The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London has teamed with Revolver Entertainment to premiere a trio of highbrow documentaries that will transfer to DVD at the end of August. Given that the school holidays have increasingly become a dumping ground for crass comedies and mediocre melodramas that the despondant shruggingly patronise after being turned away from a sold-out blockbuster, it's refreshing to find films of such serious intent restoring a little intellectual credibility to the summer schedule.

The pick of the triptych is Morgan Melville's The Cool School, which chronicles the rise and fall of the Ferus Gallery, which sponsored the Los Angeles art boom of the late 1950s and early 60s. Founded by self-taught connoisseur Walter Hopps and co-managed by the more savvily entrepreneurial Irving Blum, this tiny space on La Cienaga Boulevard acquired a nationwide reputation after it premiered Andy Warhol's Campbell's soup tins. But its real legacy lies in the championing of the artists, assemblagists and ceramicists who built upon the achievements of the Abstract Expressionists and provided the West Coast with an art scene to challenge (if never rival) that of New York.

Although mavericks Ed Kienholz and Walter Berman tended to garner the headlines with works deemed obscene by the conservative California establishment, Ferus regulars like Ken Price, John Mason, Ed Moses, Robert Irwin, Ed Ruscha, Larry Bell, John Altoon and Billy Al Bengston all made major contributions to the Americanisation of American art that so irked snooty Manhattan critics like the aptly named Ivan Karp. Consequently, each extant alumnus has fascinating insights to impart. But Melville is wise to fix his focus on the eccentric Hopps, who burned himself out while curating shows devoted to Marcel Duchamp and Pop Art at the Pasadena Art Museum in the mid-sixties.

If this fittingly scattershot documentary often presumes too much prior knowledge and over-indulges Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell's pretentious Method mumblings, it's pleasingly free of hagiographical cant. As is Esther B.Robinson's A Walk Into the Sea, which profiles her uncle, the editor-cum-underground film-maker Danny Williams, who mysteriously disappeared, when seemingly on the verge of making his name, in July 1966. However, despite having unique access to Williams's mother, sister and brother, Robinson fails to form a profound impression of the twentysomething Harvard graduate who had shown such promise as the editor of the Maysles brothers' actualities, Showman (1963) and What's Happening! The Beatles in the USA (1964). Instead, she emulates him by falling under the spell of the Warhol Factory and just as Williams had followed its superstars like a stalker with a silent Bolex, so she allows such survivors as Billy Name, Paul Morrissey, Brigid Berlin and Gerald Malanga to piece together unreliable memoirs through a fug of narcotic residue. Mercifully, John Cage, Ron Nemeth and Nat Finkelstein are more cogent and remember Williams with more affection and admiration for the talent to capture a telling image and strobe edit in the camera that is so ably demonstrated in his sole completed film, the 16mm monochrome reverie, Factory.

James Crump also seems in awe of his talking heads in Black, White + Gray, which examines the impact of Robert Mapplethorpe's professional and sexual relationships with Sam Wagstaff on his photography. As a result, he gives too much prominence to the self-regarding pronouncements of art historian Eugenia Parry in discussing Wagstaff's taste as a collector of iconoclastic images and antique silver and his importance as a muse to Mapplethorpe and singer Patti Smith and as a curator at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut.

Finally, there's a little restrained melodrama on offer in writer-director Meneka Das's Little Box of Sweets. Looking rather too old for the role, Das also stars as the teenage schoolgirl who falls for childhood friend Joe Anderson after he returns to Allahabad after completing his education abroad. The trouble is, Anderson is the son of Indian Commissioner Rahul Vohra and his English teacher wife Helena Michell, while Das is the granddaughter of his domestics, Raja Zutshi and Mohini Mathur.

Apparently inspired by Das's upbringing in Uttar Pradesh and richly photographed in Super-16 by Dusan Todorovic, this is a film of minor moods rather than major moments, with Bollywood staples like social mobility and arranged marriages being downplayed in favour of character reactions to circumstances beyond their control and a genuine feeling for the pace and feel of subcontinental life in the mid-1980s. Vohra blows hard occasionally, but the performances are otherwise pleasingly naturalistic, with Das's sister Sheenu impressing as her sensitive cousin.