Best movies like Changing Landscapes

A documentary about the design of cities, which looks at the issues and strategies behind urban design and features some of the world's foremost architects, planners, policymakers, builders, and thinkers.

Raising Bertie is a longitudinal documentary feature following three young African American boys over the course of six years as they grow into adulthood in Bertie County, a rural African American-led community in Eastern North Carolina. Through the intimate portrayal of these boys, this powerful vérité film offers a rare in-depth look at the issues facing America's rural youth and the complex relationships between generational poverty, educational equity, and race. The evocative result is an experience that encourages us to recognize the value and complexity in lives all too often ignored.

Three stories of love and coincidence around the theme of dates in Paris.

Shot in France, England, Switzerland and the United States, this documentary covers director Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo, Holy Mountain, Santa Sangre) and his 1974 Quixotic attempt to adapt the seminal sci-fi novel Dune into a feature film. After spending 2 years and millions of dollars, the massive undertaking eventually fell apart, but the artists Jodorowsky assembled for the legendary project continued to work together. This group of artists, or his “warriors” as Jodorowsky named them, went on to define modern sci-fi cinema with such films as Alien, Blade Runner, Star Wars and Total Recall.

The socialist mayor of a small village in France dreams of building an arts center but he runs up against some opposition.

Early new wave effort from Rohmer, which was the first of his six moral tales. It concerns a young man who approaches a girl in the street, but after several days without seeing her again, he becomes involved with the girl in the local bakery. Eventually, he has to choose between them when he arranges dates with them on the same day.

The Challenge... A Tribute to Modern Art is a 1974 American documentary film directed by Herbert Kline. The film shows footage of great modern artists in their studios creating and commenting on their work, with narration and commentary by Orson Welles. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

Terry is the chief car tester for Emery Motors and Frank is an Engineer. Jane has just been hired to work in publicity. Frank and Terry both want Jane to be their girl. Terry has designed a new carburetor that should bring him fame and money, but he cannot get it to work correctly. Terry and Gadget have tested it for over a year, but it still is not perfected. Emery Motors assigns Frank to help Terry with the carburetor, but Terry is not happy because Frank is an Engineer and is also vying for Jane. They finish the carburetor, and to test it, they enter a car in the Indianapolis 500 race. Terry is not yet satisfied with the carburetor before the big race even though it has passed all the tests.

An eccentric Parisian woman's optimistic perception of life begins to sound more rational than the rather traditional beliefs of others.

Two young girls meet, Reinette from the countryside and Mirabelle from Paris, and decide to take a flat together in Paris where they attend University. Four successive stories about their daily lives illustrate the very different views, characters and relation to the world of these two friends.

Louise is dissatisfied with her mundane life in a bleak Parisian new-town. She rents a pied-à-terre in the city so she can experience independence.

Gloria is set against the backdrop of a rural landscape slowly disappearing in modern Portugal. The small border town of Vila de Santiago, once a booming trade center for illegal trafficking, is about to become a ghost town, as a new motorway is to bypass the city and the railway station is being closed. Its stationmaster, Vincente, is preparing to retire. Many young people have moved out, leaving the children to be brought up by the elderly, including thirteen-year-old Glória and her friend Ivan. Glória's life suddenly changes with the arrival of Vincente's younger brother, Mauro, who has just come out of prison and has some old issues to settle. Mauro begins to charge around the station on his motorbike, while Glória's friendship with Ivan is put to test on account of her attraction to older Mauro.

Using a specially designed transparent 'canvas' to provide an unobstructed view, Picasso creates as the camera rolls. He begins with simple works that take shape after only a single brush stroke. He then progresses to more complex paintings, in which he repeatedly adds and removes elements, transforming the entire scene at will, until at last the work is complete.

Bouncing between Europe and the United States as often as she would between lovers, Peggy Guggenheim’s life was as swirling as the design of her uncle’s museum, and reads more like fiction than any reality imaginable. Peggy Guggenheim – Art Addict offers a rare look into Guggenheim’s world: blending the abstract, the colorful, the surreal and the salacious, to portray a life that was as complex and unpredictable as the artwork Peggy revered and the artists she pushed forward.

Clumsy Monsieur Hulot finds himself perplexed by the intimidating complexity of a gadget-filled Paris. He attempts to meet with a business contact but soon becomes lost. His roundabout journey parallels that of an American tourist, and as they weave through the inventive urban environment, they intermittently meet, developing an interest in one another. They eventually get together at a chaotic restaurant, along with several other quirky characters.

Dark City Beneath The Beat is an audiovisual experience that defines the soundscape of Baltimore city. Inspired by an all original Baltimore club music soundtrack, the film spotlights local club artists, DJs, dancers, producers, and Baltimore’s budding creative community as they are realizing their life dreams. Rhythmic and raw, these stories illustrate the unique characteristics of the city’s landscape and social climate through music, poetry, and dance. From the city’s social climate to its creative LGBTQ community, Dark City Beneath The Beat showcases Baltimore club music as a positive subculture in a city overshadowed by trauma, drugs, and violence.

Inspired by a letter by Friedrich Engels and a 1974 account of two militant Marxist writers who had been imprisoned by the Nasser regime, Straub-Huillet filmed this film in France and Egypt during 1980. They reflect on Egypt’s history of peasant struggle and liberation from Western colonization, and link it to class tensions in France shortly before the Revolution of 1789, quoting texts by Engels as well as the pioneering nonfiction film Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895).

An American polo player in Paris gets roped into intrigue when he's asked to find a family friend whom has gone missing.

A spate of robberies in Southern California schools had an oddly specific target: tubas. In this work of creative nonfiction, d/Deaf first-time feature director Alison O’Daniel presents the impact of these crimes from an unexpected angle. The film unfolds mimicking a game of telephone, where sound’s feeble transmissibility is proven as the story bends and weaves to human interpretation and miscommunication. The result is a stunning contribution to cinematic language. O’Daniel has developed a syntax of deafness that offers a complex, overlaid, surprising new texture, which offers a dimensional experience of deafness and reorients the audience auditorily in an unfamiliar and exhilarating way.

Some time after marrying a sensual girl, Pozdnychev realizes the only link to his spouse is that of physical love. When a violinist with whom his wife plays regularly the “Sonata to Kreutzer” appears, the young woman blooms in a new passion. From then on, her husband is eaten away by jealousy.

An epic silent space opera about a robot-based alien invasion, featuring unique visuals created by meticulously modifying and editing thousands of hours of silent and serial film footage. With an original story, musical score, and sound design, Time of the Robots creates a new experience highly reminiscent of early cinema.

In the 1980s Keith Haring blazed a trail through the galleries and nightclubs of downtown New York's art scene. Rebellious and ingenious, Haring chose to operate both inside and outside the art world. Inspired by the city's graffiti scene, he made New York's subways, tarpaulins and walls his canvas. This new feature documentary blends stunning archive and an edgy soundtrack, with tender and candid first-hand accounts of Haring. It tells the extraordinary story of an artist who lived and created with a boundless energy, throughout the social, cultural and political counter-revolution of the 1980s.

This documentary explores Perriand's development from her own perspective, from the 1930s, when she made common cause with Le Corbusier and avant-garde art, to her discovery of Japan, where she was inspired to incorporate aspects of Japanese tradition into her practice of Modernism.

A man with a perspective like no other on the planet. The leading structural engineer of the World Trade Center oversees its construction, haunted by its fall ever since. A guru in high-rise design. Driven by his values as a pacifist and activist and the woman engineer who emboldened, expanded and ultimately saved the man she loved. About fulfillment, fragility, and a fighting spirit.

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.

Un conservateur terrorisé par les plantes vertes, une mère plastifiée pour être exposée, un ballet de Saintes Vierges, des gardiens épuisés par Rodin, un ministre perdu dans une exposition de sexes, une voiture disparue au parking Rembrandt, des provinciaux amoureux des Impressionnistes, touristes galopins galopant d'une salle à l'autre, passager clandestin dans l'art premier, Picasso, Gauguin, Warhol, ils sont tous là dans ce petit monde qui ressemble au grand, dans ce musée pas si imaginaire que ça, valsant la comédie humaine jusqu'au burlesque.

A storm of Modernism swept through the art worlds of the West in the early decades of the twentieth century, uprooting centuries of tradition. The epicenter of this storm was Paris, France. For an incandescent moment from 1905 to 1930, Paris was the magnetic center for radical innovation and experiment, and the Mecca for creative talents who would change the course of art throughout the Western world.

Architect I.M. Pei speaks about his famous works, such as the addition to the Louvre in Paris, the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas, Texas. Footage of these projects shows both interiors and exteriors. Various other experts comment on the impact and importance of Pei's work.

Dr James Fox takes a journey through six different landscapes across Britain, meeting artists whose work explores our relationship to the natural world. From Andy Goldsworthy's beautiful stone sculptures to James Turrell's extraordinary sky spaces, this is a film about art made out of nature itself. Featuring spectacular images of landscape and art, James travels from the furthest reaches of the Scottish coast and the farmlands of Cumbria to woods of north Wales. In each location he marvels at how artists' interactions with the landscape have created a very different kind of modern art - and make us look again at the world around us.

The Maysles' third film about the artists sees them trying to get three projects off the ground: wrapping the Pont Neuf, the oldest bridge in Paris; wrapping the Reichstag; and surrounding eleven man-made islands in Florida with pink plastic sheets. As the latter is the only one that gets approval, it gets the bulk of this film.

In 1939, visionary aircraft designer Barnes Wallis designed a very special bomb that would bounce across water and destroy German dams. The raid in 1943 was a success and a 1950s feature film carried the the Dambusters story into British legend. The science behind the bouncing bomb is highly complex, and many of Barnes Wallis' vital working calculations have been lost. Now, Cambridge engineer Dr Hugh Hunt, is going to attempt to solve the scientific puzzle of exactly how Wallis did it. Starting from scratch, he will rediscover the brilliance of Wallis's achievement when he tries to hit a dam with a bouncing bomb. It is the first time this has been attempted since the war.

How is a planned city designed? What consequences does creating one has on the environment? What are the living conditions in such areas ? Such are the questions asked by Eric Rohmer in this first part of a TV documentary series, through the particular case of Cergy-Pontoise, near Paris.

Henri Rousseau started to paint in Paris around 1880, at the age of 40. This self-taught artist was friendly with the poet Apollinaire, Robert Delaunay and Pablo Picasso, who recognized his genius, and yet his work was to remain underrated during his lifetime. However, with its dislocated compositions and profoundly dreamlike subject matter, it was to have a decisive influence on modern art, from surrealism to abstract art.

Throughout the 19th century, imaginative and visionary artists and inventors brought about the advent of a new look, absolutely modern and truly cinematographic, long before the revolutionary invention of the Lumière brothers and the arrival of December 28, 1895, the historic day on which the first cinema performance took place.

A pioneering ceramic artist Clarice Cliff roares to prominence in the 1920s while working in Britain’s Stoke-on-Trent pottery industry.