Movies Similar to Vowellet - An Essay by Sarah Vowell

Stranger in the City(1961)

Aspects of a London day, including prostitutes on street corners, a striptease show and the 2i's Coffee Bar.

To Stay Alive: A Method(2016)

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.

Land Without Bread(1933)

An exploration —manipulated and staged— of life in Las Hurdes, in the province of Cáceres, in Extremadura, Spain, as it was in 1932. Insalubrity, misery and lack of opportunities provoke the emigration of young people and the solitude of those who remain in the desolation of one of the poorest and least developed Spanish regions at that time.

The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat(1896)

A group of people are standing along the platform of a railway station in La Ciotat, waiting for a train. One is seen coming, at some distance, and eventually stops at the platform. Doors of the railway-cars open and attendants help passengers off and on. Popular legend has it that, when this film was shown, the first-night audience fled the café in terror, fearing being run over by the "approaching" train. This legend has since been identified as promotional embellishment, though there is evidence to suggest that people were astounded at the capabilities of the Lumières' cinématographe.

Twenty Years After(1944)

This short celebrates the 20th anniversary of MGM. Segments are shown from several early hits, then from a number of 1944 releases.

Visions of Europe(2004)

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

Quest for the Ring(2001)

H.P. Lovecraft - Ipotesi di un viaggio in Italia(2004)

A documentary about the possible ties between H.P.LOVECRAFT and the Polesine region (Italy), stimulated by the casual discovery of a mysterious manuscript attributed to the great American horror writer died in 1937.

The Joys and Sorrows of Young Yuguo(2022)

16-year-old Yuguo, who has a passion for Eastern European romantic poetry, makes a pilgrimage from his home in China to the foothills of Romania’s Carpathian Mountains.

To Be or Not to Be: Klingons and Shakespeare(2009)

The story behind the translation and performance of Shakespeare's "Hamlet" in Klingon.

The Green Fog(2018)

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…

Grandpa's in the Tuff Shed(1998)

It adroitly tells the story of a "counter culture" young man who when his grandfather dies, packs the body in dry ice, and stores him in a Tuff Shed, waiting for the time when advances in modern medicine can bring him back to life. I am not making this up. Then our young men gets deported back to Norway on unrelated charges. Then, quite a while later, people look up and take notice ... "Hey ... there appears to be a frozen dead guy in that shed over there."

Black Sun(2019)

Underscored by French film legend Delphine Seyrig’s evocative recitation of a Henri Michaux poem, Maureen Fazendeiro’s film is a mysterious, multi-textured portrait of eclipse spectators in Portugal.

Au coeur de Nikita(1990)

A documentary that captures some moments on set of filming of Luc Besson's "Nikita".

Return to Crystal Lake: Making 'Friday the 13th'(2003)

Locations: Looking for Rusty James(2013)

A personal meditation on Rumble Fish, the legendary film directed by Francis Ford Coppola in 1983; the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA, where it was shot; and its impact on the life of several people from Chile, Argentina and Uruguay related to film industry.

The Imperial Lullaby(2020)

The armies of Fascist Italy conquered Addis Ababa, capital of Abyssinia, in May 1936, thus culminating the African colonial adventure of the ruthless dictator Benito Mussolini, by then lord of Libya, Eritrea and Somalia; a bloody and tragic story told through the naive drawings of Pietro Dall'Igna, an Italian schoolboy born in 1925.

The Long Shadow of Dirty Harry(2008)

An in-depth look at Dirty Harry (1971), featuring interviews with such film artists as Michael Madsen, 'Hal Holbrook', John Milius, 'Shane Black' and John Badham.

Night and Fog(1959)

Filmmaker Alain Resnais documents the atrocities behind the walls of Hitler's concentration camps.

Brasilia, Contradictions of a New City(1968)

In 1967, de Andrade was invited by the Italian company Olivetti to produce a documentary on the new Brazilian capital city of Brasília. Constructed during the latter half of the 1950s and founded in 1960, the city was part of an effort to populate Brazil’s vast interior region and was to be the embodiment of democratic urban planning, free from the class divisions and inequalities that characterize so many metropolises. Unsurprisingly, Brasília, Contradições de uma Cidade Nova (Brasília, Contradictions of a New City, 1968) revealed Brasília to be utopic only for the wealthy, replicating the same social problems present in every Brazilian city. (Senses of Cinema)