube