Emerging from the primordial soup of glamour, gutter sleaze, and feverish creativity that was New York's 1960s underground culture, the Velvet Underground redefined music with its at once raw and exalted blend of experimentation and art-damaged rock and roll. In his kaleidoscopic documentary The Velvet Underground, Todd Haynes vividly evokes the band's incandescent world: the creative origins of the twin visionaries Lou Reed and John Cale, Andy Warhol's...

A sublime work of personal vision, the debut feature by the Mexican Ethiopian filmmaker Jessica Beshir is a hypnotic documentary immersion in the world of Ethiopia₂s Oromo community, a place where one commodity khat, a euphoria-inducing plant once prized for its supposedly mystical properties holds sway over the rituals and rhythms of everyday life. As if under the influence of the drug itself, Faya Dayi unfurls as intoxicating, trance state cinema,...

"The extraordinary debut from documentarian Bing Liu weaves a story of skateboarding, friendship, and fathers and sons into a coming-of-age journey of courageous vulnerability. Over the course of several years and with his camera always at the ready, Liu records the rocky paths into adulthood of Keire and Zack, two friends from his own skateboarding community in Rockford, Illinois"-Container.

"This playful, profound, and immensely moving docu-fantasia by Kirsten Johnson is a valentine to the director's beloved father, Dick Johnson, made as she is beginning to face the reality of losing him to dementia. Using the language of cinema both to defy death and to confront it head-on, Johnson mischievously envisions an array of ways in which the man she loves most in the world might die, staging a series of alternately darkly comic and colorfully...

From 1963 to 1966, Murray Lerner visited the annual Newport Folk Festival to document a thriving, idealistic musical movement as it reached its peak as a popular phenomenon. Shooting in gorgeous black and white, Lerner juxtaposes performances with snapshot interviews with artists and their fans, weaving footage from four years of the festival into an intimate record of a pivotal time in music, and in American culture at large.

Fearless documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras's career-long pursuit of truth and justice finds powerful expression in an epic story of art, activism, and survival. Made in collaboration with renowned artist Nan Goldin, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed entwines the mission of PAIN an advocacy group she founded to raise awareness about the billionaire Sackler family's integral role in the ongoing crisis of opioid overdoses with an intimate journey through...

Gates of Heaven: uses two Southern California pet cemeteries as the bases for a profound and funny rumination on love, loss, and industry. Vernon, Florida: travels to a languorous southern backwater and meets a handful of fascinating folks; a determined turkey hunter, a curious minister, a laconic policeman, engaged in individualistic, sometimes absurd pursuits.

Monterey Pop is the first filmed document of a rock festival. The Monterey Pop Festival, held on California's Monterey Peninsula in 1968, inspired Jann Wenner to launch his enormously successful "Rolling Stone Magazine." It also did much to boost the careers of many of the pop and rock stars who performed in it.

Koko, a Talking Gorilla is a documentary from 1978 that observes a zoo-born female gorilla in the fifth year of an experiment in human-simian communications. Dr. Penny Patterson has taught Koko hundreds of sign-language words in American Sign Language. Observing Koko's daily routine, her responses, her rejection of a new yellow sweater for her worn older red one, and her initiation of new subjects in conversation prompts more questions than it answers....

Chronicles the 1973 Harlan County, Kentucky coal miners' strike against the operators of the Brookside mine and the Duke Power Company, which resulted from the company's refusal to honor the national contract of the United Mine Workers of America when the miners joined the union.