Browse Movies : Completed : 2013 : Documentary : T

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.

The film takes an unconventional journey with a true “comic’s comic”. Eddie Pepitone, a startling voice in the alt-comedy scene, has been battling on-stage for over 30 years. Now in his fifties, he is attempting to take his comedy to the next level. Throughout the film, we follow Eddie as he struggles to break through his cult status while dealing with self-doubt, sobriety and a challenging past.

Original animation, stand-up material and hilarious interviews with Patton Oswalt, Sarah Silverman, Marc Maron and others help us gain insight into this fascinating character. Above all, “The Bitter Buddha” is an unhinged portrait of creativity, enlightenment and rage.

Gloria Gaynor, Village People, Kool and the Gang, KC and the Sunshine Band and more appear in the documentary about the birth of disco in the ’70s and the part the music movement played in the liberation of gays, blacks and women.

The film is a living collage of rare archival material, filmed portraits, and voices, provided by Jena Malone, Ben Whishaw, Julia Hummer, and Jessie Usher, lifted from early 20th century diary entries. Teenage world premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and went on to screen at Hot Docs and AFI Docs, among others.

When American basketball player Kevin Sheppard accepts a job to play in one of the world’s most feared countries – Iran – he expects the worst. But what he finds is a country brimming with generosity, acceptance, and sensuality. With a charismatic personality that charms everyone he meets, Kevin forms an unlikely friendship with three outspoken Iranian women who share with him their strong opinions on everything from politics to religion to gender roles. Kevin’s season in Iran eventually culminates in something much bigger than basketball: the uprising and subsequent suppression of Iran’s reformist Green Movement – a powerful prelude to the sweeping changes currently unfolding across the Middle East in the wake of the Arab Spring.

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.

Morgan Neville follows half a dozen diverse and gifted back up singers from throughout music history, each of whom has a story to tell of life in the shadows of superstardom (Bruce Springsteen, The Rolling Stones, Stevie Wonder, Sting, Joe Cocker, Bette Midler to name just a few). These talented artists represent a range of styles that come from all eras of popular music, but each singer belongs to the first family of American voice. Now is their turn for the spotlight.

This chilling and inventive documentary examines a country where death squad leaders are celebrated as heroes, challenging them to reenact their real-life mass-killings in the style of the American movies they love.

When the Indonesian government was overthrown in 1965, small-time gangster Anwar Congo and his friends went from selling movie tickets on the black market to leading anti-communist death squads in the mass murder of over a million people. Anwar boasts of killing hundreds with his own hands, but he's lived in his country with impunity ever since. When approached to make a film about their role in the genocide, Anwar and his friends eagerly comply-but their idea of being in a movie is not to provide reflective testimony, but to dance their way through musical numbers, twist arms in film noir gangster scenes, and gallop across the prairies as yodeling cowboys.

The epic rivalry between half-pipe legends Kevin Pearce and Shaun White is documented in this exhilarating ride into the world of extreme snowboarding. With both practicing more and more breathtaking and dangerous tricks leading up to the Vancouver Winter Olympics, everything suddenly changes for Kevin when a horrific crash leaves him fighting for his life. When he recovers, all he wants to do is get on his snowboard again, even though medics and family fear it could kill him.

For the first time ever, six former heads of Israel's domestic secret service agency, the Shin Bet, share their insights and reflect publicly on their actions and decisions. Since the Six Day War in 1967, Israel has failed to transform its crushing military victory into a lasting peace. Throughout that entire period, these heads of the Shin Bet stood at the center of Israel's decision-making process in all matters pertaining to security. They worked closely with every Israeli prime minister, and their assessments and insights had - and continue to have - a profound impact on Israeli policy.

1975. In Rome, Claude Lanzmann filmed a series of interviews with Benjamin Murmelstein, the last President of the Jewish Council in the Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia, the only "Elder of the Jews" not to have been killed during the war. A rabbi in Vienna, following the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938, Murmelstein fought bitterly with Adolf Eichmann, week after week for seven years, managing to help around 121,000 Jews leave the country, and preventing the liquidation of the ghetto.

2012. Claude Lanzmann, at 87 – without masking anything of the passage of time on men, but showing the incredible permanence of the locations involved –exhumes these interviews shot in Rome, returning to Theresienstadt, the town “given to the Jews by Hitler”, a so-called model ghetto, but a ghetto of deceit chosen by Adolf Eichmann to dupe the world. We discover the extraordinary personality of Benjamin Murmelstein: a man blessed with a dazzling intelligence and a true courage, which, along with an unrivaled memory, makes him a wonderfully wry, sardonic and authentic storyteller.

Through these three periods, from Nisko in Poland to Theresienstadt, and from Vienna to Rome, the film provides an unprecedented insight into the genesis of the Final Solution. It reveals the true face of Eichmann, and exposes without artifice the savage contradictions of the Jewish Councils.

With infectious zeal and a voracious appetite for popular culture, Slavoj Zizek literally goes inside some truly epochal movies, all the better to explore and expose how they reinforce prevailing ideologies. As the ideology that undergirds our cinematic fantasies is revealed, striking associations emerge: What hidden Catholic teachings lurk at the heart of The Sound of Music? What are the fascist political dimensions of Jaws? Taxi Driver, Zabriskie Point, The Searchers, The Dark Knight, John Carpenter’s They Live, and propaganda epics from Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.

Admit it: you don’t really read the endless terms and conditions connected to every website you visit, phone call you make or app you download. But every day, billion-dollar corporations are learning more about your interests, your friends and family, your finances, and your secrets, and they’re not only selling the information to the highest bidder, but also sharing it with the government. And you agreed to all of it. This disquieting exposé demonstrates how every one of us is incrementally opting-in to a real-time surveillance state, click by click- and what, if anything, you can do about it.

In 2009 Alex Gibney was hired to make a film about Lance Armstrong's comeback to cycling. The project was shelved when the doping scandal erupted, and re-opened after Armstrong's confession. The Armstrong Lie picks up in 2013 and presents a riveting, insider's view of the unraveling of one of the most extraordinary stories in the history of sports. As Lance Armstrong himself says: "I didn't live a lot of lies, but I lived one big one."

Kathleen Hanna, lead singer of the punk band Bikini Kill and dance-punk trio Le Tigre, rose to national attention as the reluctant but never shy voice of the riot grrrl movement. She became one of the most famously outspoken feminist icons, a cultural lightning rod. Her critics wished she would just shut-up, and her fans hoped she never would. So in 2005, when Hanna stopped shouting, many wondered why. Through 20 years of archival footage and intimate interviews with Hanna, The Punk Singer takes viewers on a fascinating tour of contemporary music and offers a never-before-seen view into the life of this fearless leader.

Follows the lives of eight of the best 7-year-old golfers in the world as they train for and compete in the World Championships of Junior Golf. The annual tournament held at golfing mecca Pinehurst, North Carolina, brings in 1500 young golfers from 54 different countries and determines who will be crowned golf’s next phenom. In its course, the eight stories entwine to form a fascinating and often funny portrait of a group of very young athletes and their families, in which the narrow-focused, peculiar and highly competitive junior golf subculture becomes both a window into contemporary global society and an inspiring reflection of the human condition.

Documents a calamitous expedition up K2, the second-highest peak in the world. The project explores what happened to a group of 24 climbers -- 11 of whom were killed or vanished during a trek to the summit.