Best movies like Entr'acte

Arthur Lipsett's first film is an avant-garde blend of photography and sound. It looks behind the business-as-usual face we put on life and shows anxieties we want to forget. It is made of dozens of pictures that seem familiar, with fragments of speech heard in passing and, between times, a voice saying, "Very nice, very nice." The film was nominated for an Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film.

On a winter's day, a woman stretches near a window then sits in a bathtub of water. She's happy. Her lover is nearby; there are close ups of her face, her pregnant belly, and his hands caressing her. She gives birth: we see the crowning of the baby's head, then the birth itself; we watch a pair of hands tie off and cut the umbilical cord. With the help of the attending hands, the mother expels the placenta. The infant, a baby girl, nurses. We return from time to time to the bath scene. By the end, dad's excited; mother and daughter rest.

Witch’s Cradle is an unfinished Maya Deren film made in the Guggenheim Gallery during a surrealist “Art of this Century” exhibit. It was assembled long after her death by staffers within the preservation department at Anthology Film Archives.

In this Oscar-winning short film, Norman McLaren employs the principles normally used to put drawings or puppets into motion to animate live actors. The story is a parable about two people who come to blows over the possession of a flower.

Michael Snow narrates a series of Hollis Frampton's photographs (speaking as Frampton, in the first person)—as each picture catches fire on a hot plate.

Experimental film, white specks and shapes gyrating over a black background, the light-striped torso of Kiki of Montparnasse (Alice Prin), a gyrating eggcrate. One of the first Dadaist films.

A social event choreographed in the manner of a dance, illuminated by concepts drawn from Greek legend; one of filmmaker Maya Deren’s most intriguing works.

A young man who lives on women meets his match in the young wife of a rich industrialist. Their affair is doomed by her taste for luxury and his dislike of her coolness.

An elderly gentleman sets out for what he thinks will be a normal day at an amusement park and is soon embroiled in a waking nightmare.

Un Chien Andalou is an European avant-garde surrealist film, a collaboration between director Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali.

Ballet Mécanique (1923-4) is a Dadaist, post-Cubist art film conceived, written, and co-directed by artist Fernand Léger and filmmaker Dudley Murphy (with cinematographic input from Man Ray). It has a musical score by the American composer George Antheil (However, the film premiered with no soundtrack, on September 24th, 1924 at the Internationale Ausstellung neuer Theatertechnik in Vienna). It is considered one of the masterpieces of early experimental filmmaking.

Aspiring architect Tom Thompson is told by mysterious Ruth Abernathy that his best friend, "Bill," has taken his own life. Except that Tom has never met Bill and neither have his incredulous friends. So when Tom foolishly agrees to give the eulogy at Bill's funeral, it sets him on a collision course with Ruth -- who is revealed to be Bill's oversexed mother -- and Julie DeMarco, the longtime crush Tom hasn't seen since they were teens.

First time father Henry Spencer tries to survive his industrial environment, his angry girlfriend, and the unbearable screams of his newly born mutant child.

A young boy and his friends face off against a mysterious grave robber known only as the Tall Man, who keeps a mysterious arsenal of terrible weapons with him.

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.

A creation myth realized in light, patterns, images superimposed, rapid cutting, and silence. A black screen, then streaks of light, then an explosion of color and squiggles and happenstance. Next, images of small circles emerge then of the Sun. Images of our Earth appear, woods, a part of a body, a nude woman perhaps giving birth. Imagery evokes movement across time. Part of the Dog Star Man series of experimental films.

In a decaying castle surrounded by a dank, mirrored lake live the morbidly nervous Roderick Usher and his sickly twin sister, Madeline. Their tale is told and dimly comprehended by the unnamed narrator, a boyhood friend whom Roderick has summoned. When Madeline soon dies—or seems to die—they entomb her body. On a stormy night, "cracking and ripping" sounds and a "shriek" from below convince the panicky Roderick that "We have put her living into the tomb!" The shrouded, emaciated figure of Madeline appears at the door of Roderick's book-strewn study, falls upon him, "and in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse."

A father lives a double life as a counterfeiter, bank robber and con man in order to provide for his daughter.

An inexperienced young actress is invited to play a role in a film based on Dostoyevsky's 'The Possessed'. The film director, a Czech immigrant in Paris, takes over her life, and in a short time she is unable to draw the line between acting and reality. She winds up playing a real-life role posing as the dead wife of another Czech immigrant, who is manipulated by the filmmaker into commiting a political assassination.

Two narrators, one seen and one unseen, discuss possible connections between a series of paintings. The on-screen narrator walks through three-dimensional reproductions of each painting, featuring real people, sometimes moving, in an effort to explain the series' significance.

Two youngsters declare to their parents that they want to get married. Not sometime in the future but as soon as possible.

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.

Accompanied only by music the film alternates between shots of pilgrims near the tomb of Saint Sergei in Sergiyev Posad, Russia and pilgrims at the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico.

What starts off as a conventional travelogue turns into a satirical portrait of the town of Nice on the French Côte d'Azur, especially its wealthy inhabitants.

Maya Deren’s shortest, two-minute A Study in Choreography for Camera seems like an exercise piece to capture a dancer’s movement on celluloid, which later on developed into her masterpieces such as Ritual in Transfigured Time and Meditation on Violence.

A young poet named Hoffman broods over his failed romances. First, his affair with the beautiful Olympia is shattered when he realizes that she is really a mechanical woman designed by a scientist. Next, he believes that a striking prostitute loves him, only to find out she was hired to fake her affections by the dastardly Dapertutto. Lastly, a magic spell claims the life of his final lover.

This is Cinerama is a 1952 full-length film designed to introduce the then-new widescreen process Cinerama, which broadens the aspect ratio so the viewer's peripheral vision is involved. This is Cinerama premiered on 30 September 1952 at the New York Broadway theatre, in New York City. The film includes scenes of the roller coaster from Rockaways' Playland, then moves on to a scene of the temple dance from Aida, views of Niagara Falls, a Viennese choir, scenes of the canals of Venice, a military tattoo in Edinburgh, a bullfight, more from Aida, a sound demonstration in stereo, scenes from the amusement park in Cypress Gardens, Florida for a water skiing sequence, and the playing of America the Beautiful as scenes are shown from the nose of a low flying B-25.

The daughter of a dead magician who accidentally killed his wife, her mother, while performing a guillotine trick must spend the night in his house in order to collect her inheritance. Is the house haunted or is it all magic?

The boy Vito is a portrait of beauty and wide-eyed innocence spawned from a violent family of kidnapers and murderers in the South of Italy. When his entire family is murdered by a rival clan of kidnapers, Vito must flee for his own life and in the end attempts to make atonement for some of his family's sins.

A prisoner undergoes experimental brain surgery in order to get early parole. He released but has no memories. Things get dangerous when a group of thugs go after him in search of loot he hid before his amnesia.

A French agent goes after a gang of Asian terrorists who plan to blow up an American nuclear aircraft carrier.

While her mother is away on business, a young girl home alone with her older brother witnesses her neighbor's kidnapping. But no one believes her--not her brother, not the cops. So she takes matters into her own hands putting her life at risk to save her neighbor.

A heart-warming family film about one girl's dream of dancing in the lead and realizing the only way to do it, is believing that you can.

A man is sent back and forth and in and out of time in an experiment that attempts to unravel the fate and the solution to the problems of a post-apocalyptic world during the aftermath of WW3. The experiment results in him getting caught up in a perpetual reminiscence of past events that are recreated on an airport’s viewing pier.

A man is plagued by recurring nightmares, and when he wakes up he finds that the nightmares he just dreamed of keep coming true.