Documentary

PLOT: Jia Zhangke travels with painter Liu Xiaodong from China to Thailand as they as they meet everyday workers in the throes of social turmoil. Liu Xiaodong is well-known for his monumental canvases, particularly those inspired by China’s Three Gorges Dam project. Jia Zhangke visits Liu on the banks of Fengjie, a city about to be swallowed up by the Yangtze River. The area is in the process of being “de-constructed” by armies of shirtless male workers who form the subject of Liu’s paintings. Liu and Jia next travel to Bangkok, where Liu paints Thai sex workers languishing in brothels. The two sets of paintings are united in their subjects’ shared sense of malaise in the face of the dehumanizing labor afforded them.Read More »

An in depth look at the making of Kurosawa’s films.

The series consists of episodes of varying length, typically between 30 and 60 minutes, which chronicle the making of Kurosawa’s films. Altogether 21 of Kurosawa’s 30 films are covered by the series: basically, the ones that he shot for Toho studios.Read More »

This Spike & Mike documentary is a journey told through the stories of those they impacted – people like Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter, Nick Park and many others.Read More »

From The New York Times:
The tone of the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award dinner each year is foreshadowed in its opening minutes, when a man or woman whose films ”have stood the test of time” walks past the 1,100 stars, directors, and studio presidents who form his honor court.

Thursday night as he ambled in, the 11th winner of the award, 76-year-old John Huston threw up his arms like a conqueror. ”All of us,” said Orson Welles later in the evening, ”are doomed to play the hero in our own life story” but are haunted by the fear that a understudy will somehow take over. John Huston, he added, could never be overtaken by an understudy.Read More »

Quote:
In 1973 Benoit Jacquot shot two films on Jacques Lacan, Psychanalyse I and II, broadcast on French television the same year. Les Éditions du Seuil published the text the following year; the English version appeared in 1990 under the imprint of W.W. Norton.Read More »

Freedom’s Fury is a documentary about the Hungarian water polo team of the 1956 Melbourne Olympics and the the effects of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution on the lives of the team members, with their infamous match with the Soviet team in the main focus.
The film is made up of a series of archive and recreated footage and short snippets of interviews with people directly or indirectly involved with the revolution or water polo. The material discussed is perhaps a little too extensive to fit into a ninety-minute-long documentary, but the interviews with the surviving members of both Hungarian and Soviet teams make Freedom’s Fury a memorable viewing experience.Read More »

Synopsis
Follows the creation of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s most attended fashion exhibition in history, “China: Through The Looking Glass,” an exploration of Chinese-inspired Western fashions by Costume Institute curator Andrew Bolton.A behind the scenes look at the preparations for the 2015 art exhibit, China: Through the Looking Glass held at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, commonly referred to as the Met Gala, which has become one of the hottest tickets in town.—clover140Read More »

An in depth look at the making of Kurosawa’s films.

The series consists of episodes of varying length, typically between 30 and 60 minutes, which chronicle the making of Kurosawa’s films. Altogether 21 of Kurosawa’s 30 films are covered by the series: basically, the ones that he shot for Toho studios.Read More »

An intense documentary about the tremendous tension between observation and interpretation. The pilots and gunners of attack helicopters who carry out nighttime missions in war zones make decisions with far-reaching consequences, not only for their targets, but for themselves as well; the fear of making a mistake is ever-present.

During their flights, the soldiers use thermal cameras to observe movement on the ground: anything that gives off heat lights up. From a distance, landscapes, villages, people, and animals become abstract patches of light and dark, lines, surfaces, and contours. Is the figure among them a Taliban fighter with a Kalashnikov or a shepherd with a stick?Read More »