If you’ve seen Top Gun or Transformers, you may have wondered: Does all of that military machinery on screen come with strings attached? Does the military actually get a crack at the script? With the release of a vast new trove of internal government documents, the answers have come into sharp focus: the US military has exercised editorial control over thousands of films and television programs. As these activities gain new public scrutiny, new questions arise: How have they managed to fly under the radar for so long? And where do we go from here?
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Michael Winterbottom, celebrated director of 24 Hour Party People, The Road to Guantanamo, and The Trip, joins forces with actor, comedian, and provocateur Russell Brand for that most unlikely of documentary approaches: an uproarious critique of the world financial crisis. Building on Brand’s emergence as an activist following his 2014 book Revolution, where he railed against “corporate tyranny, ecological irresponsibility, and economic inequality,” The Emperor’s New Clothes pairs archival footage with comedic send-ups conducted in the financial centers of London and New York. Brand spotlights not only how the crisis affected the working class around the world, but also how the uber-wealthy benefited from the downturn. With Winterbottom providing his signature ingenuity and pinpoint directorial control, they generate a riveting, boisterous, and, at times, cathartic riff on the extreme disparities between the haves and have nots in contemporary society.
Originally a home video never intended for public viewing, this film captures the final chapter in Roger Federer’s legendary tennis career, featuring Roger, his family, and his three main rivals: Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, and Andy Murray.
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In pre-Revolutionary France, a young aristocratic woman left penniless by the political unrest in the country, must avenge her family’s fall from grace by scheming to steal a priceless necklace.
A mother grapples to understand how her son became a school shooter and what it would take to prevent the next one.
Armando Iannucci presents a personal argument in praise of the genius of Charles Dickens. Through the prism of the author’s most autobiographical novel, David Copperfield, Armando looks beyond Dickens – the national institution – and instead explores the qualities of Dickens’s work that still make him one of the best British writers. While Dickens is often celebrated for his powerful depictions of Victorian England and his role as a social reformer, this programme foregrounds the elements of his writing which make him worth reading, as much for what he tells us about ourselves in the twenty-first century as our ancestors in the nineteenth. Armando argues that Dickens’s remarkable use of language and his extraordinary gift for creating characters make him a startlingly experimental and psychologically penetrating writer who demands not just to be adapted for television but to be read and read again.
The story of how, in the 1970 and 1978 World Cups, Brazil and Argentina’s military dictators took a vested interest in their nation’s football dreams.
A nature documentary centered on a family of chimps living in the Ivory Coast and Ugandan rain forests.
Casey Anthony’s parents undergo polygraph tests to answer lingering questions.
An embellished account of the 1803 expedition by famed frigate U.S.S. Constitution–a.k.a. “Old Ironsides”–against the Barbary pirates then terrorizing American shipping, focusing on the crew and passengers of a fictional merchant ship, The Esther, who fall afoul of the same pirates and thus become involved with the Constitution’s mission.
Documentary on the great American Ballerina Wendy Whelan
Its focus will be on the inventor-explorer-environmentalist-filmmaker revolution, i.e., giving mankind the resources to explore the ocean with the Aqua Lung, calling attention to ocean pollution, and his longtime collaboration.