Movies with an Artsy View

Artnet tempted me with a list of “The Best Art World Movies of 2025” and they were all so good I had to share. These films deal with prescient themes such as gender, art theft (both outright and AI generated), collaborative relationships in artists’ lives, and include documentaries on controversial art figures that we thought we despised (read below about the documentary The Painter of Light…)

-A film by Kelly Reichardt, The Mastermind, set in 1970 is the life of a slacker young man who wants to show his rich family he is ‘something.’ He plans a scheme to steal art from a British museum. From the start, the film gets the spirit of the 1970s just right, the young Boomer Gen and what we had to face then. (I was there!)

-A film about stolen art, Auction, explores just how close an auction house can get to ultimate greed when an Egon Schiele work is discovered with an unknown (likely stolen) past in a garage – and offered to the auctioneer. Does he do the right thing? Or make millions? (Having worked at Christie’s, I can tell you this work of fiction is not too unbelievable…)

-The one documentary I never thought I would long to see is Art for Everybody about Thomas Kinkade, the self-described “Painter of Light”, offering a spin on Kinkade as a marketing genius who actually COULD paint – and who ushered in the age of art and the artist as a BRAND, and painting as performance.

-Based on a writer’s interview with a famous photographer for her book on how an artist spends a day, Peter Hujar’s Day explores how even the most inconsequential event can blossom into a work of art – or not, and what sparks and fuels the creative mind.

-The great Spike Lee reworks Kurosawa’s 1963 crime melodrama High and Low into Highest 2 Lowest, where Denzel Washington is the head of a big record label; Denzel questions both the cultural value and worth of the artist in 2026 reality, especially the Black artist.

-A film by David Charles Rodrigues – S/He Is Still Her/E: The Official Genesis P-Orridge Documentary – delves into cult British lead vocalist of the industrial band Throbbing Gristle. The film details vocalist Genesis P-Orridge and companion Jacqueline Breyer’ exploration of the pandrogyne, a concept in which the two use surgical body modification to so closely resemble each other they become “a single pandrogynous being named Breyer P-Orridge”  – effectively combining two persons/genders into one and creating a third biological mind. 

-I am a lover of 1940s musicals, so I long to see Blue Moon, directed by Richard Linklater, who takes us to the opening in 1943 of the groundbreaking stage musical Oklahoma. Created by the team of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Oklahoma’s premiere was also the night the partnership of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart exploded for good, due to Hart’s alcoholism and perfectionism. Lorenz Hart died in his 40s from pneumonia following a revival of A Connecticut Yankee, his final collaboration with composer Richard Rodgers. He achieved significant musical success with his lyrics making Broadway hits, such as “Blue Moon,” “The Lady Is a Tramp,” “Manhattan,” “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” and “My Funny Valentine.” A must-see about tortured genius and self-destruction with Ethan Hawke as Hart.

-This will be a cult classic: Dracula, by the Romanian film maker Radu Jude, a story about what happens when AI regurgitates 125 years of cultural baggage around Bram Stoker’s gothic horror novel from 1897. AI remixes everything about Dracula, with the result being a narrative belonging to no one and resonating with no one.

-Finally, this story is not a movie but SHOULD be. A lovely bevy of ladies of a certain age called the “Dumfries House Sewing Bee” called upon King Charles III of England with an idea: to turn the curtains at his country estate, Sandringham in Norfolk, into Christmas stockings to raise money for charity. 

The dear ladies got the job, likely due to the fact that Charles believes such handcrafts to be culturally enriching. His Majesty is in fact the founder, in 2005, of The Foundation School of Traditional Arts, whose mission, “to continue the living traditions of the world’s sacred and traditional art forms”, welcomes aspiring younger versions of the Dumfries House Sewing Bee ladies themselves. The proceeds from the sale of the Royal Cypher-embroidered curtain-created fireplace stockings raised $14,000 for the King’s Foundation. Any movie directors out there want to tackle this adorable story of the “Dumfries House Sewing Bee?” 

-As I was researching this touching and very British story, I discovered that Charles III is a man who likes to upsize, rework, mend, thrift, and recycle. I learned one of his mottos is to “make do – and mend.” In fact, for his coronation in 2023 he thrifted his forebearer’s 1820 Imperial Mantle (a luscious cape), and he borrowed his grandfather’s Coronation Glove worn by George VI in 1937.