Best movies like Crystal Gazing

"Touring makes you crazy," Frank Zappa says, explaining that the idea for this film came to him while the Mothers of Invention were touring. The story, interspersed with performances by the Mothers and the Royal Symphony Orchestra, is a tale of life on the road. The band members' main concerns are the search for groupies and the desire to get paid.

A surreal look at the schizophrenia of a group of girls in a therapy session.

Joan Jett and Cherie Currie, two rebellious teenagers from Southern California, become the frontwomen for The Runaways -- the now-legendary group that paved the way for future generations of female rockers. Under the Svengali-like influence of impresario Kim Fowley, the band becomes a huge success.

A blending of documentary and experimental narrative strategies, combining stunning 16mm landscape cinematography with a bold, lyrical voice-over to share two San Francisco stories: the history of the Golden Gate Bridge as “suicide landmark,” and the story of a butch dyke in San Francisco searching for love and self-discovery. The Joy of Life is a film about landscapes, both physical and emotional.

Claude and Ellen are best friends who live in a not-so-nice area of New York. They're involved in the subculture of 90s youth, complete with drugs, live music, and homophobia. All is changed one night when a violent and meaningless death rocks their lives.

Two musicians and a roadie take money that is owed to them from a job. One flees to Mexico, and everyone has questions.

A female photographer who is engaged to a businessman investigates a cult in the local club scene. By living out some of her sexual fantasies, she faces the truth about her life and helps one of the cult's victims escape.

Plagued by strange memories, Neo's life takes an unexpected turn when he finds himself back inside the Matrix.

When Stephanie, a famous violinist, contracts multiple sclerosis her life begins to fall apart. Her career ends, her husband leaves her for another woman and her favorite pupil leave the country. Unable to bear all this loss, Stephanie attempts suicide.

The artist's personal commentary on the decline of his country in a language closer to poetry than prose. A dark meditation on London under Thatcher.

Fourteen-year-old Mo is a lonely, sensitive boy whose hunger for the rant and banter of buddies makes him prone to tread dangerous territories. He idolizes his handsome older brother, Rashid, a charismatic, well-respected member of a local gang, whose drug dealing enables “Rash” to provide for his family. Aching to be seen as a tough guy himself, Mo takes a job that unlocks a fateful turn of events and forces the brothers to confront their inner demons. It turns out that hate is easy. It is love and understanding that take real courage.

Two middle-aged lesbian couples accidentally kill a younger girl and decide to cover it up. But their crime comes back to haunt them when an unexpected stranger appears in their lives, bringing tension and discord.

The Committee, starring Paul Jones of Manfred Mann fame, is a unique document of Britain in the 1960s. After a very successful run in London’s West End in 1968, viewings of this controversial movie have been few and far between. Stunning black and white camera work by Ian Wilson brings to life this “chilling fable” by Max Steuer, a lecturer (now Reader Emeritus) at the London School of Economics. Avoiding easy answers, The Committee uses a surreal murder to explore the tension and conflict between bureaucracy on one side, and individual freedom on the other. Many films, such as Total Recall, Fahrenheit 451 and Camus’ The Stranger, see the state as ignorant and repressive, and pass over the inevitable weaknesses lying deep in individuals. Drawing on the ideas of R.D. Laing, a psychologically hip state faces an all too human protagonist.

A loose biography of surfer and documentarist George Greenough, one of the most famous and unique members of the surfing subculture.

A young woman in Manhattan lives in a world where the past, present and future mix.

Separation concerns the inner life of a woman during a period of breakdown – marital, and possibly mental. Her past and (possible?) future are revealed through a fragmented but brilliantly achieved and often humorous narrative, in which dreams and desires are as real as the ‘swinging’ London (complete with Procul Harum music and Mark Boyle light show) of the film’s setting.

A production company begins casting for its next feature, and an up-and-coming actress named Rose tries to manipulate her filmmaker boyfriend, Alex, into giving her a screen test. Alex's wife, Emma, knows about the affair and is considering divorce, while Rose's girlfriend secretly spies on her and attempts to sabotage the relationship. The four storylines in the film were each shot in one take and are shown simultaneously, each taking up a quarter of the screen.

An avant-garde examination of the relationship between women and money in society. Mixing musical, silent melodrama, and philosophical treatise into a post-punk, heady brew.

Renee wakes up one morning in the middle of the desert with blood on her hands. She cannot remember why she is there, how she got there or with whom she came. Her quest to uncover forgotten events leads her on a journey of discovery where reality and memory collide and people are not what they seem.

In a dramatization of her life, Linda Eastman, takes a job snapping pictures for Rolling Stone Magazine, despite the objections of her straight-laced father, Lee Eastman. As Linda rubs elbows with music royalty, she bumps into rock star Paul McCartney, and they soon fall in love. Although not only her father but also Paul's band mates disapprove of the romance, Linda and Paul wed while relations between the Beatles begin to disintegrate.

Breaking Glass is the story of punk singer Kate and her meteoric rise to stardom. Starting out in the rock pubs of London, Kate, assisted by her manager Danny, becomes a huge star overnight. Once at the top the pressure is immense as Kate's band are squeezed out and she is left to cope alone in the spotlight.

A young, jobless woman stays in bed, reads, talks on the phone, smokes cigarettes, makes fresh coffee, and tries on some clothes from a large wardrobe.

Nada, a beautiful French journalist on assignment in New York, records the life and work of an up and coming punk rock star, Billy. Soon she enters into a volatile relationship with him and must decide whether to continue with it, or return to her lover, a fellow journalist trying to track down the elusive Andy Warhol.

A title card announces that the film is a result of found footage assembled by cameraman J.J. Burden working for the acclaimed documentary filmmaker Jim Dunn, who has disappeared. Leach, a heroin addict, introduces the audience to his apartment where other heroin addicts, a mix of current and former jazz musicians, are waiting for Cowboy, their drug connection, to appear. Things go out of control as the men grow increasingly nervous and the cameraman keeps recording.

A fascinating and unlikely reinvention story, The Royal Road simultaneously explores cinematic spiritual channeling, the conquest and colonization of Mexico and the American Southwest, fading historical Californian urban landscapes, and the passions found in butch identity to achieve an achingly beautiful and poetic defense of remembering. Probing roads from El Camino Real, to the Boulevard of Broken Dreams, to the road right outside the front door, Olson crafts a deeply intelligent and transcending observation of the human condition that reaches for redemption in the embrace of history, nostalgia, mindfulness, and sheer beauty. If you give yourself over to it, it will crack you wide open.

Double Tide documents the work of a female clam digger in the mudflats of coastal Maine and is filmed on the rare occasion in which low tide occurs twice within daylight hours—once at dawn and once at dusk.

Bill struggles to put together his shattered psyche, in this feature film version of Don Hertzfeldt's animated short film trilogy.

Julia Sweeney tells the viewers the monologue about the hard time in her life when her brother fought with cancer and she was also diagnosed with a rare form of cancer.

Two twenty-something women dream of the ideal man and slowly realize that reality is very different from their fantasies.

A complex and fascinating experimental exploration of time and identity, Anti-Clock is a film of authentic, startling originality. Brilliantly mixing film and video techniques, Arden and Bond's paranoid, psychological surveillance study of a career gambler turned clairvoyant unstuck in time captures onscreen the anxieties that have infiltrated the consciousness of so many in Western society.

After the death of her husband, Pat learns that he gambled away all of their savings and that she's now destitute. She may even have to leave their apartment. Much to the embarrassment of her daughter Tina, who wants to marry a rich snob, she helps the homeless Dollie, who lives in a cardboard box near her building, and they become friends

Elena Gallenti is an anthropology graduate student struggling to complete her thesis on 'modern means of communication.' All that changes when she meets her new boyfriend's teenage kids, who are going through their own journeys of self-discovery. All of them learn to navigate love and intimacy in the digital age.

“A Darkness Swallowed opens on a pair of faded photographs showing an old dented car, one with a child standing beside it and the other without. Speaking in voice-over, Bromberg references a past event, one that will forever haunt her although it occurred before her birth. The film then sinks downward, dipping below the surface of the rational world to mine the seemingly infinite layers of the past stored within the fleshy entrails, chalky bones, sinewy spider webs and gnarled ligaments of both the body and the Earth. Noises – of clanging metal, bells, heartbeats and jazz music, to name only a few – combine to create a dense sound environment, a seemingly immense, three-dimensional space for contemplation." – Holly Willis, L.A . Weekly

Time-lapse photography of books, paintings, reflections, and light falling on textures, shot entirely through a glass ashtray.