Best movies like Playback

Using edited archive footage, mockery is made of Italy's dictator Benito Mussolini.

Recorded at the breathtakingly beautiful Red Rocks Amphitheater in Colorado in 1983, this concert features Irish rock sensation U2 and front man Bono in their early glory days. Including five previously unreleased songs and a director's commentary.

A Film Journey to the Soul of India documents the life of sitar master Ravi Shankar in the late 1960s and early 1970s, following him on his return to India to revisit his guru, Bengali multi-instrumentalist and composer, Baba Ustad Allauddin Khan. It further explores Shankar's life as a musician and teacher in the United States and Europe, initiating those in the West to the exceptional world that is Indian classical music and culture. Through rare and candid footage shot in both India and the United States, Raga sheds light on Shankar's influences and collaborations, from Allauddin Khan to his famed dancer brother Uday Shankar, to his associations with Western musicians Yehudi Menuhin and George Harrison. Fully narrated by Shankar himself, the film reveals music as the soul of India and of Shankar's life.

A lyrical portrait of Amsterdam and its changing appearance during a rain-shower.

In 1922 the first documentary in the genre sense came on the big screen, "Nanook of the North" (1922). Kabloonak is the story of the making of this movie for which the story was partially staged by his director 'Robert Flaherty'.

A young golfer is mugged by an escaped convict and finds himself in a prison where he foils a jailbreak.

Short documentary about 50 years of history of Czechoslovakia, with archive images.

The true history of a collection of some 500 films dating from 1910s to 1920s, which were lost for over 50 years until being discovered buried in a sub-arctic swimming pool deep in the Yukon Territory, in Dawson City, located about 350 miles south of the Arctic Circle.

After his lover rejects him, a young man in early 20th century England, trapped by the oppressiveness of Edwardian society, tries to come to terms with and accept his sexuality.

Cartoon figures announce, via comic strip balloons, that they will move - and move they do, in a wildly exaggerated style. Also known as "Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics".

Live at the Aladdin Las Vegas is a 2003 direct to video film of Prince in concert at the Aladdin Theatre for the Performing Arts. The concert was recorded December 12, 2002, and features several notable cover versions, an unreleased song and touches on some of his rarely performed backlog of material. Special guests included former band associates, Eric Leeds and Sheila E., funk legends Maceo Parker and Greg Boyer, as well as Nikka Costa. The soundcheck contains an excerpt of "The Rainbow Children" from the album of the same name and "Nagoya" from C-Note.

Made in wartime and edited in candlelight, Mikhail Vartanov's rarely-seen masterpiece tells about his friendship with the genius Sergei Parajanov who was imprisoned by KGB "at the peak of his artistic power". Vartanov takes us back with the scenes from his censored 1969 film The Color of Armenian Land where Paradjanov is at work on his suppressed chef-d'oeuvre The Color of Pomegranates - widely regarded as one of the greatest films of all time - and contrasts it with the shocking request Parajanov sent him in unpublished 1974 letters from the Soviet prisons. Vartanov's camera documents Parajanov's striking last day at work in 1990 during the making of the unfinished Confession. A monumental wordless montage - the entire sixth reel - concludes Vartanov's acclaimed documentary, which, despite the prohibitive conditions it was created in, won the admiration of many of cinema's greatest artists, including Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese.

The fascinations of filmmaker Peter Greenaway, whose motto is "art is life and life is art,"are captured like butterflies and arranged in an alphabet, a form that suits him perfectly as an encyclopedist. In intimate conversations with his perceptive 16-year-old daughter Zoë, we discover the whos, whats and whys about Greenaway.

A documentary about the life of Carl Laemmle, early cinema pioneer and founder of Universal Studios, documenting his life in Hollywood and his efforts in the 1930s to save Jewish families in Nazi Germany.

When a young war vet returns home from Afghanistan, he struggles to find joy in the life he once knew. As he comes close to giving up all hope, his guardian angel pays a visit to show him there’s more meaning to his life than he’s ever known.

Leon Bronstein is not your average Montreal West high school student. For one thing, none of his peers can claim to be the reincarnation of early 20th century Soviet iconoclast and Red Army hero, Leon Trotsky. When his father sends Leon to public school as punishment for starting a hunger strike at Papa's clothing factory, Leon quickly lends new meaning to the term 'student union', determined as he is to live out his pre-ordained destiny to the fullest and change the world.

Monsters once lived in hiding—even from each other—because they were afraid they would be in danger if humans knew they existed. But Draculaura, the daughter of Dracula, along with her best ghoulfriends, dreamt of a school where everyone was welcome and accepted for who they are. Determined to make their dream come true, the ghouls travel the world on an epic adventure to recruit new students. But even in this amazing place, there's drama: a villainess zombie is spreading trouble rather than friendship, and every student must live with the fear that their secret will be revealed. Now the ghouls must save their school so that every monster has a place where they belong and their uniqueness is celebrated!

This documentary highlights the historical contexts that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender individuals have occupied in cinema history, and shows the evolution of the entertainment industry's role in shaping perceptions of LGBT figures. The issues addressed include secrecy – which initially defined homosexuality – as well as the demonization of the homosexual community with the advent of AIDS, and finally the shift toward acceptance and positivity in the modern era.

Since the invention of cinema, the standard format for recording moving images has been film. Over the past two decades, a new form of digital filmmaking has emerged, creating a groundbreaking evolution in the medium. Keanu Reeves explores the development of cinema and the impact of digital filmmaking via in-depth interviews with Hollywood masters, such as James Cameron, David Fincher, David Lynch, Christopher Nolan, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, Steven Soderbergh, and many more.

A gambling hall owner relocates from New Orleans to Chicago and entertains his patrons with hot jazz by Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Woody Herman, and others.

In the year 2070, Caulder Benson is a government archivist officer charged by an increasingly invasive and restrictive government to destroy all elements and remnants of his society's self-indulgent and avaricious past.

In honor of the twentieth anniversary of Andrei Tarkovsky's death, student filmmaker Dmitry Tarkovsky sets out in search of his favorite director's legacy. His journey leads him to fifteen moving interviews in California, Italy, Sweden, and finally, Russia as he attempts to come closer to the meaning of one of Tarkovsky's most enigmatic beliefs... that death doesn't exist.

A rare look at the the career of film director Pedro Almodóvar, especially his early works, with interviews with the director himself and his stars and admirers.

This Pirates of Penzance is primarily a historical document, part of the Broadway Theater Archive television series. It presents, with some inevitable, tiny technical shortcomings, a live 1980 performance in Central Park, not the 1983 movie of the same name that also starred Linda Ronstadt and Kevin Kline. Those who remember that film, which had the benefit of retakes and editing, a lavish production budget, and the spaciousness of a Hollywood studio, may find this video less polished. On its own terms, it is nonetheless thoroughly enjoyable.

A woman accidentally discovers the Plaque of Kolob which leads her to discover an insidous alien plot for world domination documented by a disreputable early Mormon prophet. 'Plan 10 from Outer Space' is an eccentric comedy involving a bizarre relationship between Mormons, bees and extra terrestrials. Shot on an obviously miniscule budget with a largely unknown cast, save for b-grade queen Karen Black, this is the perfect example of an inventive and original script outshining technical shortcomings.

The first half century of Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation from its beginnings under Hungarian immigrant William Fox to it emergence as a major studio.

Through ten carefully chosen cover versions that whisk us from the British Invasion to a noughties X Factor final, this film journeys over five decades to track how artists as varied as The Moody Blues, Soft Cell, Puff Daddy and Alexandra Burke have scored number 1s with their retake on someone else's song. Each of the ten classic cover versions has its own particular tale, tied not only into its musical and cultural context but also the personal testimony of the artists, producers and songwriters whose lives were changed in the process.

A Night at the Movies: The Gigantic World of Epics looks at Hollywood’s biggest screen spectaculars from all sides, including the genre’s beginnings, literary adaptations, great epic directors and actors, the challenges of making big-budget movies, classic set-pieces and epic music scores. The special also looks at how the genre fell out of favor with audiences and filmmakers in the ‘70s and ‘80s, only to be reborn with more recent films like Gladiator, and Dances with Wolves trilogy. Throughout, the special is packed with classic scenes and behind-the-scenes images from such films as The Birth of a Nation (1915), Gone With the Wind (1939), Samson & Delilah (1949), The Ten Commandments (1956), Ben-Hur (1959), El Cid (1961), King of Kings (1961), Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965).

The first ever comprehensive history of animation worldwide. Animated with hosts created by Bill Plympton, this films includes over 160 films from 26 countries.

1860 ushers in the era of iron ships, Richard Sibley, a builder of wooden ships, stubbornly resists the change, which leads him to forbid the marriage of his daughter Rose to John Rhead, a proponent of the new method. This injustice outrages John's sister Gertrude so much that she breaks off her engagement to Sibley's son Sam. Meanwhile, John and Rose elope.

Angelos Papanastassiou, the man behind the camera, a story of a Greek patrician of WW2 times Athens. In the very first days of the Nazi occupation Angelos decided to record and document the Greece motherland's sufferings. Using a clandestine 16-mm film camera risking daily his own, and his families life, filmed, documented the Nazi atrocities in Athens all through the German-Italian occupation. Meanwhile his daughter, Loukia was born and we follow her first steps as the family life images juxtaposed over the tragic chapter of modern Greek history. Angelos Papanastassiou secretly developed, edited and saved the films, which later become one of the principal evidence of the Nazi atrocities at the Nuremberg Trials 1947. The Angelos’ Film composed from a unique film journal of wartime Athens and offers a new insight to Greece’s past, with the music of Tibor Szemzõ.

The life of Irishman George Howard who buys an English theatre and strives to improve the standard of musical entertainment. Set in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and loosely based on fact.

A ship was found drifting with its crew massacred on the coast of the Gaspé ... It's consternation! In the process, an ambitious journalist, helped a young museum professional archivist rather shy and sedentary, discovers that a collector of maritime objects with dubious intentions may be linked to this terrible story. Then begins a race against time to find out who is this mysterious diver decimating everything in its path to achieve its goals and recover valuable documents looted the wreck of the "Princess of the North", where he found death, 100 years ago ...

Why are we still able, today, to view images that were captured over 125 years ago? As we enter the digital age, audiovisual heritage seems to be a sure and obvious fact. However, much of cinema and our filmed history has been lost forever. Archivists, technicians and filmmakers from different parts of the world explain what audiovisual preservation is and why it is necessary. The documentary is a tribute to all these professionals and their important work.

An intimate and moving portrait of one of the most remarkable women in American history. It is the story of a lonely, unhappy child who became the most admired and respected woman in the world. Richard Kaplan's lively documentary reveals the human face behind the American icon, beginning with the emotional deprivation suffered by this plain, awkward little girl born into a socially prominent and powerful family. Though she would eventually marry a man who would look beyond her awkwardness, Eleanor was not content to be the proper, silent wife to her husband Franklin's extraordinary political career. Instead, she began a lifelong crusade to speak out about injustice and oppression in any form. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2006.