Best movies like Toyen

The Universal Language is a new documentary from Academy Award-nominated director Sam Green (The Weather Underground). This 30-minute film traces the history of Esperanto, an artificial language that was created in the late 1800s by a Polish eye doctor who believed that if everyone in the world spoke a common tongue, humanity could overcome racism and war. Fittingly, the word “Esperanto” means “one who hopes.” During the early 20th century, hundreds of thousands of people around the world spoke Esperanto and believed in its ideals. Today, surprisingly, a vibrant Esperanto movement still exists. In this first-ever documentary about Esperanto, Green creates a portrait of the language and those who speak it today that is at once humorous, poignant, stirring, and ultimately hopeful.

A fashionable contemporary art gallerist in Chelsea, New York falls for a brooding new music composer in this comic satire of the state of contemporary art.

The tragic story of Vincent van Gogh broadened by focusing as well on his brother Theodore, who helped support Vincent. Based on the letters written between the two.

An extravagant, exotic and moving look at Rembrandt's romantic and professional life, and the controversy he created by the identification of a murderer in the painting The Night Watch.

A portrait of Austrian artist Gustav Klimt whose lavish, sexual paintings came to symbolize the art nouveau style of the late 19th and early 20th century.

Now one of the world’s most celebrated artists, Yayoi Kusama broke free of the rigid society in which she was raised, and overcame sexism, racism, and mental illness to bring her artistic vision to the world stage. At 88 she lives in a mental hospital and continues to create art.

In December 1941, Czech soldiers Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš parachute into their occupied homeland to assassinate Nazi officer Reinhard Heydrich.

The story of Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1653), one of the first well-known female painters, including her youth, when she was guided and protected by her father, the painter Orazio Gentileschi.

The former famous painter Frenhofer lives quietly with his wife on a countryside residence in the French Provence. When the young artist Nicolas visits him with his girlfriend Marianne, Frenhofer decides to start again the work on a painting he long ago stopped: La Belle Noiseuse. And he wants Marianne as model.

Young female models are being strangled. Will law enforcement be able to stop the crime wave before more women become victims?

After a painful breakup, Ben develops insomnia. To kill time, he starts working the late night shift at the local supermarket, where his artistic imagination runs wild.

The true story of Charlotte Salomon, a young German-Jewish painter who comes of age in Berlin on the eve of the Second World War. Fiercely imaginative and deeply gifted, she dreams of becoming an artist. Her first love applauds her talent, which emboldens her resolve. When anti-Semitic policies inspire violent mobs, she escapes to the safety of the South of France. There she begins to paint again, and finds new love. But her work is interrupted, this time by a family tragedy that reveals an even darker secret. Believing that only an extraordinary act will save her, she embarks on the monumental adventure of painting her life story.

In the 20th century, no artistic medium in North America with so much potential for creative expression has had a more turbulent history plagued with less respect than comic books. Through animated montages, readings and interviews, this film guides us through the history of the medium from the late 1930s and 1940s with the first explosion of popularity with the superheroes created by great talents like Jack Kirby and hitting its first artistic zenith with Will Eisner's "Spirit". It then shifts to the post war comics world with the rising popularity of crime and horror comics, especially those published by EC Comics under the editorshiop of William B. Gaines until it came crashing down the rise of censorship with the imposition of the Comics Code. In its wake of the devastation of the medium's creative freedom, we also explore EC's defiant survival with the creation of the singular "Mad Magazine" by Harvey Kurtzman.

A biography of artist Frida Kahlo, who channeled the pain of a crippling injury and her tempestuous marriage into her work.

An intimate journey through the formative years of David Lynch's life. From his idyllic upbringing in small town America to the dark streets of Philadelphia, we follow Lynch as he traces the events that have helped to shape one of cinema's most enigmatic directors.

This Hrebejk’s comedy is set in Prague, four years after the democratic “Velvet revolution” of 1989. This was an era of sudden freedom, transition and confusion. Most people got carried away, quickly abandoning the old values and uncritically accepting the new. Some people just took a break…

A period musical comedy set in a quiet Prague quarter at the end of the fifties. Using the western plot device of the "man from nowhere" a generation gap story unfolds of changing social climate. The action is driven by the character of a young man named Baby who causes a local rebellion by bringing rock'n'roll to a Communist neighborhood raised on swing.

A young artist is commissioned by the wife of a wealthy landowner to make a series of drawings of the estate while her husband is away.

This film, adapted from a work of fiction by author Tracy Chevalier, tells a story about the events surrounding the creation of the painting "Girl With A Pearl Earring" by 17th century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer. A young peasant maid working in the house of painter Johannes Vermeer becomes his talented assistant and the model for one of his most famous works.

In an early 20th century village, a painter with an unusual commission finds two pretty girls two model for him. The girls slowly come of age while exploring their sexuality and finding liberation in a repressed society.

An artist falls for a married young woman while he's commissioned to paint her portrait. The two invest in the risky tulip market in hopes to build a future together.

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.

Audrey Munson (a real-life 'perfect' model for numerous Beaux-Arts sculptors) first appeared artistically nude as a sculptor's model, recreating classic artistic (nude) paintings in George Foster Platt's controversial film from the Mutual Film Corporation. In fact, the film told the story of her own life. This film has generally been regarded as the first non-pornographic American film to feature nudity. This was the first known film in which a leading actress stripped down to be naked, making her the first nude film star. (filmsite.org)

Biographic film chronicling the last year of the life of the Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani, 1919, who falls in love with a girl from a wealthy family. Her parents are against this relationship and stop financial help. Modigliani worked and died in abject poverty in the Montparnasse Quarter of Paris, France.

When two of artist Barbora Kysilkova’s most valuable paintings are stolen from a gallery at Frogner in Oslo, the police are able to find the thief after a few days, but the paintings are nowhere to be found. Barbora goes to the trial in hopes of finding clues, but instead she ends up asking the thief if she can paint a portrait of him. This will be the start of a very unusual friendship. Over three years, the cinematic documentary follows the incredible story of the artist looking for her stolen paintings, while at the same time turning the thief into art.

On an isolated island in Brittany at the end of the eighteenth century, a female painter is obliged to paint a wedding portrait of a young woman.

During the 1970s a student named Gilles gets entangled in contemporary political turmoils although he would rather just be a creative artist. While torn between his solidarity to his friends and his personal ambitions he falls in love with Christine.

An attempt to bring the work of surrealist artists to a wider public. The plot is that of an average Joe who can conjure up dreams that will improve his customer's lives. This frame story serves as a link between several avant-garde sequences created by leading visual artists of their day, most of whom were emigres to the US during WWII.

A nurse and her surgeon-lover are part of a resistance movement in 1940s Czechoslovakia. When they are discovered, her lover flees and she must find a place to hide. A patient whose life she saved, a man from a remote mountain village where time stopped 150 years ago, agrees to hide her as his wife.

A young man Jindrich goes looking for a princess only to find a girl in the country mill.

A Latvian tragicomedy about a young artist who bears witness to the dramatic political upheavals of the WWII era. As brutal regimes come and go, his country, his village, his people, and even his heart are swept up in the inexorable currents of history.

Prague, 1920. Milena's father wants her to follow in his footsteps and be one of the first female doctors in Czechoslovakia, but she is determined to be a writer. She elopes to Vienna with the Jewish music critic Ernst Pollak, and starts a correspondence with Franz Kafka. She leaves Pollak and returns to Prague with her father, where she befriends and translates Kafka. As a journalist, Milena covers the 1923 Ruhr worker's strike and meets the communist architect Jaromir.

This film is about life of a family, which lived in Prague since since 1968 to 1980. Father of the family comes from Ukraine and so every year someone from Ukraine to visit this family and to buy something more better than is in Ukraine. As the times go by, the friens of family live in Austria. And now for change the family visit "a better life" in west Europe and they found out how it is to be something second-rate.

Artist Bedřich Mára (Bolek Polivka) is unable to find much secure work due to his public antagonism toward the ruling Communist Party. He has a wife and two children. Life begins to change when art historian Alois Fábera (Jiři Pecha) begins working on a piece about Bedřich, leading to a job offer from a Party official. Things are looking up, until the wrong people hear portions of the historian's writing.

They loved each other with the ardor of thirteen-year-old boys. Rebellion and curiosity, hopes and doubts, girls and dreams of glory – they shared it all. Paul was rich, Emile poor. They went skinny-dipping, drank absinthe, starved, only to overeat. Sketched models by day, caressed them by night... Now, Paul is a painter and Emile a writer. Glory has passed Paul by. But Emile has it all: fame, money, the perfect wife, whom Paul once loved. They judge each other, admire each other, confront each other. They lose touch, meet up again, like a couple who cannot stop loving each other.

The story of communist show-trial victim Milada Horáková. Horáková was one of the first victims of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. She opposed the communist coup in 1948 but did not leave the country. She was arrested and tried for treason on fabricated charges in a show trial that was broadcast on the radio and shown in film clips. The film focuses on the time from 1945 to 1950 when the communists took over, but also goes back a little further in Horáková's life into the late 1930s

An artist with a rather unusual art-style literally uses all the men she likes for her artworks. Bodies begin to pile up in abandoned alleyways and the case is handed out to a homicide detective to bring in the artistic serial killer.

In 1891, the French painter Paul Gauguin leaves Paris and travels to Tahiti to renew his art as a free man, far from the European artistic conventionalism. On his journey of discovery, he faces solitude and disease, but he also knows the beauty of wild nature and the love of Tehura, a young native girl who becomes his wife and model.

The life of Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, famous french painter, who lived, enjoyed, loved in the late 1800s Paris' Montmartre cultural life. He suffered from suffered from congenital health conditions traditionally attributed to inbreeding. His lifestyle and work are a testimony of the late-19th-century parisian bohemian lifestyle, as he was commissioned to produce a series of posters for the Moulin Rouge cabaret opening. As an alcoholic, he was addicted to absinthe. The movie related his love affair with the french painter Suzanne Valadon.

Czech painter and illustrator Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939) ranks among the pioneers of the Art Nouveau movement at the end of the 19th century. Virtually overnight, he becomes famous in Paris thanks to the posters that he designs to announce actress Sarah Bernhardt’s plays. But at the height of his fame, Mucha decides to leave Paris to realize his lifetime project.

Over a 50-year career and more than a hundred movies, filmmaker John Ford (1894-1973) forged the legend of the Far West. By giving a face to the underprivileged, from humble cowboys to persecuted minorities, he revealed like no one else the great social divisions that existed and still exist in the United States. More than four decades after his death, what remains of his legacy and humanistic values in the memory of those who love his work?

How did a young artist at the beginning of the 20th century, rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts in Germany because she was a woman, always seen in the shadow of her companion, Vassily Kandinsky, become an eminent painter in an unprecedented artistic movement? With the support of several contributors and personal writings, Gabriele Münter - Pionnière de l'art moderne, retraces the life of one of the most illustrious figures of the German expressionist movement of the Blue Rider and draws up the portrait of a singular artist, whose work, intimate and human, testifies to the complexity of her time as much as that of her own existence.

Documentary on the life and art of Marie Cermínová AKA Toyen or “the baroness” to her friends. Long considered a marginal figure, it was not until her death in 1980, when her estate was auctioned off, that Toyen’s masterpieces finally saw the light of day. This film is a portrait of an important figure of the European artistic avant-garde in the 20th century.

When Anna Parisi, an unemployed fine arts painter, is unable to make ends meet, she is hired to become a personal Christmas shopper for Marc, an uptight corporate exec. As they begin working together, Marc learns that Christmas giving has less to do with the amount of money spent and more to do with the importance of the gift, while Anna discovers she might find success as an artist in a way she never expected. The best gift of all of course is the love they discover with one another.

One of the greatest playwrights of the 20th century, Arthur Miller created such celebrated works as Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, which continue to move audiences around the world today. He also made headlines for being targeted by the House Un-American Activities Committee at the height of the McCarthy Era and entering into a tumultuous marriage with Hollywood icon Marilyn Monroe. Told from the unique perspective of his daughter, filmmaker Rebecca Miller, Arthur Miller: Writer is an illuminating portrait that combines interviews spanning decades and a wealth of personal archival material, and provides new insights into Miller’s life as an artist and exploring his character in all its complexity.

Twenty-five years ago the renowned art critic Robert Hughes made The Shock of the New, a landmark television series that examined the key cultural movement of the 20th Century. Now he's back to look at more recent work and to question whether modern art can still be shocking in its originality and understanding. In an age of media saturation it's perhaps even harder to tell what is good art and what is bad; but Hughes cuts through the marketing and the hype to reveal the art that is vital and will last; the art which defines the times in which we live. In a film which features interviews with David Hockney, Paula Rego, Jeff Koons and Sean Scully, Robert Hughes makes the case that painting, drawing, and the search for beauty matter more than ever before.

Lily is a museum curator who finds a painting that looks just like her. Lily’s search for the artist leads her to Ireland, where she meets William, a charming man who helps her on her quest and may also know more about the portrait’s origins than he’s letting on.

In the early 20th century, Lazar -a taciturn woodsman- asks the disenchanted portraitist Arkadi to immortalize his child. The execution of this portrait will unsettle both men while revealing their inner fears and change their outlook on life.