Best movies like Diaries, Notes, and Sketches

This oddball counterculture comedy/drama follows Zalman King through a series of kooky misadventures while he searches for his life's purpose in New York City.

Nicholas Ray plays himself, acting as mentor, friend, and artistic inspiration to his students at Binghamton.

A 1971–72 documentary film by Jonas Mekas. It revolves around Mekas' trip back to Semeniškiai, the village of his birth.

Chantel Mitchell, a hip, articulate, black high-school girl in Brooklyn, is determined not to become "just another girl on the IRT" (the IRT is one of NYC's subway lines). She dreams of medical school, a family, and an escape from the generational poverty and street-corner life her friends seem to have accepted as their lot. But personal and sexual challenges confront Chantel on her way to fulfilling these dreams.

A compilation of over 30 years of private home movie footage shot by Lithuanian-American avant-garde director Jonas Mekas, assembled by Mekas "purely by chance", without concern for chronological order.

An eight-hour contemplative epic, entirely starring sheep.

Lacking a formal narrative, Warhol's mammoth film follows various residents of the Chelsea Hotel in 1966 New York City. The film was intended to be screened via dual projector set-up.

A psychiatrist secretly films his female patients as an experiment; he pushes both him and his customers in ways that induce his own mental breakdown.

A young filmmaker decides to make a movie about his day-to-day activities in an attempt to understand himself and get his life back in order. A precursor to reality television and vlogs.

College coeds in New York City, Al, the son of a celebrity chef, and Imogen, a talented artist, become smitten the second they lay eyes on one another at a bar. However, the road to happiness is not a smooth one. Outside forces, including a predatory porn star who wants to lure Al into her bed, threaten to pull apart the young lovers before their romance has a chance to really flourish.

This art experiment by Andy Warhol captures the simple act of a man eating mushrooms. This one-man show starring Robert Indiana presents the actor slowly eating some mushrooms, having an enjoyable time not only with the food but also with a friendly cat that from time to time comes to see what the man is doing.

Experimental film consisting of a single static shot of the Empire State Building from early evening until nearly 3 am the next day.

Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, apparently playing themselves, share their lives over the course of an evening meal at a restaurant.

In Manhattan's Central Park, a film crew directed by William Greaves is shooting a screen test with various pairs of actors. It's a confrontation between a couple: he demands to know what's wrong, she challenges his sexual orientation. Cameras shoot the exchange, and another camera records Greaves and his crew. Sometimes we watch the crew discussing this scene, its language, and the process of making a movie. Is there such a thing as natural language? Are all things related to sex? The camera records distractions - a woman rides horseback past them; a garrulous homeless vet who sleeps in the park chats them up. What's the nature of making a movie?

An experimental feature made by rephotographing the 1905 Biograph short Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son.

"Tub Girls" features Warhol superstar Viva lying in a bathtub with different people of both sexes, including Brigid Berlin (as Brigid Polk), who appeared fully clothed in the tub.

Sonny falls asleep while his mom reads him a bedtime story and wakes up in Balloon Land, a magical world filled with giant balloon people and animals.

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.

Chris & Don chronicles the lifelong relationship between author Christopher Isherwood and his much younger lover, artist Don Bachardy, and it combines present-day interviews, archival footage shot by the couple from the 1950s, excerpts from Isherwood's diaries, and playful animations to recount their romance.

Three young New York men decide to travel South for a few days away from the Big Apple. They pick up a beautiful, mysterious young sight less woman with a strange and unsettling past. All three are captivated and fascinated by her, but can she be trusted?

In a surreal universe where bananas fire laser beams and soup cans are used as grenades, a wacky cast of gangsters are thrown into a deadly game to battle it out over a mystical longboard in this trippy take on the Tarantino crime genre.

Against a plain, unchanging blue screen, a densely interwoven soundtrack of voices, sound effects and music attempt to convey a portrait of Derek Jarman's experiences with AIDS, both literally and allegorically, together with an exploration of the meanings associated with the colour blue.

CREMASTER 3 (2002) is set in New York City and narrates the construction of the Chrysler Building, which is in itself a character - host to inner, antagonistic forces at play for access to the process of (spiritual) transcendence. These factions find form in the struggle between Hiram Abiff or the Architect ...

A series of erotic vignettes and sexual imagery (mostly of the gay variety) are presented courtesy of The Cockettes (a gay/drag performance art ensemble of late 60s/early 70s San Francisco).

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 parable of the missteps of life enacted in the hothouse world of late 1980’s New York, in which the art market and the stock market each boomed, and in process spawned a smorgasbord of “yuppie” delusions which still persist. Anna, a French actress studying in New York, crosses paths with a successful stock-broker, Mark, standing before a Vermeer portrait at the Metropolitan, thence ensues a peculiar romance of missed meanings and connections, with tangential asides to the steaming arts world and stock market, loft-mate conflicts, and, perhaps, love. Wrapped up in their blindered worlds, Anna and Mark deflect away from their chances, leaving at the conclusion the wistful face of Vermeer’s portrait enigmatically asking questions. All the Vermeers in New York is a comedy of manners which, as gently as a Vermeer, looks beneath the skin of this time and place, and of these characters.

The coincidence cross fates of five characters in a hotel room in New York. A newlyweds couples discussing, a touring magician requesting the services of a prostitute, a voyeur photographer that is silent witness to the fight of a couple on the street and a journalist who is going to kill himself because he made public his penchant for crossdressing.

The Angelic Conversation is a lyrical, haunting film about a young man’s search for love in a dreamlike landscape. Its tone is set by the juxtaposition of slow moving homo-erotic images and opaque landscapes through which two men take a journey into their own desires. Offscreen, Dame Judi Dench recites a sequence of Shakespeare's sonnets that counterpoint the action. Jarman called it, “My most austere work, but also the closest to my heart.”

HWY: An American Pastoral is a film by Jim Morrison, Frank Lisciandro, Paul Ferrara, and Babe Hill and stars Morrison as a hitchhiker. It is a 50-minute experimental film in Direct Cinema style. It was shot during the spring and summer of 1969 in the Mojave Desert and in Los Angeles.

A depressed woman, Barbara, is on the verge of suicide while a man she meets in a church and a married couple try to convince her that life is worth living.

Prometheus, on an Odyssean journey, crosses the Brooklyn Bridge in search of the characters of his imagination. After meeting the Muse, he proceeds to the "forest." There, under an apple tree, he communes with his selves, represented by celebrated personages from the New York "underground scene" who appear as modern correlatives to the figures of Greek mythology. The filmmaker, who narrates the situations with a translation of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound , finds the personalities of his characters to have a timeless universality.

65 shots making up a cryptically alluded-to narrative: a lesbian couple's Midwest travels, a hitchhiking young man's journeys, the story of a man who may be having an affair.

Set in a post-apocalyptic future, the story finds a handful of ragged survivors attempting to communicate with dolphins, while another cadre of survivors have made it their crusade to destroy all the world's religions.

"Breathtaking in its techniques, rhapsodic in its passion, and encyclopedic in its scope, the film traces the long fall from paradise into modern barbarism." - Art Gallery of Ontario

A dedicated music teacher in East Harlem instructs a gaggle of underprivileged children in the art of the violin. In the climax, they play Carnegie Hall with some of the world's foremost fiddlers.