Browse Movies : 2013 : Rating Not Available : Documentary

Enzo Avitabile, renowned Neapolitan saxophonist and singer/songwriter, is here filmed by Oscar-winning director Jonathan Demme, a longtime admirer of Avitabile’s music. This work represents an incredible opportunity as one of the world’s great directors tells us not just about the music of a singular artist in its fusion of Neapolitan, world music (and especially Arab with performances by Naseer Shamma and Palestinian singer Amal Murkus) and jazz but also of a city, Naples, with all of its treasures and contradictions, as Enzo creates amazing new music with collaborators from all over the world, including Eliades Ochoa of Buena Vista Social Club, Naseer Shamma, Daby Touré and Trilok Gurtu. Music and a movie you will never forget!

For the first time in 35 years, Daniel Lutz recounts his version of the infamous Amityville haunting that terrified his family in 1975. George and Kathy Lutz's story went on to inspire a best-selling novel and the subsequent films have continued to fascinate audiences today. This documentary reveals the horror behind growing up as part of a world famous haunting and while Daniel's facts may be other's fiction, the psychological scars he carries are indisputable.

Markus Imhoof tackles the issue of why bees, worldwide, are facing extinction. With the tenacity of a man out to solve a world-class mystery, he investigates this global phenomenon, from California to Switzerland, China and Australia.

Each year, 60,000 people from around the globe gather in a dusty windswept Nevada desert to build a temporary city, collaborating on large-scale art and partying for a week before burning a giant effigy in a ritual frenzy. Rooted in principles of self-expression, self-reliance and community effort, Burning Man has grown famous for stirring ordinary people to shed their nine-to-five existence and act on their dreams. Spark takes us behind the curtain with Burning Man organizers and participants, revealing a year of unprecedented challenges and growth. When ideals of a new world based on freedom and inclusion collide with realities of the "default world," we wonder which dreams can survive.

Before Bad Brains, the Sex Pistols or even the Ramones, there was a band called Death. Punk before punk existed, three teenage brothers in the early '70s formed a band in their spare bedroom, began playing a few local gigs and even pressed a single in the hopes of getting signed. But this was the era of Motown and emerging disco. Record companies found Death's music—and band name—too intimidating, and the group were never given a fair shot, disbanding before they even completed one album. Equal parts electrifying rockumentary and epic family love story, A Band Called Death chronicles the incredible fairy-tale journey of what happened almost three decades later, when a dusty 1974 demo tape made its way out of the attic and found an audience several generations younger.

Former Mayor Ed Koch is the quintessential New Yorker. Still ferocious, charismatic, and hilariously blunt, the now 88-year-old Koch ruled New York from 1978 to 1989—a down-and-dirty decade of grit, graffiti, near-bankruptcy and rampant crime. First-time filmmaker (and former Wall Street Journal reporter) Neil Barsky has crafted a revealing portrait of this intensely private man, his legacy as a political titan, and the town he helped transform. His three terms included a fiercely competitive 1977 election; the burgeoning AIDS epidemic; landmark housing initiatives; and an irreparable municipal corruption scandal. Through candid interviews and rare archival footage, Koch thrillingly chronicles the personal and political toll of running the world’s most wondrous city.

Combines traditional documentary storytelling with original animation culled from seven decades worth of art from the renegade children’s book author and illustrator Tomi Ungerer.

Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini wasn’t merely the lightweight champ. He fought for his father and for those in small towns across America. The Good Son is an intimate history, a saga of fathers and fighters, loss and redemption and finally, forgiveness.

A shocking undercover investigation leads to a ban on animal circuses in Bolivia. But the circuses defy the law. The team behind the investigation returns, tracks down the illegal circuses and saves every animal. The confrontations, heartache and incredible risks the rescue team face are all captured before a joyous finale sees 25 lions airlifted to freedom in Colorado.

A reality-based (documentary) comedy debunking aliens, psychics and all things paranormal. The film follows Blake Freeman, who takes a 69-year-old man named LeRoy on a cross-country journey in search of the truth. LeRoy has spent his life savings on trying to protect himself from aliens and paranormal ghosts by buying gimmicks and entrusting psychics. Upon discovering LeRoy’s plight, Blake Freeman, with LeRoy in tow, decides to put these beliefs and so-called "experts" to the test.

The documentary feature chronicling the creation of the legit musical version of Green Day album “American Idiot”.

In the 30 years since The Shining's film release, a considerable cult of Shining devotees has emerged, fans who claim to have decoded the film’s secret messages addressing everything from the genocide of Native Americans to a range of government conspiracies. Rodney Ascher’s Room 237 fuses fact and fiction through interviews with cultists and scholars, creating a kaleidoscopic deconstruction of Kubrick’s still-controversial classic.

Academy Award winning director Alex Gibney takes an unprecedented look in The Last Gladiators at the National Hockey League’s most feared enforcers and explores the career of Chris “Knuckles” Nilan. The role was simple: protect their teammates no matter the cost. For Chris this meant a shattered body, addiction to drugs, and harming the people closest to him. But in the process, he won the love of hockey’s holy city, Montreal, and helped the team win the Stanley Cup. Through interviews with hockey’s toughest guys, the film explores what it means to enforce the unspoken code of the NHL.

Following world famous French soprano Natalie Dessay from the first repetitions until the premiere under the direction of Jean-Francois Sivadier, we meet a very special woman, a piece of art, a myth: La Traviata.

The film documents the daily lives of David Kato - the first openly gay Ugandan man - and three fellow "kuchus", culminating in a murder.

Two bartenders try to achieve their dreams through bartending. An injured Marine turns his goals to becoming a principal bartender at the best cocktail bar in the world. A young man leaves his white-collar job to buy the corner bar in his hometown years later he struggles to keep afloat. The bar is three deep, and the bartenders are in the weeds at the greatest cocktail party since before Prohibition. Hey Bartender is the story of the rebirth of the bartender and the comeback of the cocktail.

On May 13, 1985, a longtime feud between the city of Philadelphia and controversial radical urban group MOVE came to a deadly climax. By order of local authorities, police dropped military-grade explosives onto a MOVE-occupied rowhouse. TV cameras captured the conflagration that quickly escalated—and resulted in the tragic deaths of eleven people (including five children) and the destruction of 61 homes. It was only later discovered that authorities decided to “...let the fire burn.” Using only archival news coverage and interviews, first-time filmmaker Jason Osder has brought to life one of the most tumultuous and largely forgotten clashes between government and citizens in modern American history.

A documentary about the exile of Futaba’s residents, the region housing the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Since the 1960s, Futaba had been promised prosperity with tax breaks and major subsidies to compensate for the presence of the power plant. The town’s people have now lost their homeland. Through their agonies and frustrations, the film questions the real cost of capitalism and nuclear energy.

The day after the magnitude 9.0 earthquake on March 11, 2011, Futaba locals heard the hydrogen explosion at Reactor Number 1 and were showered with nuclear fallout. In response, the Japanese government designated the whole town as an “exclusion zone” and 1,400 of the town’s residents fled to an abandoned high school 250 kilometers away. The entire community, including the Town Hall office, was moved into the four-story building, making the residents nuclear refugees.

The film portrays the evacuees as the nuclear disaster situation changes over time. One of them is Ichiro Nakai, a farmer who lost his wife, his home, and his rice fields in the massive tsunami. Doing his best to cope with the monotony of life at the evacuation center, he struggles to wipe away the haunting memories and start a new life with his son. The two finally get an official permit to enter the exclusion zone to visit their hometown. There, they see that their worst fears have become reality...

Throughout Richard Nixon’s presidency, three of his top White House aides obsessively documented their experiences with Super 8 home movie cameras. Young, idealistic and dedicated, they had no idea that a few years later they’d all be in prison. This unique and personal visual record, created by H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and Dwight Chapin, was seized by the FBI during the Watergate investigation, then filed away and forgotten for almost 40 years. OUR NIXON is an all-archival documentary presenting those home movies for the first time, along with other rare footage, creating an intimate and complex portrait of the Nixon presidency as never seen before.

This film tells the story of the Pink Panthers, the world's most successful diamond thieves. With exclusive access to gang members as well as those tasked with catching them, the film combines animation and archive to explain their background in the history of Balkans and bring to life their gripping exploits.