Best movies like Why Man Creates

Animated cartoon, in which philosopher and scholar Alexander Zuckerkandl proposes the view that detached, uninvolved existence is the best.

A young woman trades her upper-class existence for a new life in an economically depressed suburb of London.

Orson Welles talks fantasy and magic in this short Vienna travelogue.

In the 1930s, Charles Lang invents an engine that runs using water for fuel. But when he tries to get it patented, he is first offered a ridiculously low amount. When he refuses, he is suddenly several people are pressuring him to sell. The big oil companies don't want the competition. Now he has to try and keep them from getting his idea, and somehow get it published.

Punctuated with stories from the Bible, the film’s purpose was to reinforce Christian values in the atomic age by condemning the consequences of human conflict with scenes of the crucifixion, lynching and Nazi fascism.

Sam Laker is an American industrialist, working in Britain, who has just been awarded an international award for industrial design. He is planning to travel to East Germany to attend a trade show and show off his invention, taking his 10 year old son with him for a holiday. Meanwhile a British Intelligence officer who served with Laker in the Second World War decides to use the opportunity of Laker's trip and his lack of an intelligence profile to coerce him into carrying out an assassination.

In this short film by Norman McLaren, dancers enact the Greek tragedy of Narcissus, the beautiful youth whose excessive self-love condemned him to a trapped existence. Skilfully merging film, dance and music, the film is a compendium of the techniques McLaren acquired over a lifetime of experimentation.

Astronauts blast off to explore the moon on Rocketship X-M or "Rocketship eXploration Moon". A spacecraft malfunction and some fuel miscalculations cause them to end up landing on Mars. On Mars, evidence of a once powerful civilization is found. The scientists determined that an atomic war destroyed most of the Martians. Those that survived reverted to a caveman like existence.

The Tramp interferes with the celebration of several kid auto races in Venice, California (Junior Vanderbilt Cup Race, January 10 and 11, 1914), standing himself in the way of the cameraman who is filming the event.

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.

Arrival in the Bronx is shown with a view from an elevated train as it enters the city. Then follows a montage of sights from the Bronx. Many typical neighborhood activities are shown, along with scenes from many local businesses.

Count Ferdinand, a submarine commander and secret pacifist refuses to torpedo a defenseless passenger ship during wartime. His submarine is sunk in the following fracas. In the spirit world, Christ commends the captain, and returns to earth in the commander's body to promote His message of peace.

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

A woman dressed elegantly walks purposely through the water gardens at the Villa d'Este in Tivoli, as the music of Vivaldi's Winter movement of The Four Seasons plays. Heavy red filters give a blue cast to the light; water plays across stone, and fountains send it into the air. No words are spoken. Baroque statuary and the sensuous flow of water are back lit. Anger calls it water games.

A compilation of images co-creator Frank Mouris had collected from magazines interwoven with two narrations, one giving a mostly linear autobiography and the other stating words having to do with the images, the story the first voice is relating, or neither.

The film is centered on two men in a bathtub; it is implied that they are veterans of some past conflict. The first man is paranoid about the drain of the tub, the second indifferent to it. As the conversation between the two men progresses, a vine-like tendril emerges from the drain…

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

Set in a world where the concept of lying doesn't exist, a loser changes his lot when he invents lying and uses it to get ahead.

"An average American family", the Middletons, visit the 1939 World's Fair and witnesses the advent of future technology, encountering robots and dishwashers for the first time.

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.

John Cassellis is the toughest TV news reporter around. After extensively reporting about violence and racial tensions in poor communities, he discovers that his network is helping the FBI by granting them access to his footage to find suspects.

The Los Angeles punk music scene circa 1980 is the focus of this film. With Alice Bag Band, Black Flag, Catholic Discipline, Circle Jerks, Fear, Germs, and X.

Dreamlike satire about a young man who resists getting a job at the lone employing conglomerate in his dreary industrial town, but changes his mind when he discovers the plant's boiler room has the perfect climate to assist him with his pet horticultural (fungal) project.

Documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman takes us inside Northeast High School as a fly on the wall to observe the teachers and how they interact with the students.

A baby lamp finds a ball to play with and it's all fun and games until the ball bursts. Just when the elder Luxo thinks his kid will settle down for a bit, Luxo Jr. finds a ball ten times bigger.

MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES is the striking new documentary on the world and work of renowned artist Edward Burtynsky. Internationally acclaimed for his large-scale photographs of “manufactured landscapes”—quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines and dams—Burtynsky creates stunningly beautiful art from civilization’s materials and debris.

Bruce Conner's landmark experimental film consisting entirely of found footage edited to a new score.

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

Babies are hardly monster-like, unless you're a toy. After escaping a drooling baby, Tinny realizes that he wants to be played with after all. But in the amount of time it takes him to discover this, the baby's attention moves on to other things only an infant could find interesting.

In a poisoned world where sunshine kills, a hit squad from the Zyklor Corporation interrupts the testing of a matter replikator capable of duplicating living tissue for the purpose of extending human life. When the smoke clears, scientist Ludovic finds himself framed for murder and on the run from an exact duplicate... of himself. Joining forces with ex-lover Kat Moscow and cynical Detective Valiant, Ludovic follows the bloody path of destruction wrought by a monster with his face.

Four landscape shots containing a replica of Ted Kaczynski’s cabin, one shot per season. On the soundtrack, Benning reads extracts from Kaczynski’s journals from the early 1970s, recording his progress at hunting and gathering, and his connection to the Montana wilderness; a hand-written folded sheet of paper detailing his acts of “monkey wrenching” and first attempts at planting bombs; two notebooks written in numerical code in 1985 and decoded by Benning in 2011; two excepts from Industrial Society and Its Future by "FC" (aka the Unabomber Manifesto) as published in The New York Times and The Washington Post in 1995; and a 2001 interview with Kaczynski by J. Alienus Rychalski, special correspondent for the Blackfoot Valley Dispatch.

Sometime in the 21st century, a new evil threatens humankind. Meet the fundamentalist movie fan! Raised by violence in the media and armed to the teeth, these suburban thugs declare holy war against Hollywood in a string of horrific mass shootings threatening the very fabric of human civilization! A bizarre cult of militant nerds addicted to fantasy and obsessed with blockbuster movies like Star Wars and Batman begin to stalk humans as prey, treating their victims like living toys for their own sick entertainment. Can anyone stop these psychos from dragging the world into a war which to them is little more than a live game of Action Figures? In a strange new world ruled by Star Wars Fundamentalists comes the first chapter in the darkest mythology the world has ever known!

Learn how seemingly small flashes of innovation have changed the course of civilization. Humanity from Space is an epic journey of discovery. Using the very latest mind-boggling data and astonishing CGI, the film traces the story of humankind’s ascent from hunter-gatherer to dominant global species.

Set amid the glittering casino lights and deteriorating desert landscapes of the oasis city Las Vegas, QUEEN OF DIAMONDS revolves around the disaffected existence of of Firdaus (Tinka Menkes), a blackjack dealer whose world unfolds as a fragmented but hypnotic interplay between repetition and repressed anger.

Groot discovers a miniature civilization that believes the seemingly enormous tree toddler is the hero they’ve been waiting for.