Director Asif Kapadia follows his BAFTA-winning documentary Senna with this haunting portrait of singer Amy Winehouse. Featuring extensive unseen archival footage and previously unheard tracks, the film restores humanity to a figure who had become a tabloid caricature. Winehouse captured the world’s attention with her unforgettable voice and charisma, but the pressures of celebrity and […]
NYC PREMIERE “I want to tell people how I became this woman with razor blades between her teeth.” So says Sonia Sanchez, a seminal figure in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, a poet who has harnessed her gift for words as a champion against racism, sexism and war, fusing art and activism over the past […]
45th anniversary screening, in memory of Al Maysles, who passed away this year. What began as a Direct Cinema portrait of the Rolling Stones becomes a disturbing record of a notorious concert. In contrast to Woodstock’s free-flowing peace and love, a palpable tension hangs over the free Altamont Speedway show on December 6, 1969, recognized […]
WORLD PREMIERE Peelander-Z isn’t your ordinary band. Once audiences see their outrageous onstage antics – human bowling, anyone? – and distinctive color-coded costumes, they might just start to believe the Japanese art-punk band’s claims of coming from another planet. After fifteen years of playing in NYC and touring around the country, Peelander Red decides to […]
NYC PREMIERE Despite a couple of minor hits, soul singer Syl Johnson retired from the music industry in the 1980s, never quite having achieved the success he longed for. But with the dawn of hip hop came the unexpected, widespread embrace of his 1967 song “Different Strokes” – sampled by artists as diverse as Run-DMC, […]
NYC PREMIERE In their 40-year career, the members of the pioneering sound and video collective known as The Residents have insisted on absolute anonymity, performing in distinctive giant eyeball masks and natty suits, and never revealing their true identities. In Don Hardy’s entertaining, accessible film, longtime collaborators, ardent supporters like The Simpsons’ Matt Groening, magician […]
NYC PREMIERE This timely look at US-Cuba relations focuses on the younger Cubans and Cuban Americans who are seeking to bridge the conflicts of their parents’ generation. Covering a span of ten years, the film looks at the buildup to and aftermath of the 2009 Peace Without Borders concert in Havana that assembled some of […]
Hustlers Convention is, in the words of The Hollywood Reporter, a hip-hop history lesson that feels at times like a rap cousin of Searching for Sugar Man. Director Mike Todd (Joe Frazier: When the Smoke Clears) goes in search of the artist behind the influential 1973 album Hustlers Convention. Interviews include George Clinton, Fab 5 […]
NYC PREMIERE Between 1957 and 1965, former LIFE Magazine photojournalist W. Eugene Smith obsessively photographed and taped the goings-on at the dilapidated Sixth Avenue loft he called home. As revealed in this astonishing WNYC-produced time capsule, what he captured is a treasure trove of NYC jazz of that period, including a three-week rehearsal by the […]
Bernardo Ruiz’s compelling investigation into the human costs of the Mexican drug war, on both sides of the border, reveals the links between the lives and experiences of an activist nun in northern Mexico, a rancher in Texas who used to smuggle marijuana and a US drug enforcement agent on the border. A raw history […]