Watch first,
decide later.

Welles turns a film about the forger Elmyr de Hory into an essay on fakery itself — including his own. Ends the only way it can: by admitting it might all be a trick.

Picasso paints on the far side of a transparent screen; the camera watches ink bleed through in real time. Twenty works made for the film, and destroyed after it. Nothing else looks like this.

De Kooning, Rauschenberg, Johns, Warhol and Frankenthaler, filmed in their own studios. A raw, unpolished record of the New York scene from Abstract Expressionism to Pop.

A portrait of underground illustrator Robert Crumb that becomes a portrait of an entire family. Uncomfortable, unforgettable, and one of the great films about where art actually comes from.

Andy Goldsworthy builds sculptures out of ice, leaves and stacked stone, knowing the tide will take most of them by afternoon. The calmest film on this list, and the one people remember longest.

A painter directs a film about a painter. Jeffrey Wright plays Jean-Michel Basquiat with the 1980s downtown New York scene — Warhol included — built around him.

Ed Harris directs and stars as Jackson Pollock, drip technique and all. A decade in the making, and it shows in every frame of the studio scenes.

A quiet, imagined story of the maid who may have sat for Vermeer's most famous painting. Slow, lit like the paintings themselves, and worth it for that alone.

Salma Hayek as Frida Kahlo, with the pain, the politics and the self-portraits given equal weight. Taymor's staging turns several paintings into scenes you can walk into.

Timothy Spall grunts and growls his way through the last decades of J.M.W. Turner's life. Unglamorous, unhurried, and one of the best performances of an artist ever put on screen.

Every one of its 65,000 frames is an oil painting in Van Gogh's own style, made by over a hundred trained painters. A murder-mystery told entirely in his brushstrokes.