Best Idiosyncratic Movies & TV Shows

Offbeat documentarian Chris Smith provides a behind-the-scenes look at how Jim Carrey adopted the persona of idiosyncratic comedian Andy Kaufman on the set of Man on the Moon.

A brilliant but idiosyncratic British detective and his resourceful local team solve baffling murder mysteries on the fictional Caribbean island of Saint-Marie.

Former Sergeant Diogenes Hernandez owns the Universal, a precarious detective agency private in the Centre of Bogotá, which is based in the same apartment where he and his wife Fabiola inhabit. His nephew, Clemente Fernández, who works at the Agency, maintains a romance with Fabiola, without trying to hurt the feelings of his uncle, but driven by the need to alleviate their empty urban and anonymous man.

Unencumbered by wives, jobs or any other responsibilities, three senior citizens who've never really grown up explore their world in the Yorkshire Dales. They spend their days speculating about their fellow townsfolk and thinking up adventures not usually favored by the elderly. Last of the Summer Wine premiered as an episode of Comedy Playhouse in 1973. The show ran for 295 episodes until 2010. It is the longest running comedy Britain has produced and the longest running sitcom in the world.

The Ryries have suffered a loss: the death of a baby just fifty-seven hours after his birth. Without words to express their grief, the parents, John and Ricky, try to return to their previous lives. The couple's children, ten-year-old Biscuit and thirteen-year-old Paul, responding to the unnamed tensions around them, begin to act out in exquisitely idiosyncratic ways. But as the family members scatter into private, isolating grief, an unexpected visitor arrives, and they find themselves growing more alert to the hurt, humor, warmth, and burdens of others—to the grief that is part of every human life but that also carries within it the power to draw us together.

The story of the conception of a new British weapon for smashing the German dams in the Ruhr industrial complex and the execution of the raid by 617 Squadron 'The Dam Busters'.

Olive, an average high school student, sees her below-the-radar existence turn around overnight once she decides to use the school's gossip grapevine to advance her social standing. Now her classmates are turning against her and the school board is becoming concerned, including her favorite teacher and the distracted guidance counselor. With the support of her hilariously idiosyncratic parents and a little help from a long-time crush, Olive attempts to take on her notorious new identity and crush the rumor mill once and for all.

Idiosyncratic new recruit Francis "Ike" Farrell tries to help the Cubs to the pennant with his pitching and hitting.

A private investigator helps a former flame solve the murder of her wealthy grandfather, who lived in a sprawling estate surrounded by his idiosyncratic family.

From the first time he performed Swimming to Cambodia - the one-man account of his experience of making the 1984 film The Killing Fields - Spalding Gray made the art of the monologue his own. Drawing unstintingly on the most intimate aspects of his own life, his shows were vibrant, hilarious and moving. His death came tragically early, in 2004; this compilation of interview and performance footage nails his idiosyncratic and irreplaceable brilliance.

A teenage girl tries to deal with her idiosyncratic, Luis Buñel-esque family while putting up with the pressures of everyday life, which turns out to be more difficult than it seems.

Aging Major Palgrave, an idiosyncratic but charming mystery writer, reveals to Miss Jane Marple that one of the guests at a luxurious Caribbean resort they're staying at is a Bluebeard-type wife murderer. Unfortunately, the Major succumbs to an apparently accidental overdose of alcohol and blood pressure medication before revealing the killer's identity. When it's discovered that the medicine belonged to another guest and the revealing photograph the Major was carrying is missing, Miss Marple realizes that the serial killer has struck again and more murders will follow.

After botching the capture of a notorious serial killer, idiosyncratic detective Michael Burrows loses his job with the San Francisco Police. He becomes an investigator for an insurance company and joins forces with a cynical field agent to probe suspicious and unusual deaths.

From America's greatest beardsman, to Morgan Spurlock's own mustache, Executive Producers Will Arnett, Jason Bateman and Ben Silverman bring us a hilarious look at men's identity in the 21st century. Models, actors, experts and comedians weigh in on what it is to be a man in a world where the definition of masculinity has become as diverse as a hipster's facial hair in Williamsburg. The hilarious follicles of men's idiosyncratic grooming habits are thoroughly combed over as men finally take a long hard look in the mirror.

Randy Quaid as the taxi driver drives Zen parables (Is time money - Is time the root of all evil?) into his passenger/protegee in a high-speed, idiosyncratic tour of their city's ethnic coteries. All the boy wants is to dispose of his date's dead dog Jasper and get back to the babe who's so hot she mutters darkly about being a Pressure Cooker: his conventional efforts are continually thwarted. Quaid is respected by the peculiar groups he interests in the dog's corpse and effects, and our one-gloved heroine is much keener on him than on her rather lackluster date.

Privilege is an intelligently conceived, boldly anarchic, and wickedly insightful exposition on the culturally ingrained and socially divisive malaise of isms that artificially define and characterize empowerment in contemporary society: ageism, sexism, economic elitism, and racism. Yvonne Rainer conveys texture through the intercutting of archival footage, video, and film - as well as compositional layering through the film-within-a-film structure, elliptical (and self-referential) fusion of past and present, and the filmmaker's idiosyncratic penchant for superimposed typed text.

Documentary on the idiosyncratic, eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes utilizes rare archive footage and interviews with associates to shed light on the Hughes enigma.