Best movies like Balkan Baroque

A fashionable contemporary art gallerist in Chelsea, New York falls for a brooding new music composer in this comic satire of the state of contemporary art.

The Weight of Chains is a Canadian documentary film that takes a critical look at the role that the US, NATO and the EU played in the tragic breakup of a once peaceful and prosperous European state - Yugoslavia. The film, bursting with rare stock footage never before seen by Western audiences, is a creative first-hand look at why the West intervened in the Yugoslav conflict, with an impressive roster of interviews with academics, diplomats, media personalities and ordinary citizens of the former Yugoslav republics. This film also presents positive stories from the Yugoslav wars - people helping each other regardless of their ethnic background, stories of bravery and self-sacrifice.

Wild Combination is a visually absorbing portrait of the seminal avant-garde composer, singer-songwriter, cellist, and disco producer Arthur Russell. Before his death in 1992, Arthur prolifically created music that spanned both pop and the transcendent possibilities of abstract art. Now, over fifteen years since his passing, Arthur's work is finally finding its audience. Wolf incorporates rare archival footage and commentary from Arthur's family, friends, and closest collaborators to tell this poignant and important story.

An artist whose work involves capturing images of strangers begins to believe she herself is being observed.

In 1939, Charlotte Salomon leaves Berlin to seek refuge at her grandparents' villa in the south of France. A little later, war breaks out, and Charlotte must, besides forgetting all she left behind, deal with her grandmother's depression, and her mother's suicide. To fight despair, Charlotte starts to paint, producing over one thousand images. "Is my life real, or is it theater?" This is the title she gives her body of work, which highlights her former life in Berlin. She finds herself though her art, but in 1943 is deported to Germany and Auschwitz.

Alison Wynn is an amateur triathlete who convinces Dr. Laura Stevens, a controversial peak-performance trainer, to take her on as a client. Together they embark on a rigorous program combining cutting-edge physical training with experimental hypnotherapy in an effort to render Alison more competitive. Pushed to her limits and forced to explore the painful repressed memories of her mother's suicide, Dr. Stevens' punishing regimen helps Alison post impressive gains and break through her own glass ceiling; but at what cost? Alison's work and family life with her husband and daughter suffer but no sacrifice seems too great to satisfy Laura's escalating demands. In fact Laura will do whatever it takes to have Alison all to herself. As Alison runs directly into Laura's sinister psychological trap, it's up to Alison's daughter to help her mother see through the deception before they lose her forever.

In a fantasy world of opposing kingdoms, a 15-year old girl must find the fabled MirrorMask in order to save the kingdom and get home.

After overhearing a shocking secret, precocious orphan Lyra Belacqua trades her carefree existence roaming the halls of Jordan College for an otherworldly adventure in the far North, unaware that it's part of her destiny.

Eighty-year-old Alice Hargreaves is about to visit Columbia University to attend a reception in honor of author Lewis Carroll. As a child, Alice had a close friendship with the writer, and their relationship was the creative catalyst for Carroll's most beloved work. However, as Alice reflects on her experiences with the author, she realizes the complexity of their bond has had lasting, deeply felt ramifications.

In the sixties, Eddie and the cruisers was the hottest band around. But the tragic death of its lead singer broke the band up. Only Eddie is not dead. He works as a carpenter in Montreal. His love of music forces him to create a new band which will have to struggle with its anonymity.

John Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam pay tribute to their late Monty Python colleague Graham Chapman in this hilarious, 3-D animated adaptation of Chapman's brazenly fictionalized life story.

An actress, who goes all over rural France with her monologe "Sex and Crime", meets and falls in love with a man, since that moment starts helping him in his plays.

Madeline has become an integral part of a prestigious physical theater troupe. When the workshop's ambitious director pushes the teenager to weave her rich interior world and troubled history with her mother into their collective art, the lines between performance and reality begin to blur. The resulting battle between imagination and appropriation rips out of the rehearsal space and through all three women's lives.

A woman returning home falls asleep and has vivid dreams that may or may not be happening in reality. Through repetitive images and complete mismatching of the objective view of time and space, her dark inner desires play out on-screen.

A man entranced by his dreams and imagination is lovestruck with a French woman and feels he can show her his world.

The story of a family troupe of English actors who travel around the towns and villages in India giving performances of Shakespearean plays. Through their travels we see the changing face of India as the old is replaced by the new, Maharajas become hotel owners, sports become more important than culture and the theater is replaced by Bollywood movies. Based on the travels of Geoffrey Kendal with his daughter Felicity Kendal.

Aging screenwriter Felix Bonhoeffer has lived his life in two states of existence: in reality and his own interior world. While working on a murder mystery script, and unaware that his brain is on the verge of implosion, Felix is baffled when his characters start to appear in his life, and vice versa.

"The Tales of Hoffmann" - The story of the poet Hoffmann, who falls in love with a mechanical doll, loses his mirror image in Venice and finally liberates his lover from the clutches of a sinister doctor.

Confusing realities surface in this paranoid film dealing with the fragile nature of a young woman recovering from rape and an apparent attempted suicide. In one reality, she is a killer destroyer of men. In another she is the new wife on a Jamaican honeymoon with her husband (William Baldwin), who is trying to help her recover. Which is real is the question as the story unfolds.

Fictionalized account of Ferdinand Waldo Demara Jr., who stole or created fictional identities and worked in a variety of occupations, most quite successfully.

A brother and sister return to their family home in search of their world famous parents who have disappeared.

Begotten is the creation myth brought to life, the story of no less than the violent death of God and the (re)birth of nature on a barren earth.

The world is a bleak desolate place where the people live in elevated cities. As the ground is uninhabitable, the citizens spend most of their lives wasting their time in virtual reality. Carver is a dream-breaker whose job is to enter the world of VR and fix what is wrong. And what is wrong is that his gal pal Dinah has been murdered in VR which should not be possible. But Carver soon finds that Dinah has constructed a transducer which allows people to enter VR without other equipment, but creates a rift. That rift causes people to enter VR, but also allows the creatures from the game to enter the real world.

A mockumentary following an ambitious TV network executive trying to produce a controversial reality show where contestants play Russian Roulette

Malpertuis is the name of an old, rambling mansion which is in reality a labyrinth where characters from Greek mythology are imprisoned by the bedridden Cassavius. He manages to keep them, as well as his nephew and niece, prisoners even after his death, through a binding testament. As Jan, the nephew, unravels the mystery, he discovers that he cannot escape the house because Malpertuis is far more significant than he was led to believe.

The career of Eindhoven-based artist and musician Dick Verdult spans decades. He is seen as an outsider, as 'the last Dada-ist'. But what we experience as elusiveness turns out to be quite controlled and firstly funded on very personal experiences from his childhood as a 'Philips child' in Latin America. Rather than experiencing globalism as a problem, Verdult is like a cheerful, transcultural mutant. We see how, at the age of 60, he has become a cult musician in South America, Russia and Japan and is increasingly recognised internationally as a visual artist. This documentary explores Verdult's multidisciplinary, international art practice. We see Verdult at work in his studios in Bergeijk (The Netherlands) and Calanda (Spain) and on tour in Peru, Colombia and Argentina.

Love comes in many forms, and in Melody Gilbert’s Silicone Soul, the need for companionship and understanding is shown in the bond between humans and their synthetic companions. Tenderly captured by Gilbert, the bonds shown in the film are diverse and layered: from romantic relationships, to friendships, to a recreation of the love between mother and child. Silicone Soul does not allow for its subjects to be easily labeled or judged. Instead, the film is a collection of resoundingly human stories that reflect universal themes—the desire for love, compassion and communication.

Two young rival dragon riding warriors fight to end a 1000 year old war despite the hidden manipulator opposing them.

Still Kicking: William Shatner and 'Christopher Plummer' is a one-hour television special that captures the memories and insights of these two icons. The setting is the stage of the renowned Stratford Shakespeare Festival Stage, where both men launched their careers in the 1950s, and were then propelled to international stardom. Both continue to produce incredible work. Plummer earned an Academy Award in 2012 for his performance in Beginners. He recently wrote a best-selling autobiography, and will soon be returning to the stage of the Stratford Festival for the theatre's 60th anniversary season. Shatner won four Emmys for his portrayal of Denny Crane on Boston Legal, and also recently wrote a best-selling book, and currently has an amazing four television series on air.

Gauguin’s vivid artworks sell for millions. He was an inspired and committed multi-media artist who worked with the Impressionists and had a tempestuous relationship with Vincent van Gogh. But he was also a competitive and rapacious man who left his wife to bring up five children and used his colonial privilege to travel to Polynesia, where in his 40s he took ‘wives’ between 13 and 15 years old, creating images of them and their world that promoted a fantasy paradise of an unspoilt Eden in the Pacific. Later, he challenged the colonial authorities and the Catholic Church in defence of the indigenous people, dying in the Marquesas Islands in 1903, sick, impoverished and alone.

She is the godmother of performance art. With her shocking public actions she created in the late 60s images that have burned into the general visual memory until today. The life and work of the Austrian artist Valie Export exemplify a development in art history in which women sought and found new ways and means of expression. Her work provides a feminist counterpart to the Viennese actionism of her time, which has influenced numerous artists of subsequent generations. The innovative diversity of her artistic approaches makes Valie Export an icon of 20th century art history.

A poet chooses to give birth alone at home surrounded by characters pregnant with their dreams. How to let life make its way out of the maternal womb? How to build a family when you had to leave the motherland? How to keep hope alive when even birds are hiding from bombings? Timelife is a lifeline, an umbilical cord linking each of us, no matter the color of the skin, the mother tongue or the land of birth. Timelife «homebirthes» lives, hopes and love. The narrative takes root in each moment of reality. The truth, extracted from context, is fictionalized. A way of staging life.

After 40 years of running their community arts space The Bread Factory, Dorothea and Greta are suddenly fighting for survival when a pair of celebrity performance artists from China come to Checkford and build an enormous complex down the street, catapulting big changes in their small town.

A dramatic comedy following a Korean American performance artist who struggles to be authentically heard and seen through her multiple identities in modern Los Angeles.

Doctor Faustus is Christopher Marlowe's most renowned and controversial work. Famous for being the first dramatised version of the Faustus tale, the play depicts the sinister aftermath of Faustus's decision to sell his soul to the Devil's henchman in exchange for power and knowledge. In the first-ever staging of this menacing drama at the Globe Theatre, Matthew Dunster's production features Paul Hilton as the arrogant, power-hungry Faustus and Arthur Darvill as the sardonic Mephistopheles, and includes several impressive magical stunts along the way.

This is the story of the multinational and ethnically conflicted assembly of apatrides from war torn ex-Yugoslavia, hired by a crippled war merchant to sew labels upon fake jeans and participate in drug smuggling ring. Forced and humiliated into doing such work they are locked up in a Paris cellar where they find out that their Western fate brings even worse temptations then the war in Yugoslavia that made them leave the motherland.

Ice World is a Discovery Channel documentary concerning three people living 24,000 years ago in England during the last ice age. They live very much like plains Indians, with tee pees, buckskin clothing and long hair. Aki and Mora are a couple with a child on the way. Brom is their tribal chief. As the ice cap advances they flee southeast towards warmer weather. At that time there was no English channel and they walked to France and over several months on to present day Czechoslovakia. This is a fictional account of how people might have coped back then. The scenes of our three twenty-somethings trying to find another tribe to join up with are intermingled with discussions by archaeologists lecturing about cave paintings and findings that correlate with the basic story.

Delphine Seyrig, an extraordinary woman and actress, died on October 15, 1990. From "Last Year at Marienbad" by Alain Resnais to "India Song" by Marguerite Duras, she played in 34 films for cinema, 13 films for television and 33 plays. Jacqueline Veuve, filmmaker and friend of Delphine Seyrig, wanted to break the silence that has fallen on her memory by making a documentary that traces with emotion and subjectivity the life of the mythical actress, the fierce feminist but also the simple friend.

The many references in contemporary film to Edward Hopper's works, as well as the widespread reproduction of some of his paintings have made his universe familiar to many. His unclassifiable figurations weave a dialogue between appearances and light, between the unmistakeable and enigma. Focusing on the artist's personal life in the context of 20th century America, "Edward Hopper and the Blank Canvas" bears witness to a fiercely independent painter, who was aware of the issues of his era, and who was hostile to the imprisonment that a modern American art opposing realism and abstraction could lead him to. This film brings the artist to life, transposing his realist and metaphysical poetry. It is a subtile and passionate work, which at last unveils one of the most important painters of American modernity.

Frig — a film in three parts (Love, Shit and Sperm) — is an experimental drama beginning with the end of a love affair. Love and the resulting experience are presented as a metaphor that goes beyond the personal and into a deeper consideration of life’s cycles, ultimately becoming a reflection on life, death and rebirth. Opening with a personal poem and accompanied by fragmented images, the film plunge into Sade’s universe in “120 Days of Sodom” and charts the descent into one’s own, personal hell, revealing the hidden face of society.

The story has been told before, but never like this. An occupied desert nation. A radical from the wilderness on hunger strike. A girl whose mysterious dance will change the course of the world. This charged retelling turns the infamous biblical tale on its head, placing the girl we call Salomé at the centre of a revolution. Internationally acclaimed theatre director Yaël Farber (Les Blancs) draws on multiple accounts to create her urgent, hypnotic production on the stage of the National Theatre. ‘Epic. A near-perfect production.’ Guardian (on Les Blancs)

One year after her husband has passed away, Joanna Burke (Sherilyn Fenn) is plagued by reoccuring nightmares about her daughter Emma.after risking her life to prevent a horrendous accident, Joanna wakes up in the hospital and finds herself in a bizarre parallel world that holds little resemblance to her previous reality. Suddenly, her name is Sarah Randolph, she has a sister Penny ( Rena Sofer), her old friends have vanished and no longer recognize her, and, most shockingly, she no longer has a daughter. Enlisting the help of her smitten doctor (Thomas Gibson), Joanna searches for Emma and for traces of her old life, but she is haunted both by her memories of Emma and by the creeping suspicion that her new identity has a dangerous secret to hide.. Joanna will have to find a way out of this alternative world before someone in it finds out Sarah's disturbing past.

A comedy musical stage version of the Phantom of the Opera, filmed live on-stage during a performance in Florida.

A filmmaker continues shooting his film after his funding is pulled - a grim reality he has kept secret from his cast. His mind awash in the noise of memory and morphine, he reflects on his own life through the characters in his script. The story is told with highly stylistic vignettes projected in the black void of his mind, bringing to life each of the characters he has created on paper. "Phantom Images" explores the new challenges confronting gay men - and the cultural changes that have made communication between generations more difficult.

Meryl Streep stars as Alice in this production of Elizabeth Swados' musical, which was adapted from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll. Based on the acclaimed New York Shakespeare Festival production by Joseph Papp, Alice at the Palace follows Alice's surreal adventures with The Mad Hatter, The March Hare, The Queen of Hearts, and The Cheshire Cat, among many others.

"Inspired by a fable by La Fontaine, [composer Jean-Philippe] Rameau produced perhaps his most brilliant music for his penultimate great work, blending reality and the surreal on several levels." — from the DVD back cover

Conceived and filmed at London's O2 Arena in September 2019 the film follows a team of scientists as they investigate the source of a paranormal anomaly appearing around the world. Blurring the lines between narrative and concert film, virtual and reality, Muse's most theatrical tour to date launches the viewer through a supernatural spectacle, questioning the world around us.

Blood on the Carpet is an arthouse musical film written and produced by Bladde. The film follows a lonely character braving a steep mountain attempting to reach its peak. As he journeys the mountain, he is forced to confront a plethora of internal demons. Blood on the Carpet is the debut film work of Bladde, blending together performance art drag elements with arthouse horror qualities. The film features music from a variety of artists and genres including a recurring score borrowed from the work of composer Jacob Abrams.

Satellite dish salesman Gus (Stephen Ouimette) experiences some life-altering changes when he meets performance artist Lucy (Christie MacFadyen) in this visually poetic fantasy. After Lucy vanishes, leaving a puzzling note, Gus goes on a quest for the mysterious woman. Moving from his meticulous life in a technologically advanced world into the spontaneity of nature, Gus learns some important lessons and begins to trust his own instincts.

Small town artist Charley is a tortured man whose drinking binges blur with his sneaking suspicion that he might be a werewolf. He distances himself from those he loves and sinks deeper into solitude, as his flashes of memory of his grisly nighttime acts manifest themselves through his artwork.