Browse Movies : 2014 : Documentary

Australian director Alan Hicks spent four years following the charming and sometimes poignant mentorship between jazz-legend Clark Terry and blind piano prodigy, Justin Kaulflin, during a pivotal moment in each of their lives. At eighty-nine years old, ‘CT’ has played alongside Duke Ellington and Count Basie; his pupils include Miles Davis and Quincy Jones, but his most unlikely friendship is with Justin, a 23-year-old with uncanny talent but debilitating nerves. As Justin prepares for a competition that could jumpstart his budding career, CT’s failing health threatens his own.

An cinematic experience covering 12 years in the life of a family. At the center is Mason, who with his sister Samantha, is taken on an emotional and transcendent journey through the years, from childhood to adulthood.

I Am Ali is told through exclusive, unprecedented access to Ali’s personal archive of ‘audio journals’ combined with touching interviews and testimonials from his inner circle of family and friends, including his daughters, son, ex-wife and brother, plus legends of the boxing community including Mike Tyson, George Foreman and Gene Kilroy.

Bears showcases a year in the life of two mother bears as they impart life lessons to their impressionable young cubs. Set against a majestic Alaskan backdrop teeming with life, their journey begins as winter comes to an end and the bears emerge from hibernation to face the bitter cold. The world outside is exciting—but risky—as the cubs’ playful descent down the mountain carries with it a looming threat of avalanches. As the season changes from spring to summer, the brown bear families must work together to find food—ultimately feasting at a plentiful salmon run—while staying safe from predators, including an ever-present wolf pack. “Bears” captures the fast-moving action and suspense of life in one of the planet’s last great wildernesses—where mothers definitely know best and their cubs’ survival hinges on family togetherness.

Captured with IMAX 3D cameras, Island of Lemurs: Madagascar takes audiences on a spectacular journey to the remote and wondrous world of Madagascar. Lemurs arrived in Madagascar as castaways millions of years ago and evolved into hundreds of diverse species but are now highly endangered.

In 1991, music manager Shep Gordon held Mike Myers over a barrel a few weeks before shooting “Wayne’s World” regarding an Alice Cooper song Myers wanted to use in the film. They have been close friends ever since. Twenty-two years later, the story of Gordon’s legendary life in the uber fast lane is now told in Myers’ directorial debut. And this time it’s Myers who has Gordon over a barrel.

Capitalist, protector, hedonist, pioneer, showman, shaman . . . Supermensch.

Shep Gordon is the consummate Hollywood insider. Though he isn’t a household name, Gordon has become a beacon in the industry, beloved by the countless stars he has encountered throughout his storied career. Shep is known for managing the careers of Alice Cooper as well as stints with Blondie, Luther Vandross and Raquel Welch, among others – a career that began with a chance encounter in 1968 with Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. He even found time to invent the “Celebrity Chef.” Though the chef as star is part of the culture now, it took Shep's imagination, and his moral outrage at how the chefs were being treated, to monetize the culinary arts into the multi-billion dollar industry it is today. Personal friends with the Dalai Lama through his philanthropic endeavors with the Tibet Fund and the guardian of four children, Gordon’s unlikely story told by those who know him best, his pals, including Alice Cooper, Michael Douglas, Sylvester Stallone, Anne Murray, Willie Nelson, Emeril Lagasse and more.

The true story of a group of brave people risking their lives to build a better future in a part of Africa the world's forgotten and a gripping expose of the realities of life in the Congo. In the forested depths of eastern Congo lies Virunga National Park, one of the most bio-diverse places in the world and home to the last of the mountain gorillas. In this wild, but enchanted environment, a small and embattled team of park rangers - including an ex-child soldier turned ranger, a caretaker of orphan gorillas and a Belgian conservationist - protect this UNESCO world heritage site from armed militia, poachers and the dark forces struggling to control Congo's rich natural resources. When the newly formed M23 rebel group declares war in May 2012, a new conflict threatens the lives and stability of everyone and everything they've worked so hard to protect.

Finding Vivian Maier unearths the mysteries behind Vivian Maier, who was a nanny in the wealthy North Shore suburbs of Chicago. Maier’s secret world is unraveled slowly through her photo collections and interviews with those who knew her, from the parents who hired her and the children she cared for to store owners, movie theater operators, and neighbors.

he story of programming prodigy and information activist Aaron Swartz. From Swartz's help in the development of the basic internet protocol RSS to his co-founding of Reddit, his fingerprints are all over the internet. But it was Swartz's groundbreaking work in social justice and political organizing combined with his aggressive approach to information access that ensnared him in a two year legal nightmare. It was a battle that ended with the taking of his own life at the age of 26.

Aaron's story touched a nerve with people far beyond the online communities in which he was a celebrity. This film is a personal story about what we lose when we are tone deaf about technology and its relationship to our civil liberties.

The Missing Picture explores filmmaker Rithy Panh's quest to create the missing images during the period when the Khmer Rouge ruled over Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. Panh uses intricately detailed clay figurines intercut with archival footage he could find to relay what is indelibly recorded in his memory, he creates the missing pictures of what does not exist in photograph or film.

A modern-day Grapes of Wrath, award-winning documentary The Overnighters is an intimate portrait of job-seekers desperately chasing the broken American Dream to the tiny oil boom town of Williston, North Dakota. With the town lacking the infrastructure to house the overflow of migrants, a local pastor starts the controversial “overnighters” program, allowing down-and-out workers a place to sleep at the church. His well-meaning project immediately runs into resistance with his community, forcing the clergyman to make a decision which leads to profound consequences that he never imagined.

The film takes an intimate look at the world of Burt Shavitz, the face and co-founder of Burt’s Bees, exploring his fascinating and unique life. Wise and wry, ornery and opinionated, the reclusive Shavitz is committed to living off the land and keeping true to his humble beginnings despite his celebrity status. The film chronicles Burt’s life as a photographer, beekeeper, and brand spokesman, following his complicated relationship with the company, his fans, and the world around him.

A 40-year-old father of two, still finds life very complicated. When the mother of his children moves to New York, he can't bear them growing up far away from him and so he decides to move there as well.

The film follows a group of obsese children for more than two years as they try to lose weight.

The Culture High is the riveting story that tears into the very fiber of modern day marijuana prohibition to reveal the truth behind the arguments and motives governing both those who support and those who oppose the existing pot laws.

Paris has the Louvre, London has the Tate Modern, and New York the Metropolitan Museum. But Husavik, Iceland-a diminutive village on the fringe of the Arctic Circle-boasts the world's only museum devoted exclusively to painstakingly preserved male genitalia. Founded and curated by Sigurður "Siggi" Hjartarson, the Icelandic Phallological Museum houses four decades worth of mammalian members, from a petite field mouse to the colossal sperm whale, and every "thing" in between. Lamentably, Siggi's collection lacks the holy grail of phallic phantasmagoria: a human specimen. Siggi's world changes dramatically when he receives generous offers from an elderly Icelandic Casanova and an eccentric American. However, as the competition for eternal penile preservation heats up between the two men, Siggi soon discovers that this process is more complicated than it initially appeared.

Academy Award-winning director Errol Morris (The Fog of War) offers a mesmerizing portrait of Donald Rumsfeld, one of the key architects of the Iraq War, and a larger-than-life character who provoked equal levels of fury and adulation from the American public. Rather than conducting a conventional interview, Morris has Rumsfeld perform and expound on his “snowflakes,” tens of thousands of memos (many never previously published) he composed as a congressman and as an advisor to four different presidents, twice as Secretary of Defense. These memos provide a window onto history—not history as it actually happened, but history as Rumsfeld wants us to see it. Morris makes plain that Rumsfeld’s “snowflakes”—whether intended to elucidate, rationalize, obfuscate, or control history—are contradicted by the facts.

America is more important to the world than we could ever imagine. A story that imagines that the United States lost the Revolutionary War and therefore never existed.

Academy Award®-nominated directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessin (Trouble the Water; co-producers of Fahrenheit 9/11 & Bowling for Columbine) follow the money behind the rise of the Tea Party. Citizen Koch investigates the impact of unlimited, anonymous spending by corporations and billionaires on the electoral process, featuring stories of life-long Republicans whose loyalty is tested when their families become collateral damage in the GOP fight to take organized labor out at the knees.

Renowned ball-room dancer, Pierre Dulaine takes his belief that dance can overcome political and social differences and applies it to eleven-year-old Jewish and Palestinian Israelis.