Best movies like The Big Departure

A unique, carefully handpicked, selection of the best movies like The Big Departure Starring Sterling Hayden, Anne Wiazemsky, Gilles Raysse, Lucienne Hamon, and more. If you liked The Big Departure then you may also like: The Wild Man of the Navidad, Necropolis, The Other Side of the Underneath, Keyhole, L’Amour Fou and many more popular movies featured on this list. You can further filter the list even more or get a random selection from the list of similar movies, to make your selection even easier.

This is the only feature directed by the famed French painter and sculptor Martial Raysse. In keeping with the revolutionary spirit of the time, the movie has no plot to speak of and appears to have been largely made up on the spot. We follow the cat man into a bizarre fantasy universe presented in negative exposure that reverses color values (black is white and vice versa) and written words. The cat man steals a car and then picks up a young girl he promises to take to “Heaven.” Heaven turns out to be a country chateau inhabited by several more animal mask wearing weirdoes...

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The Wild Man of the Navidad

Based on the recently acquired journals of Texan Dale S. Rogers, this vintage horror tale debunks history books to tell the veracious, harrowing story of a rural Texas community whose residents were terrified for years by a mysterious creature inhabiting the nearby woods.

Necropolis

A surreal and disturbing distillation of Western Civilization, Necropolis is the unhinged vision of Italian director Franco Brocani. Pierre Clémenti is Attila the Hun, naked and on horseback, while Warhol superstar Viva is a drunken and abusive Countess Bathory. A pop pastiche for the psychedelic generation, Necropolis features a soundtrack by Gavin Bryars.

The Other Side of the Underneath

A surreal look at the schizophrenia of a group of girls in a therapy session.

Keyhole

Gangster and deadbeat dad, Ulysses Pick, embarks on an unusual journey through his home.

L’Amour Fou

Follows the dissolution of the marriage between Claire, an actress and Sebastien, her director.

Birds, Orphans and Fools

In the aftermath of war, two men and a woman begin acting more like children than adults, leading to tragedy.

5.7 / 10 1966 Drama
suggested by: solotraveler

Chelsea Girls

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.

Cosmos

Two young men seek the solitude of the country; their peace is disturbed when a set of random occurrences suggest to their susceptible minds a pattern with sinister meanings.

6.8 / 10 1985 Drama
suggested by: MoonlitMole

Hail Mary

A college student gets pregnant without having intercourse, affecting people close and unrelated to her in different ways.

6.2 / 10 1984 Drama
suggested by: SparklingStarfish

The Public Woman

An inexperienced young actress is invited to play a role in a film based on Dostoyevsky's 'The Possessed'. The film director, a Czech immigrant in Paris, takes over her life, and in a short time she is unable to draw the line between acting and reality. She winds up playing a real-life role posing as the dead wife of another Czech immigrant, who is manipulated by the filmmaker into commiting a political assassination.

Pleasantville

Geeky teenager David and his popular twin sister, Jennifer, get sucked into the black-and-white world of a 1950s TV sitcom called "Pleasantville," and find a world where everything is peachy keen all the time. But when Jennifer's modern attitude disrupts Pleasantville's peaceful but boring routine, she literally brings color into its life.

The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting

Two narrators, one seen and one unseen, discuss possible connections between a series of paintings. The on-screen narrator walks through three-dimensional reproductions of each painting, featuring real people, sometimes moving, in an effort to explain the series' significance.

The House

A moving world of spirits and ghosts, condemned to brush against one another without really meeting since they have all emerged from a single perpetual dream: that of a young man who no longer wants to wake up, immersed as he is in this world of fascinating spectres.

Lonesome Cowboys

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

The Three Trials

Catherine, a nun with a unique form of narcolepsy, attempts to lose herself in the worlds of religion, adolescent fantasy, and finally masochistic devotion to a man. Her husband, a plastic surgeon, has evolved from a yeti-like creature to accommodate her masochism with increasingly extreme and bizarre rituals. With an experimental and ground-breaking format, The Three Trials incorporates surreal narrative, music video, and abstract imagery. The viewer is left to interpret what is real, what is dream, and what is false narrative in this feverish, pitch-black comedy with a smorgasbord of sexual fetishes.

Eden and After

A group of French students are drawn into the psychological and sexual games of a mysterious man called Duchemin. Once they sample his "fear powder" the students experience a series of hallucinations.

Au Hasard Balthazar

The story of a donkey Balthazar as he is passed from owner to owner, some kind and some cruel but all with motivations beyond his understanding. Balthazar, whose life parallels that of his first keeper, Marie, is truly a beast of burden, suffering the sins of humankind. But despite his powerlessness, he accepts his fate nobly.

Final Portrait

Paris, 1964. The Swiss sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti, one of the most accomplished and respected artists of his generation, asks his friend, the American writer James Lord, to sit for a portrait, assuring him that it will take no longer than two or three hours, an afternoon at the most.

Blue

Against a plain, unchanging blue screen, a densely interwoven soundtrack of voices, sound effects and music attempt to convey a portrait of Derek Jarman's experiences with AIDS, both literally and allegorically, together with an exploration of the meanings associated with the colour blue.

5.5 / 10 2005 Drama Fantasy
suggested by: NighttimeNightingale

What Is It?

A young man journeys through a bizarre land inhabited by mentally impaired people, demons, and snails.

Eggshells

A group of hippie students in Austin, Texas move into an old big house in the woods. However, something else is there and it's influencing them.

The Blue Note

A look at the last few days of in the life of composer Frédéric Chopin's professional life.

Diamantino

A disgraced soccer star seeks redemption but is exploited by a variety of causes hoping to capitalize on his celebrity.

The Black Alley Cats

Wanting revenge on a street gang for a rape attack, four young girls get together, take kung-fu lessons, learn how to shoot, form a gang called the Black Alley Cats and search out the gang that attacked them.

L'Immortelle

A melancholy man meets a stunning, mysterious woman while he is traveling, and discovers she may or may not be involved in a prostitution ring. She disappears after their relationship lasts a few days, and though he searches for her, those around him pretend not to know who he is speaking of.

3.5 / 10 2018
suggested by: user933jkpbrutz

Frig

Frig — a film in three parts (Love, Shit and Sperm) — is an experimental drama beginning with the end of a love affair. Love and the resulting experience are presented as a metaphor that goes beyond the personal and into a deeper consideration of life’s cycles, ultimately becoming a reflection on life, death and rebirth. Opening with a personal poem and accompanied by fragmented images, the film plunge into Sade’s universe in “120 Days of Sodom” and charts the descent into one’s own, personal hell, revealing the hidden face of society.

Anti-Clock

A complex and fascinating experimental exploration of time and identity, Anti-Clock is a film of authentic, startling originality. Brilliantly mixing film and video techniques, Arden and Bond's paranoid, psychological surveillance study of a career gambler turned clairvoyant unstuck in time captures onscreen the anxieties that have infiltrated the consciousness of so many in Western society.

6.3 / 10 1979 Documentary
suggested by: NighttimeNightingale

New Old

"Chronicles of the Present Times" - An experimental trilogy comprising 'Visa De Censure No.X', 'Livre De Famille' and 'Anima Mundi'. New Old flows together footage from more than a decade of his wandering between scenes, sets, and drugs, an accelerated world tour through various iterations of the counterculture.

Ixe

“Ixe (written X and pronounced EEKS – as it is pronounced in French –, like a scream, a wound) is an imploded, crucified film. Made to be projected on four screens at once, X is drawn and quartered. At the four points of the compass, at the four ends of the cross, War, Sex, Religion and Drugs, the double exposures, the colliding glimpses the eye barely recognizes, the skilful repetitions of themes, remind us that Sex is also the war of bodies, and the pope, the Drug of the people. And the story of this young man, shooting up in order to experience all the horror of the world in front of his TV set, reminds us that the heroin orgy is indeed the subjective locus of the monsters of the modern unconscious.” - Guy Hocquenghem

4.8 / 10 1972 Comedy Drama
suggested by: trendspotter

What a Flash!

The producers of this French film took approximately 100 people, put them on a soundstage and had them improvise this film based on the premise that they are on a spaceship escaping from the dictators of earth and only have a few days to live. Improvisation is a dangerous art-form; unprepared amateurs invariably come up with gross caricatures when challenged to improvise. The actors' choices in this film include an allegorical pageant of the life of Jesus, a marriage, an orgy, and some genuinely affectionate moments. Nonetheless, as an experimental effort in large-group improvisation, the film is instructive. - Clarke Fountain, Rovi

In the Shadow of the Blue Rascal

300 kilos of heroin have disappeared in Necrocity, a city of terror—a city of night—where Captain Speed has a gang and the government hides the dead. An experimental crime film considered to be a landmark of Parisian underground cinema.

War Is Menstrual Envy

Set in a post-apocalyptic future, the story finds a handful of ragged survivors attempting to communicate with dolphins, while another cadre of survivors have made it their crusade to destroy all the world's religions.

Dreamwood

Dreamwood narrates the oniric quest of a modern argonaut in a mysterious island located somewhere on the borders of the unconscious.

Flesh of the Void

A visualization of what it could feel like if the act of dying was a truly horrible experience - a surreal trip through the deepest and most violent fears of the human condition.

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