Artnet tempted me with a list of the Art World’s most compelling movies about art of 2025. I found them all so good I wanted to share. These films deal with prescient themes such as gender, art theft—both outright and AI generated, collaborative relationships in artist’s lives, and documentaries on controversial art figures we thought we despised.
2025 Art Films
- A film by Kelly Reichardt, The Mastermind, set in 1970, depicts the life of a slacker young man who wants to show his rich family he’s ‘something.’ He plans a scheme to steal art from a British museum. From the start, the film gets the spirit of the 1970s right, the young Boomer Gen and what we faced then. I was there!
- A film about stolen art, Auction, explores how close an auction house gets 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 this scenario isn’t too unbelievable.
- The one documentary I never thought I wanted to see is Thomas Kincaid The Painter of Light. It offers a spin on Kincaid as a marketing genius who actually paints—and ushers 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 the most inconsequential event blossoms into a work of art—or not. What sparks and fuels the creative mind?
- The great Spike Lee reworks Kurosawa’s 1963 crime melodrama High and Low into Highest 2 Lowest. Denzel Washington plays the head of a big record label. He questions both the cultural value and worth of the artist in 2026 reality, especially the Black artist.
- A documentary by David Charles Rodriques, S/He Is Still Her/e delves into cult British lead vocalist of the industrial band Throbbing Gristle, Genesis P. Orridge, as they explore their creation of the pandrogyne, the combination of two genders to create a third biological mind.
- I love 1940s musicals. So I long to see Blue Moon, directed by Richard Linklater. It takes us to the opening of Oklahoma in 1943. That night the partnership of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart exploded for good due to Hart’s alcoholism and perfectionism. Lorenz Hart died from pneumonia in the 40s working on 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, and My Funny Valentine. A must see about tortured genius and self-destruction with Ethan Hawke as Hart.
- This will become a cult classic: Dracula, by the Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude. The story tells what happens when AI regurgitates 125 years of cultural baggage around Bram Stoker’s gothic horror novel from 1897. AI remixes “all about Dracula,” resulting in a narrative belonging to no one and resonating with nobody.
Finally, a story that’s not a movie but SHOULD be
King Charles III called on a lovely bevvy of ladies of a certain age, “Dumfries House Sewing Bee.” He got an idea to turn his curtains at his country estate, Sandringham in Norfolk, into Christmas stockings to raise money for charity. The dear ladies got the job, due to the fact that Charles likes handcrafts. In fact he’s the sponsor of The Foundation School of Traditional Arts, which welcomes student crafters, younger version of the ladies in Dumfries House Sewing Bee. 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 researched this touching, very British story I discovered 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. He also borrowed his grandfather’s Coronation Glove worn by George VI in 1937.