Best movies like Keith Haring: Street Art Boy

A thoughtful portrait of a renowned artist, this documentary shines the spotlight on New York City painter Jean-Michel Basquiat. Featuring extensive interviews conducted by Basquiat's friend, filmmaker Tamra Davis, the production reveals how he dealt with being a black artist in a predominantly white field. The film also explores Basquiat's rise in the art world, which led to a close relationship with Andy Warhol, and looks at how the young painter coped with acclaim, scrutiny and fame.

Now one of the world’s most celebrated artists, Yayoi Kusama broke free of the rigid society in which she was raised, and overcame sexism, racism, and mental illness to bring her artistic vision to the world stage. At 88 she lives in a mental hospital and continues to create art.

An account of the many tribulations that Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, known for his subversive art and political activism, endured between 2008 and 2011, from his rise to world fame via the Internet to his highly publicized arrest due to his frequent and daring confrontations with the Chinese authorities.

The brief life of Jean Michel Basquiat, a world renowned New York street artist struggling with fame, drugs and his identity.

Tommy takes up temporary housing in a New York neighborhood plagued by a violent gang called the Souls. Tommy is waiting for his next assignment as a seaman and though he tries to avoid the gang and his neighbors, it does not work. Soon he is battling the Souls and not only changing their attitudes, but the attitudes of his previously intimidated neighbors as well.

Lucy is a young gallery assistant who collects mementos from her relationships. She discovers that she must let go of her past to move forward, and comes up with a lovely, artistic way to help herself and others who have suffered heartbreak.

Banksy is a graffiti artist with a global reputation whose work can be seen on walls from post-hurricane New Orleans to the separation barrier on the Palestinian West Bank. Fiercely guarding his anonymity to avoid prosecution, Banksy has so far resisted all attempts to be captured on film. Exit Through the Gift Shop tells the incredible true story of how an eccentric French shop keeper turned documentary maker attempted to locate and befriend Banksy, only to have the artist turn the camera back on its owner.

The 100-year story of the iconic restaurant chain Horn & Hardart, the inspiration for Starbucks, where generations of Americans ate and drank coffee together at communal tables. From the perspective of former customers, we watch a business climb to its peak success and then grapple with fast food in a forever changed America.

Detroit’s story has encapsulated the iconic narrative of America over the last century – the Great Migration of African Americans escaping Jim Crow; the rise of manufacturing and the middle class; the love affair with automobiles; the flowering of the American dream; and now… the collapse of the economy and the fading American mythos.

From neighborhood ciphers to the most notorious MC battles, "Freestyle: the Art of Rhyme" captures the electrifying energy of improvisational hip-hop--the rarely recorded art form of rhyming spontaneously. Like preachers and jazz solos, freestyles exist only in the moment, a modern-day incarnation of the African-American storytelling tradition. Shot over a period of more than seven years, it is already an underground cult film in the hip-hop world. The film systematically debunks the false image put out by record companies that hip-hop culture is violent or money-obsessed. Instead, it lets real hip-hop artists, known and unknown, weave their story out of a passionate mix of language, politics, and spirituality.

A young artist in Manhattan falls in love with a Mexican.

The life and art of Christopher Pratt. 'Canada's most famous living painter' - The Globe & Mail. This is the first feature-length documentary that Christopher Pratt has agreed to participate in. An honest, funny, eloquent, bizarre, and sometimes unsettling account of his life and art, and an extremely important cultural document.

There has never been a documentary like "Land of Look Behind". Relatively unknown due to poor distribution and New York Film Festival skullduggery, this breathtaking film presents a unique epic vision with quasi-dramatic elements and cinematographic wizardry. The non-reggae original soundtrack is outstanding, as is the reggae music of Bob Marley and Gregory Isaacs. The great documentary filmmaker Werner Herzog has called "Look Behind" the non-fiction film that has influenced him most over the last fifteen years. Indeed, this film's peers are the best of Herzog, Bunuel's "Land Without Bread", Flaherty's "Nanook" and Leacock-Pennebaker's "Louisiana Story". With thoughtful viewing, one will see this moving documentary actually end with a lovely little dream sequence. No American has come close to making a film this ingenious in the last thirty years.

Make It Funky! tells the story of New Orleans through words, sound and picture in this extraordinary documentary featuring the best of New Orleans' musicians, plus special guests Ahmet Ertegun, Bonnie Raitt, and Keith Richards.

A film about the work of the artist most famous for her monuments such as the Vietnam Memorial Wall and the Civil Rights Fountain Memorial.

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.

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.

On the eve of his execution, a vice-rackets bigshot recalls his various exploits in crimes such as abortion and white slavery, in which he frequently operated under an alias.

A ramshackle underground SF satire set and shot in the self-absorbed art world of lower Manhattan, written, produced, and directed by Joe Gibbons, who also plays one of the lead parts. Gibbons plays a mad scientist who's developed a technique for transferring personalities from one person's body to another; he becomes obsessed with an outlaw artist (played by performance artist Karen Finley) who destroys paintings in various galleries as a form of anarchist, anticapitalist protest.

Exploring the pre-fame years of the celebrated American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, and how New York City, its people, and tectonically shifting arts culture of the late 1970s and '80s shaped his vision.

In 1955, Tobias Schneebaum disappeared into the depths of the Peruvian Amazon. He had no guide, no map, and only the vaguest of instructions: Keep the river on your right. A year later Schneebaum emerged from the jungle…naked, covered in body paint, and a modern-day cannibal. Titled after Schneebaum’s 1969 cult classic memoir about his formative experiences living in the Amazon, Keep The River On Your Right is the extraordinary stranger-than-fiction story of Schneebaum’s return to the jungle, 45 years after his original visit, to reunite with the very tribesmen he loved and who gave him nightmares for nearly half a century. A deeply affecting and searing portrait, sibling filmmakers Laurie and David Shapiro capture a man in utter conflict, a fearless adventurer, and one of the most charming, enigmatic, and perplexing men ever captured on screen.

A young artist is desperate for money to save his brother from the mob. Drawn into a criminal world of theft, betrayal and murder, his only way out is to get in even deeper. If he fails, it could cost him his life.

This candid New York love story explores the chaotic 40-year marriage of famed boxing painter Ushio Shinohara and his wife, Noriko. Anxious to shed her role as her overbearing husband's assistant, Noriko finds an identity of her own.

Blend of documentary and domestic melodrama featuring a series of sexually charged vignettes inspired by a piece of toilet graffiti.

Venturing from Venice Beach to Watts, Varda looks at the murals of LA as backdrop to and mirror of the city’s many cultures. She casts a curious eye on graffiti and photorealism, roller disco & gang violence, evangelical Christians, Hare Krishnas, artists, angels and ordinary Angelenos.

The life of internationally renowned artist and activist Nan Goldin is told through her slideshows, intimate interviews, ground-breaking photography, and rare footage of her personal fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the overdose crisis.

Crump directed the feature-length documentary film Black White + Gray: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff + Robert Mapplethorpe, which premiered in North America at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival and in Europe at Art Basel. It explores the influence curator Sam Wagstaff, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and musician/poet Patti Smith had on the 1970s art scene in New York City.

Inside The Mind of Leonardo is based on the artist’s private journals dating from the Italian Renaissance. With over 6,000 pages of handwritten notes and drawings, da Vinci’s private journals are the most comprehensive documents that chronicle the work of the world’s most renowned inventor, philosopher, painter and genius. Using this precious collection of writings and drawings to recount Da Vinci’s story in his own words, and combining them with stunning visual effects and 3D technology, we re-create the mindscape and ideas of mankind’s greatest polymath.

The film is a day in the life of a young artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat, who needs to raise money to reclaim the apartment from which he has been evicted. He wanders the downtown streets carrying a painting he hopes to sell, encountering friends, whose lives (and performances) we peek into.

Apathy, technology, paranoia, disease and medication. Meet Arin. Arin is a shy videographer who finds it too much to handle to go out and meet girls, so he sets up an account on meester.net. The flood of responses never comes, save for one email from Susan, a struggling artist who finds her job as a waitress stifling her creativity. Susan is also on the shy side and is seeking an alternative to the classic dating situation. When Arin and Susan finally meet, that alternative dating situation comes to life as the two refuse to communicate verbally with each other, wanting to avoid bs small talk.

A unique and compelling account of the day that changed the modern world, captured by ordinary people who chose to pick up their cameras and film that fateful day.

Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant's PBS documentary tracks the rise and fall of subway graffiti in New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Join Apollo 11 on its historic journey. The film seamlessly blends mission audio featuring conversations among Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins with new footage, NASA archive and stunning CGI to recreate the first moon landing.

In 1971, four college students got together to form a rock band. Since then, that certain band called Queen have released 26 albums and sold over 300 million records worldwide. The popularity of Freddie Mercury, Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon is stronger than ever 40 years on. But it was no bed of roses. No pleasure cruise. Queen had their share of kicks in the face, but they came through and this is how they did it, set against the backdrop of brilliant music and stunning live performances from every corner of the globe. In this film, for the first time, it is the band that tells their story. Featuring brand new interviews with the band and unseen archive footage (including their recently unearthed, first ever TV performance), it is a compelling story told with intelligence, wit, plenty of humor and painful honesty.

Go inside the chaos and courage of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York in "9/11", updated fifteen years later by the original filmmakers. As the only documentary footage from inside the Twin Towers, the film is a gripping minute-by-minute account of that harrowing day through the lens of French filmmakers and brothers, Gédéon and Jules Naudet, and firefighter James Hanlon. The 2016 edition features a new intro from Denis Leary, who is closely aligned with advocacy for first responders. The updated material focuses on the ongoing health issues that 9/11 firefighters have battled, and the inspiring stories of “legacy kids” — women and men who lost loved ones in the attack and have since become firefighters.

A documentary which shows, in great detail, the making of the 1985 Bernstein-conducted recording of the entire score of "West Side Story", featuring operatic stars.

This definitive music documentary, featuring a greatest hits soundtrack and bounty of classic performance clips, provides an inside look into how Swedish pop group ABBA's music was made, as the former members and various colleagues tell their story from pre-ABBA days onward.

A look at the feud between graffiti artists King Robbo and Banksy.

Tells the story of Nelson Sullivan who was the unofficial video documentary filmmaker of the late 1980s downtown New York nightlife and LGBTQ+ community, with extensive archival segments directed by Sullivan himself.

CHINA: A CENTURY OF REVOLUTION is a six-hour tour de force journey through the country's most tumultuous period. First televised on PBS, this award-winning documentary series presents an astonishingly candid view of a once-secret nation with rare archival footage, insightful historical commentary and stunning eyewitness accounts from citizens who struggled through China's most decisive century. Mao's death begins BORN UNDER THE RED FLAG, which follows the country's new leadership of Deng Xiaoping and its unlikely transformation into an extraordinary hybrid of communist-centralized politics with an ever-expanding free market economy.

Andrew Graham-Dixon explores the ancient Christian practice of preserving holy relics and the largely forgotten art form that went with it, the reliquary. Fragments of bone or fabric placed inside a bejewelled shrine, a sculpted golden head or even a life-sized silver hand were, and still are, objects of religious devotion believed to have the power to work miracles. The documentary features interviews with art historian Sister Wendy Beckett and Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum.

Hailed as the "Rembrandt of the Video Age," renowned American artist Bill Viola became the first contemporary artist ever to be featured in a one-man show at London's prestigious National Gallery. This documentary directed by Mark Kidel features rarely seen footage from Viola's own archive and in-depth interviews with the video maverick. Viola talks passionately about his life and the influences that have driven his artwork from the beginning.

This film tells the story of one of the greatest and most controversial conductors of the 20th Century. The Hungarian-born Georg Solti had huge drive, energy and ambition. A combination of willpower and extraordinary talent took him to the peak of musical power and prestige. This film includes remarkably candid interviews which Solti talked with great honesty about his life, challenges and achievements. It also includes new interviews with some of the artists and musicians who worked closely with him.

This documentary, made seven years after the death of legendary filmmaker and kinetic artist Len Lye, tells Lye's story: from being a young boy staring at the sun, to travels around the Pacific and life in New York. It includes excerpts from many of his films, and interviews with second wife Ann and biographer Roger Horrocks. Len Lye himself is often heard, outlining his ideas of the ‘old brain’ and how Māori and Aboriginal art influenced his work. The grandeur of his ideas are only matched by their scale, with steel sculptures designed to be "at least 20 foot high".

Two young kids in love, one young graffiti artist and the other a foster-child, find trouble on the mean streets on the other side of the river in New York City. Officer Charles Banks finds young Danny tagging subway cars and then catches Teiresa selling drugs for another mislead teen, Kirk. The officer, instead of turning both of them in, gives both teens a chance to make more of their lives together. Changing their ways turns out to be more challenging than first thought.

Adrift in the lush, nocturnal urban landscape of THE GRAFFITI ARTIST, Nick (Ruben Bansie-Snellman) is a post-modern urban hero asserting his anarchistic agenda on the endless maze of virgin exterior walls that comprise downtown Seattle and Portland. For this iconoclastic young visionary, the vast wall surfaces of deserted alleys and train yards are at once a daunting symbol of capitalist oppression and a texturally rich, seamless tableau ripe for exploitation to amplify his artistic dialectic of anger and rebellion.

When Jill Godmilow’s documentary Roy Cohn/Jack Smith premiered at the 1994 Toronto International Film Festival, the number of AIDS-related deaths was reaching an all-time high in the United States (over 270,000). In New York City, the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic, many artists and filmmakers were grappling with the disease. While Broadway was hosting the second part of Tony Kushner’s award-winning play Angels in America, downtown New Yorkers were fondly recalling another recent production, Ron Vawter’s one-man show Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, in which the actor, who died of AIDS in April 1994, performed two monologues, first as Cohn, the conservative lawyer, and secondly, as Smith, the flamboyant experimental filmmaker—both of whom died of AIDS-related causes in the late 1980s.

Laura, a gallery assistant and wannabe fine art photographer, is finally promised a spot in a Newcomer's Showcase - but only if she can get a reclusive artist, Shane, to premiere his newest photographs at the gallery.

His love of film began as an escape from a rocky childhood. From underdog to Hollywood legend, Sylvester Stallone tells his story in this documentary.

Gotham tells the true story of what happened in New York City during the twenty years from 1993 to 2013. How did a city with over 2200 murders, 93,000 violent robberies and 147,000 car thefts in 1990 become the capitol of the world a mere handful of years later? This feature documentary explores what happened during these decades, told by the people who did the hard work, some at great personal and professional cost.