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Movies: Best "essay film" Movies


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135 movies found (page 1/5):

2 or 3 Things I Know About Her(1967)

1h 28min | Comedy, Drama
3.2/5 (with 73 votes)

As the city of Paris and the French people grow in consumer culture, a housewife living in a high-rise apartment with her husband and two children takes to prostitution to help pay the bills.

F for Fake(1973)

1h 29min | Documentary
3.7/5 (with 137 votes)

Documents the lives of infamous fakers Elmyr de Hory and Clifford Irving. De Hory, who later committed suicide to avoid more prison time, made his name by selling forged works of art by painters like Picasso and Matisse. Irving was infamous for writing a fake autobiography of Howard Hughes. Welles moves between documentary and fiction as he examines the fundamental elements of fraud and the people who commit fraud at the expense of others.

Lynch/Oz(2023)

1h 48min | Documentary
3.3/5 (with 4 votes)

Victor Fleming’s 1939 film The Wizard of Oz is one of David Lynch’s most enduring obsessions. This documentary goes over the rainbow to explore this Technicolor through-line in Lynch’s work.

John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection(2018)

1h 35min | Documentary
3.1/5 (with 12 votes)

An immersive film essay on tennis legend John McEnroe at the height of his career as the world champion, documenting his strive for perfection, frustrations, and the hardest loss of his career at the 1984 Roland-Garros French Open.

Directed by Julien Faraut - With John McEnroe, Ivan Lendl, Mathieu Amalric

Obit(2017)

1h 33min | Documentary
3.2/5 (with 7 votes)

How do you put a life into 500 words? Ask the staff obituary writers at the New York Times. OBIT is a first-ever glimpse into the daily rituals, joys and existential angst of the Times obit writers, as they chronicle life after death on the front lines of history.

Directed by Vanessa Gould

The So-Called Caryatids(1984)

3.0/5 (with 13 votes)

Commissioned by French television, this is a short documentary on the neo-classical statues found throughout Paris, predominantly on the walls of buildings, holding up windows, roofs etc.

Directed by Agnès Varda

Histoire(s) du Cinéma 1b: A Single (Hi)story(1989)

42min | Documentary
3.3/5 (with 10 votes)

A very personal look at the history of cinema directed, written and edited by Jean-Luc Godard in his Swiss residence in Rolle for ten years (1988-98); a monumental collage, constructed from film fragments, texts and quotations, photos and paintings, music and sound, and diverse readings; a critical, beautiful and melancholic vision of cinematographic art.

Visions of Europe(2004)

2h 20min | Documentary, Comedy, Drama
2.5/5 (with 8 votes)

Twenty-five films from twenty-five European countries by twenty-five European directors.

Vampir Cuadecuc(1972)

1h 6min | Documentary
2.9/5 (with 16 votes)

An atmospheric essay, which is an alternative version of Count Dracula, a film directed by Jess Franco in 1970; a ghostly narration between fiction and reality.

Bohemia Docta or the Labyrinth of the World and the Lust-House of the Heart (A Divine Comedy)(2000)

4h 14min | Documentary

A labyrinthine portrait of Czech culture on the brink of a new millennium. Egon Bondy prophesies a capitalist inferno, Jim Čert admits to collaborating with the secret police, Jaroslav Foglar can’t find a bottle-opener, and Ivan Diviš makes observations about his own funeral. This is the Czech Republic in the late 90s, as detailed in Karel Vachek’s documentary.

Directed by Karel Vachek - With Milan Hlavsa, Jan Klusák, Jiří Krejčík, Jan Němec, Karel Vachek, Dagmar Havlová, ...

Ars(1960)

18min | Documentary
2.8/5 (with 8 votes)

With ghostly eyes looking through the winter landscapes of the plains and villages of Ain, where the sanctified priest the Curé of Ars once lived, Jacques Demy tried to understand this fighter for communal spirituality and his daily torments of mysticism.

D is for Division(2018)

1h 27min | Documentary
3.2/5 (with 2 votes)

1940. On the border between Latvia and the USSR, a woman is killed in front of her house as she tried to protect her son from the liberating attack of the Soviets. Almost 80 years later, the archive photo bearing witness to this news item and representing a collateral victim of the European Union’s founding conflict forms the starting point for a journey undertaken by Davis Sīmanis. He navigates from one side to the other of this border, which today represents another separation, one that is geographical but also cultural: between Europe and Russia.

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Nine Sevilles(2021)

2h 37min | Documentary, Music
2.5/5 (with 1 vote)

"Nueve Sevillas" is a heterodox psycho-geographical profile of the new flamenco in Seville. Nine characters coexist with the great flamenco artists of today.

Arcadia(2017)

1h 22min | Documentary
3.6/5 (with 4 votes)

A provocative and poetic exploration of how the British people have seen their own land through more than a century of cinema. A hallucinated journey of immense beauty and brutality. A kaleidoscopic essay on how magic and madness have linked human beings to nature since the beginning of time.

Taon Noong Ako'y Anak sa Labas(2008)

1h 40min | Documentary

Filmmaker John Torres describes his childhood and discusses his father's infidelities.

Histoire(s) du Cinéma 1a: All the (Hi)stories(1989)

51min | Documentary
3.0/5 (with 12 votes)

A very personal look at the history of cinema directed, written and edited by Jean-Luc Godard in his Swiss residence in Rolle for ten years (1988-98); a monumental collage, constructed from film fragments, texts and quotations, photos and paintings, music and sound, and diverse readings; a critical, beautiful and melancholic vision of cinematographic art.

To Stay Alive: A Method(2016)

1h 10min | Documentary, Music
2.7/5 (with 6 votes)

Iggy Pop reads and recites Michel Houellebecq’s manifesto. The documentary features real people from Houellebecq’s life with the text based on their life stories.

Directed by Arno Hagers, Erik Lieshout, Reinier van Brummelen

Národ sobě aneb České moře v 18 přílivech(2003)

1h 28min | Comedy
2.3/5 (with 1 vote)

"Situation of the Street" - An experimental study about Czech life, focusing on Prague's National Street, its businesses and the varied people who frequent it.

Directed by Jan Gogola - With Zuzana Stivínová, Eva Holubová, Luděk Sobota, Petr Marek, Jiří Krejčík, Jaroslav Dušek, ...

Histoire(s) du Cinéma 2b: Deadly Beauty(1997)

28min | Documentary
3.3/5 (with 8 votes)

A very personal look at the history of cinema directed, written and edited by Jean-Luc Godard in his Swiss residence in Rolle for ten years (1988-98); a monumental collage, constructed from film fragments, texts and quotations, photos and paintings, music and sound, and diverse readings; a critical, beautiful and melancholic vision of cinematographic art.

FFG: un retrato(1976)

10min | Documentary
3.5/5 (with 1 vote)

An experimental portrait of Fernando Fernán Gómez, one of the most renowned Spanish artists of all time.

And the Dogs Were Silent(1976)

5.0/5 (with 1 vote)

For 'Et les chiens se taisaient' Maldoror adapted a piece of theatre by the poet and politician Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), about a rebel who becomes profoundly aware of his otherness when condemned to death. His existential dialogue with his mother reverberates around the African sculptures on display at the Musée de l'Homme, a Parisian museum full of colonial plunder whose director was the Surrealist anthropologist Michel Leiris.

L'affaire Valérie(2004)

1h 13min | Documentary

A film-maker travels through mountain villages and along the shores of Alpine lakes to investigate the disappearance of Valérie 20 years earlier. She allegedly murdered a Canadian tourist before disappearing without a trace. At least that is how the narrator, who was passing through the region at the time, remembers the story. Over the course of the interviews, the elusive Valérie seems to disappear a second time, literally engulfed by the Alpine landscape, magnificently captured on film by François Caillat. A haunting, imposing landscape, where chasms and precipices become metaphors, characters in a work of fiction that the camera turns into a documentary. A film in the form of an essay in which the director takes his work on memory to its highest degree of abstraction.

Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons(1974)

1h 39min | Documentary, Drama
3.3/5 (with 3 votes)

Penthesilea, the first of six films made by Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, traverses thousands of years to look at the image of the Amazonian woman in myth. It asks, among other questions, is the Amazonian woman a rare strong female image or is she a figure derived from male phantasy? The film explores the complexities of such questions, but does not seek any concrete answers.

Filmfarsi(2019)

1h 24min | Documentary

A found-footage essay, Filmfarsi salvages low budget thrillers and melodramas suppressed following the 1979 Islamic revolution.

In the Intense Now(2017)

2h 7min | Documentary
3.9/5 (with 7 votes)

A personal essay which analyses and compares images of the political upheavals of the 1960s. From the military coup in Brazil to China's Cultural Revolution, from the student uprisings in Paris to the end of the Prague Spring.

The Green Fog(2018)

1h 2min | Documentary
3.1/5 (with 11 votes)

A tribute to a fascinating film shot by Alfred Hitchcock in 1958, starring James Stewart and Kim Novak, and to the city of San Francisco, California, where the magic was created; but also a challenge: how to pay homage to a masterpiece without using its footage; how to do it simply by gathering images from various sources, all of them haunted by the curse of a mysterious green fog that seems to cause irrepressible vertigo….

Directed by Guy Maddin

Histoire(s) du Cinéma 2a: Only Cinema(1997)

26min | Documentary
3.3/5 (with 8 votes)

A very personal look at the history of cinema directed, written and edited by Jean-Luc Godard in his Swiss residence in Rolle for ten years (1988-98); a monumental collage, constructed from film fragments, texts and quotations, photos and paintings, music and sound, and diverse readings; a critical, beautiful and melancholic vision of cinematographic art.

Hands Up!(1981)

1h 16min | Drama
3.1/5 (with 2 votes)

The reunion of a group of former medical students results in a flood of bitter memories.

Don't Work (1968-2018)(2018)

1h 29min | Documentary
1.5/5 (with 1 vote)

A year in the life of Elsa Michaud and Gabriel Gauthier, students of Fine Arts in Paris, lovers in troubled times, overwhelmed by maddening verbal and auditory stimuli, witnesses of a globalized violence more visible than ever in a chaotic digital era, in which the slow execution of simple gestures in a silent performance is an act of resistance.

Opera About Poland(2017)

41min | Documentary
2.8/5 (with 2 votes)

Pole, who are you? This film collage that combines archival and contemporary materials, documentary and staged pictures, press reports, social announcements, sale offers and speech excerpts is an attempt to answer this question. Referring to the Polish tradition of a creative documentary in the style of Wojciech Wiszniewski, the film presents various manifestations of Polishness: patriotic and religious rituals, everyday traditions as well as characteristic landscapes or intimate memories from childhood.

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