Best movies like Normal Love

An epic portrait of the New York avant-garde art scene of the 60s.

In 1967, New York City is host to the Miss All-American Camp Beauty Pageant. This documentary takes a look behind the scenes, transporting the viewer into rehearsals and dressing rooms as the drag queen subculture prepares for this big national beauty contest. Jack/Sabrina is the mistress of ceremonies, and their protégé, Miss Harlow, is in the competition. But, as the pageant approaches, the glamorous contestants veer from camaraderie to tension.

Shot in France, England, Switzerland and the United States, this documentary covers director Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo, Holy Mountain, Santa Sangre) and his 1974 Quixotic attempt to adapt the seminal sci-fi novel Dune into a feature film. After spending 2 years and millions of dollars, the massive undertaking eventually fell apart, but the artists Jodorowsky assembled for the legendary project continued to work together. This group of artists, or his “warriors” as Jodorowsky named them, went on to define modern sci-fi cinema with such films as Alien, Blade Runner, Star Wars and Total Recall.

In 1933 New York, an overly ambitious movie producer coerces his cast and hired ship crew to travel to mysterious Skull Island, where they encounter Kong, a giant ape who is immediately smitten with the leading lady.

A rash of bizarre murders in New York City seems to point to a group of grotesquely deformed vagrants living in the sewers. A courageous policeman, a photo journalist and his girlfriend, and a nutty bum, who seems to know a lot about the creatures, band together to try and determine what the creatures are and how to stop them.

Shot at Warhol's Silver Factory, Camp features a group of Superstars putting on a "summer camp" talent show complete with singing, dancing, jokes, poetry, and Gerard Malanga as master of ceremonies.

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.

Harlem's legendary Cotton Club becomes a hotbed of passion and violence as the lives and loves of entertainers and gangsters collide.

Greedy sailors capture a giant lizard off the coast of Ireland and sell it to a London circus. Then its mother shows up.

Warren Nefron is a hopeless klutz who has some of the worst luck in the world: when he tries to end it all with a foolproof suicide plan, he still manages to mess it up. In desperation, he goes to a psychiatrist to see if there is some way for him to end his troubles.

During the summer of 1981, a group of friends in New York are completely unprepared for the onslaught of AIDS. What starts as a rumor about a mysterious "gay cancer" soon turns into a major crisis as, one by one, some of the friends begin to fall ill, leaving the others to panic about who will be next. As death takes its toll, the lives of these friends are forever redefined by an unconditional display of love, hope and courage.

Retired commander of the United Nations' Intelligence Taskforce, and long-time associate of the mysterious time traveler the Doctor, Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart faces the toughest battle of his military career when he is embroiled in a plot unwittingly set in motion by university chancellor Victoria Waterfield, herself a former companion of the Doctor, to take over the Earth by an evil alien entity called the Great Intelligence, aided by its ferocious robot Yeti cohorts. Can the Brigadier defeat this menace to the Earth without the Doctor's help?

While shooting a documentary on the suspicious disappearances within the homeless community, a filmmaker and his crew go missing while uncovering a terrifying and vicious secret below the city's surface.

Adventurous filmmaker, Carl Denham, sets out to produce a motion picture unlike anything the world has seen before. Alongside his leading lady Ann Darrow and his first mate Jack Driscoll, they arrive on an island and discover a legendary creature said to be neither beast nor man. Denham captures the monster to displayed on Broadway as Kong, the eighth wonder of the world.

A projectionist bored with his everyday life begins fantasizing about his being one of the superheroes he sees in the movies he shows.

A young female intern at a small magazine company becomes involved with a drug-addicted lesbian photographer, both of whom seek to exploit each other for their respective careers, while slowly falling in love with each other.

Gladys Glover has just lost her modeling job when she meets filmmaker Pete Sheppard shooting a documentary in Central Park. For Pete it's love at first sight, but Gladys has her mind on other things, making a name for herself. Through a fluke of advertising she winds up with her name plastered over 10 billboards throughout city.

Five lonesome cowboys get all hot and bothered at home on the range after confronting Ramona Alvarez and her nurse.

While vacationing at a boys' camp, the rambunctious Chip Winters befriends a famed composer Johnny Selden. Stuck for an inspiration for his latest operetta, Selden at last finds it when he meets Chip's gorgeous mother Irene Winters, a popular singer. Alas, her stiff-necked fiancé Walter Mays refuses to allow her to return to the stage, whereupon Rathbone spirals into a depression -- and even worse, a profound case of writers' block.

Legendary New York graffiti artist Lee Quinones plays the part of Zoro, the city's hottest and most elusive graffiti writer. The actual story of the movie concerns the tension between Zoro's passion for his art and his personal life, particularly his strained relationship with fellow artist Rose.

Traces the Beats from Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac's meeting in 1944 at Columbia University to the deaths of Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs in 1997. Three actors provide dramatic interpretations of the work of these three writers, and the film chronicles their friendships, their arrival into American consciousness, their travels, frequent parodies, Kerouac's death, and Ginsberg's politicization. Their movement connects with bebop, John Cage's music, abstract expressionism, and living theater. In recent interviews, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Kesey, Ferlinghetti, Mailer, Jerry Garcia, Tom Hayden, Gary Snyder, Ed Sanders, and others measure the Beats' meaning and impact.

Biography of the legendary filmmaker directed by his son.

Connie Hayward mounts an expedition into the Himalayan Mountains looking for her brother, who has not returned from a previous trek trying to locate the Yeti, or "Abominable Snowman". Arriving at her brother's last-known camp Connie and her companions find only a strange old guide, Varga. They are soon attacked by gigantic Snowmen but are not half as surprised as when Vargas reveals his secret origin and the plans he has for Connie.

An unsuccessful playwright faces trials and tribulations as he seeks to find himself in New York City.

Filmmaker and artist Jack Smith described his own film as a “comedy set in a haunted movie studio.” Flaming Creatures begins humorously enough with several men and women, mostly of indeterminate gender, vamping it up in front of the camera and participating in a mock advertisement for an indelible, heart-shaped brand of lipstick. However, things take a dark, nightmarish turn when a transvestite chases, catches and begins molesting a woman. Soon, all of the titular “creatures” participate in a (mostly clothed) orgy that causes a massive earthquake. After the creatures are killed in the resulting chaos, a vampire dressed like an old Hollywood starlet rises from her coffin to resurrect the dead. All ends happily enough when the now undead creatures dance with each other, even though another orgy and earthquake loom over the end title card.

Alexis, Sylvia and Ellen are a trio of legendary scream queens. After the head of a motion picture studio invites them out to a very special screening in exchange for the possibility of a lead role in an upcoming horror film, the three women slowly become suspicious... not only of their circumstances, but also each other. They begin to realize that the horrific footage they are watching might be real and that they might be trapped in the deserted studio with a bonafide killer.

Abigail Chandler has written her stuffy Boston relatives that she's a successful opera singer in New York. In reality, she works at a burlesque house and is billed as High-C Susie. When her sister Martha comes for a visit, Abigail tries to hide the truth from her.

WORDS AND MUSIC is the story of one of Broadway's iconic figures: the composer/lyricist of Hello, Dolly!, Mame and La Cage aux Folles. Jerry Herman and an all-star cast, chart his rise from 1950s off-Broadway through all of his smash hits. Featuring never-before-seen footage of original stage performances, and a score full of classic show tunes.

The story of a young gay man's search to find himself. David is a young, gay aspiring documentary filmmaker and takes his first tentative steps towards his adult life. His roommate, Gwen, after ending a mysterious marriage, is looking for stability. Together they try to manoeuvre their way through New York on a search for happiness. Instead, they find bad dates, worse job interviews and bizarre sexual encounters.

A feature film comprised of 24 short stories THE COLLECTION was made by filmmaker Bruno de Almeida and a group of new york city actors and writers from May 2001 to December 2005 under a project called the DV Workshop. Shot with a digital camera and edited on a home computer these films were shown on this website as they were being made, as a work in progress. The project came to it's conclusion on December 2005 with screenings in New York City and Lisbon.

Creature of habit, Jon Smith, spends his days mindlessly working as a barista in New York City. When night falls, this seeming everyman savagely kills "filthy women" as his social outlet. A chance encounter with Delia, a young prostitute searching for an escape from her troubled past, forces Jon to confront the most terrifying thing he has ever faced in all his dark affairs - himself. All God's Creatures examines the true nature of what it means to be a monster and reveals that love is not only for a chosen few, but for all God's creatures.

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.

After finding a mysterious film reel hidden in their ceiling, the well-meaning staff of a struggling movie theater assume that the film is an old B-movie preview trailer and play it before a midnight screening of the timeless George A. Romero masterpiece, 'Night of the Living Dead'. When the film is revealed to be a long-dead Nazi scientist's mind control experiment, their audience of horror movie fanatics is transformed into a mob of mindless zombies with a fierce hunger for the flesh of the living! Ten survivors struggle to stay alive as the cinema is overrun by shambling hordes of the undead, while outside, ruthless government agents plot to halt the spread of the mysterious outbreak by any means necessary. Sometimes creepy, sometimes campy, 'Dead at the Box Office' pays tribute to the low budget horror films of the '70s and '80s. Combining the elements of these "B" classics with a fresh twist on the zombie origin, 'Dead at the Box Office' is a tongue-in-cheek salute to horror fans.

An underground city is built to save a cross-section of humanity as a comet hurtles toward Earth.

Featuring a cast that includes Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, Mike Watt of the legendary hardcore band Minutemen, and Pettibon himself, this deadpan narrative pays dubious homage to the 1960's radical underground. In this crudely rendered home video of a commune of stoned revolutionaries, the cameras are hand-held, the edits in-camera, and the dialogue is wryly on-target. Pettibon's band of outsiders reenacts a countercultural moment defined by rock music, drugs, and ideological paradox — and in so doing, captures their own late-80's West Coast grunge milieu as well.