Best movies like Manufactured Landscapes

A luxury cruise boat motors up the Yangtze - navigating the mythic waterway known in China simply as "The River." The Yangtze is about to be transformed by the biggest hydroelectric dam in history. At the river's edge - a young woman says goodbye to her family as the floodwaters rise towards their small homestead. The Three Gorges Dam - contested symbol of the Chinese economic miracle - provides the epic backdrop for Up the Yangtze, a dramatic feature documentary on life inside modern China.

Takes us to locations all around the US and shows us the heavy toll that modern technology is having on humans and the earth. The visual tone poem contains neither dialogue nor a vocalized narration: its tone is set by the juxtaposition of images and the exceptional music by Philip Glass.

A paralysingly beautiful documentary with a global vision—an odyssey through landscape and time—that attempts to capture the essence of life.

Fed up with mistreatment at the hands of both management and union brass, and coupled with financial hardships on each man's end, three auto assembly line workers hatch a plan to rob a safe at union headquarters.

1935 documentary about the hard working life of Welsh coal miners.

War photographer W. Eugene Smith travels back to Japan where he documents the devastating effect of mercury poisoning in coastal communities.

A Florida real estate developer and her captain lure investors to a property in the Everglades called Dreamland Shores, under false pretenses that the swampland will soon be developed. After the group arrives on a small island, they find it has been overrun by giant mutated ants, brought on by the dumping of toxic waste in the area.

Vivian Maier's photos were seemingly destined for obscurity, lost among the clutter of the countless objects she'd collected throughout her life. Instead these images have shaken the world of street photography and irrevocably changed the life of the man who brought them to the public eye. This film brings to life the interesting turns and travails of the improbable saga of John Maloof's discovery of Vivian Maier, unravelling this mysterious tale through her documentary films, photographs, odd collections and personal accounts from the people that knew her. What started as a blog to show her work quickly became a viral sensation in the photography world. Photos destined for the trash heap now line gallery exhibitions, a forthcoming book and this documentary film.

A pastor of a small church in upstate New York starts to spiral out of control after a soul-shaking encounter with an unstable environmental activist and his pregnant wife.

The Tramp struggles to live in modern industrial society with the help of a young homeless woman.

It is happening all across America-rural landowners wake up one day to find a lucrative offer from an energy company wanting to lease their property. Reason? The company hopes to tap into a reservoir dubbed the "Saudi Arabia of natural gas." Halliburton developed a way to get the gas out of the ground-a hydraulic drilling process called "fracking"-and suddenly America finds itself on the precipice of becoming an energy superpower.

Humanity’s ascent is often measured by the speed of progress. But what if progress is actually spiraling us downwards, towards collapse? Ronald Wright, whose best-seller, “A Short History Of Progress” inspired “Surviving Progress”, shows how past civilizations were destroyed by “progress traps”—alluring technologies and belief systems that serve immediate needs, but ransom the future. As pressure on the world’s resources accelerates and financial elites bankrupt nations, can our globally-entwined civilization escape a final, catastrophic progress trap? With potent images and illuminating insights from thinkers who have probed our genes, our brains, and our social behaviour, this requiem to progress-as-usual also poses a challenge: to prove that making apes smarter isn’t an evolutionary dead-end.

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.

PUMP is a documentary that tells the story of America’s addiction to oil, from its corporate conspiracy beginnings to its current monopoly today, and explains clearly and simply how we can end it — and finally win choice at the pump. Today, oil is our only option for transportation-fuel at the pump. Our exclusive use of it has drained our wallets, increased air pollution and sent our sons and daughters to war in faraway lands. PUMP shows how, through the use of a variety of replacement fuels, we will be able to fill up our cars — cheaper, cleaner and American made — and in the process create more jobs for a stronger, healthier economy. Narrated by Jason Bateman and featuring notable experts such as John Hofmeister former President of Shell Oil, and Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors, PUMP will forever change the way you think about your car — and the fuel that powers it.

This film documents the coal miners' strike against the Brookside Mine of the Eastover Mining Company in Harlan County, Kentucky in June, 1973. Eastovers refusal to sign a contract (when the miners joined with the United Mine Workers of America) led to the strike, which lasted more than a year and included violent battles between gun-toting company thugs/scabs and the picketing miners and their supportive women-folk. Director Barbara Kopple puts the strike into perspective by giving us some background on the historical plight of the miners and some history of the UMWA.

Shot in documentary style from the perspective of an almost alien observer, the film is an exploration of the ravaged oil fields of post-Gulf War Kuwait. An effective companion to his earlier film Fata Morgana, Herzog again perceives the desert as a landscape with its own voice, as he glides over seas of oil, geyser-like infernos, monstrous smoke plumes and ashen roadways. With musical accompaniment by Wagner, Prokofiev and Pärt to boot, he observes the soot-covered creatures allured by the blaze.

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.

An exploration of technologically developing nations and the effect the transition to Western-style modernization has had on them.

Toxic waste has contaminated the world's fresh water supply. A select few with the ability to de-contaminate the supply now control the world. Minna rules the de-contaminators from a giant warship, forcing desperate land dwellers to trade anything and everything for meager water rations. The dwellers seek a leader to battle Minna's tyrannical rule. Jennifer, daughter of the rebel leader, implores outcast Mike Erikson to lead the battle against the warship. Help also comes from an unexpected source in the from of Jennifer's brother Rocky.

An uplifting feature documentary highlighting the transformative power of art and the beauty of the human spirit. Top-selling contemporary artist Vik Muniz takes us on an emotional journey from Jardim Gramacho, the world's largest landfill on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, to the heights of international art stardom. Vik collaborates with the brilliant catadores, pickers of recyclable materials, true Shakespearean characters who live and work in the garbage quoting Machiavelli and showing us how to recycle ourselves.

Documentary on psychedelic potash mines, expansive concrete seawalls, mammoth industrial machines, and other examples of humanity’s massive, destructive reengineering of the planet.

Biosludged reveals how the EPA is committing science fraud to allow the ongoing poisoning of our world with toxic sewage sludge that's being spread on food crops. Features former top government scientist and EPA whistleblower Dr. David Lewis.

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.

An oil baron and a farmer standoff after the water on his farm is poisoned by her company.

From the acclaimed director of American Movie, the documentary follows former Los Angeles police officer turned independent reporter Michael Ruppert. He recounts his career as a radical thinker and spells out his apocalyptic vision of the future, spanning the crises in economics, energy, environment and more.

A team of terrorist-fighting Naval officers in the South China Sea finds their struggle against the enemy taking a backseat to the fight of their lives when an horde of creatures thought to be extinct for millions of years descend upon them in an action-packed tale of man-versus-monster starring Steven Bauer and Lorenzo Lamas.

Meet France’s mysterious master of photography, neglected in his own lifetime but since feted for helping position the medium as an art form, and as an inspiration to surrealists. This meditative Arts Council documentary introduces Eugène Atget, a former actor who began to document the streets of old Paris from the 1890s. Little is known about his early life and the three decades he spent capturing, in eerie tableaux, urban spaces since lost to progress. The film includes dramatised scenes from his life, including his belated ‘discovery’ by American photographers Man Ray and Berenice Abbott, who published many of Atget’s works after his death in 1927.

Experts say over the next hundred years the "perfect storm" of population growth, resource depletion and climate change could converge with catastrophic results. The scenarios in Earth 2100 are not a prediction of what will happen but rather a warning about what might happen.

Follow ocean legend Sylvia Earle, renowned underwater National Geographic photographer Brian Skerry, writer Max Kennedy and their crew of teenage aquanauts on a year-long quest to deploy science and photography to inspire President Obama to establish new Blue Parks to protect essential habitats across an unseen American Wilderness.

Documentary telling the story of the shale oil industry and its lasting impact on the community of West Lothian. Presented by geologist Professor Iain Stewart.

Engineer Jem Stansfield is used to creating explosions, but in this programme he uncovers the story of how we have learnt to control them and harness their power for our own means. From recreating a rather dramatic ancient Chinese alchemy accident to splitting an atom in his own home-built replica of a 1930s piece of equipment, Jem reveals how explosives work and how we have used their power throughout history. He goes underground to show how gunpowder was used in the mines of Cornwall, recreates the first test of guncotton in a quarry with dramatic results and visits a modern high explosives factory with a noble history. Ground-breaking high speed photography makes for some startling revelations at every step of the way.

Looks at the work of Brazilian photojournalist Sebastiao Salgado (b.1944). In his monumental photo-essay, Workers, Salgado’s dominant theme is the displacement of manual labor by technological advances. He documents the effects of this new industrial revolution on laborers in Eastern Europe, Cuba, Gdansk, Brazil, India, Sicily, and Bangladesh. Includes archival footage of Salgado’s life and commentary by artists, photographers, critics, and writers such as Jorge Armado, Robert Delpire, Jimmy Fox, and Arthur Miller.

An intimate examination of a contemporary artist couple, whose living and working patterns are threatened by the imminent sale of their home.

In post-industrial Ohio, a Chinese billionaire opens a new factory in the husk of an abandoned General Motors plant, hiring two thousand blue-collar Americans. Early days of hope and optimism give way to setbacks as high-tech China clashes with working-class America.

When National Geographic photographer James Balog asked, “How can one take a picture of climate change?” his attention was immediately drawn to ice. Soon he was asked to do a cover story on glaciers that became the most popular and well-read piece in the magazine during the last five years. But for Balog, that story marked the beginning of a much larger and longer-term project that would reach epic proportions.