The Mona Lisa Curse is a Grierson award-winning polemic documentary by art critic Robert Hughes that examines how the world's most famous painting came to influence the art world. With his trademark style, Hughes explores how museums, the production of art and the way we experience it have radically changed in the last 50 years, telling the story of the rise of contemporary art and looking back over a life spent talking and writing about the art he loves, and loathes. In these postmodern days it has been said that there is no more passé a vocation than that of the professional art critic. Perceived as the gate keeper for opinions regarding art and culture, the art critic has supposedly been rendered obsolete by an ever expanding pluralism in the art world, where all practices and disciplines are purported to be equal and valid. Robert Hughes, however, is one art critic who has delivered a message that must not be ignored.
The Mona Lisa Curse is a Grierson award-winning polemic documentary by art critic Robert Hughes that examines how the world's most famous painting came to influence the art world. With his trademark style, Hughes explores how museums, the production of art and the way we experience it have radically changed in the last 50 years, telling the story of the rise of contemporary art and looking back over a life spent talking and writing about the art he loves, and loathes. In these postmodern days it has been said that there is no more passé a vocation than that of the professional art critic. Perceived as the gate keeper for opinions regarding art and culture, the art critic has supposedly been rendered obsolete by an ever expanding pluralism in the art world, where all practices and disciplines are purported to be equal and valid. Robert Hughes, however, is one art critic who has delivered a message that must not be ignored.
2008-09-18
8.5
Carol Morley returns to Manchester, where in the early 1980s, five years of her life were lost in an alcoholic blur. The Alcohol Years is a poetic retrieval of that time, in which rediscovered friends and acquaintances recount tales of her drunken and promiscuous behavior. In Morley’s search for her lost self, conflicting memories and viewpoints weave in and out, revealing a portrait of the city, its pop culture, and the people who lived it.
"Jennifer Lopez: All I Have" was the first concert residency by American entertainer Jennifer Lopez. Performed at Zappos Theater (formerly The AXIS Theater) located in the Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, the residency began on January 20, 2016 and concluded on September 29, 2018. The show has received critical acclaim for its production and Lopez's showmanship. The residency grossed $101.9 million after 120 shows, making it the sixth highest-grossing Las Vegas residency of all time, and the top residency by a Latin artist.
A community is under siege as three Belmont Highschool coed students go missing with no trace of their whereabouts. The pressure is on the police to capture the culprits responsible. Scouring the school hallways in search of clues, undercover female detective Maggie Rawdon (Jessica Sonnerborn) enters Belmont High as a transfer student in an attempt to solve the hideous disappearance of the students. Maggie makes a few new friends, and gets invited to a private rave in the country. Just as the group begins to suspect that they've taken a wrong turn, however, the trap is sprung and Maggie finds out firsthand what fate has befallen the missing girls.
Embark to Niagara Falls and witness its stunning beauty and a wide variety of wildlife—mammals, birds, and reptiles. Through the eyes of passionate scientists, uncover a complex world forged by stone and powered by water.
THE MINDS OF 99 – THREE DAYS IN THE PARK is a concert documentary film that follows the band and the individual members in the period leading up to, during, and after the magical weekend in the Park. Through a compilation of more than 300 hours of material, the audience is taken behind the scenes and gets up close to the band and the pressures and dilemmas, thoughts and emotions they encounter on the journey to the three critically acclaimed stadium concerts.
Traumatized. Immobilized. Stigmatized. Families reveal the struggles, hopes and fears that arise from raising young children with Bipolar Mood Disorder. Shot over the course of 12 months, the film focuses on five sets of parents and how they handle the unique challenges of caring for their bipolar children in the shadow of depression, violence and the threat of suicide.
A couple embark on an early vacation. Left alone, their children cut loose until the boy gets caught for skipping school and things take an unexpected turn. Boasting exquisite camera work, the film is also unforgettable for its wholly original ending.
Collegian Pratapchand alias Pratap lives with his father, Badriprasad, a building contractor, his housewife mom, and a younger brother named Ramu. Badriprasad is always critical of Pratap, and never a day passes without Pratap being reminded of his shortcomings. When Pratap's friend, Sunil gets married to Sudha, Badriprasad arranges Pratap's marriage with a village belle named Alka, much to Pratap's chagrin. After the marriage takes place, Pratap finds Alka attractive, and both fall in love with each other, and would some time together. But that is not to be so, as Pratap has exams coming up, and Badriprasad will not permit them to be close to each other. So both of them scheme up a plot to leave on the pretext of visiting Alka's parents in another distant town. Instead both of them go to Bombay, rent a room, and decide to be intimate. But fate has other plans, rather comical, for them, and will make rue their decision of coming to Bombay.
The interwoven dramas of staff and patients in Mayfield Children's Hospital, where the doctors and nurses are in the business of restoring children's lives. One small child risks losing his sight, while twin boys fool the doctors over which one has appendicitis. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, new nurse Margaret Collier suffers pangs of unrequited love for houseman Dr. Nigel Barnes.
Explores Man's tendency to reduce the world into discrete intervals so that it might be more readily analyzed, even if not wholly understood.
STOP + Cop = "Stop" or "Slow down" ? Make the right choice. An interactice movie by Ken Arsyn.
Jason Enola is an obsessive FBI agent who is almost losing his mind after ten years on the tail of an elusive serial killer whose hallmark is the "paper trail" of notes left along with the victims. As the film begins, a new wave of killings start after four years of silence, and the psychiatrist Dr. Alyce Robertson becomes involved when she starts receiving telephone calls from the killer.
A daring documentary delving into the experiences of a Ukrainian forced labourer in Germany during World War II, exploring themes of love, loss, and profound longing. When the filmmaker’s grandmother was 19, she was taken from Soviet Ukraine to Germany to work on a Bavarian farm under National Socialism. She had the luck and perseverance to survive the hardships of the forced famine in her homeland and forced labour in the new one. The stories of her everyday life – learning how to milk a cow, and falling in love – are interspersed with three generations of reflections on politics, longing, feelings of displacement and loss. Hand-processed black & white film, colour film, photographs and official documents create a montage of different perspectives. The hand-touch aesthetic combines with the acousmatic effect of disembodied voices, in this deeply intimate portrait obscured by memory loss, mistranslation, fear and trauma.
Madhavan (Dileep) is a clever thief who does robbery for a living. He is following the principles of his mentor Mullani Pappan (Mala Aravindan). Meesa Madhavan got his name by the popular saying that if Madhavan rolls his Mustache (Meesa in Malayalam) looking at someone, he will rob his house that night. His enemy was a local money lender Bhageerathan Pillai (Jagathy Sreekumar) who refused to give back his father's property. Madhavan falls in love in Bhageerathan Pillai's daughter Rukmini (Kavya Madhavan). The sub inspector in the village Eappen Pappachi (Indrajith) has an eye on Rukmini. He steals the idol from the local Temple with the intention of selling it and puts the blame on Madhavan. It becomes Madhavan's responsibility to find the culprits and he does that with his mentor's help and thus uniting with his girl friend.
The 30-year legacy of the murder of black teenager Yusuf Hawkins by a group of young white men in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, as his family and friends reflect on the tragedy and the subsequent fight for justice that inspired and divided New York City.
For several decades, gifted and incredibly prolific forger Mark Landis compulsively created impeccable copies of works by a variety of major artists, donating them to institutions across the country and landing pieces on many of their walls. ART AND CRAFT brings us into the cluttered and insular life of an unforgettable character just as he finds his foil in an equally obsessive art registrar.
You’d never know this is your home away from home. The surveillance camera outside shows a drab reception area and an unremarkable street in Mexico City; inside, the lights flash, but the tables are empty. Yet preparations are soon underway and fixed categories cease to apply: stubble is removed, make-up applied and strands of hair are teased into place; the camera is trained not on the men themselves, but what they see in the mirror.
Fighting to reunite with their children, 'Tough Love' chronicles the lives of two parents with cases in the United States child welfare system as they attempt to prove to the courts and the system that they deserve a second chance to be a parent and have a family.
War is Hell. Why would anyone want to spend their weekends there? Deep in the Oregon woods, the heat of a reenacted Vietnam battle sheds light on America's complicated relationship with war and its veterans.
A portrait of the day-to-day operations of the National Gallery of London, that reveals the role of the employees and the experiences of the Gallery's visitors. The film portrays the role of the curators and conservators; the education, scientific, and conservation departments; and the audience of all kinds of people who come to experience it.
Writing a letter to Paul B. Preciado, trans philosopher and filmmaker, as one would write to a friend. Undertake a healing process as a queer child growing up in a Spanish evangelical family. From Lausanne to New York, Lézio Schiffke-Rodriguez follows in the footsteps of revolutions that invite us to redefine our vision of binary bodies.
Since the late 18th century American legal decision that the business corporation organizational model is legally a person, it has become a dominant economic, political and social force around the globe. This film takes an in-depth psychological examination of the organization model through various case studies. What the study illustrates is that in the its behaviour, this type of "person" typically acts like a dangerously destructive psychopath without conscience. Furthermore, we see the profound threat this psychopath has for our world and our future, but also how the people with courage, intelligence and determination can do to stop it.
Seemayer Studios presents a new documentary about the American Hotel in downtown Los Angeles and the Arts District that surrounds it. Since 1979, the American Hotel has been the beating heart of a rich community of artists who began moving into the deserted factory buildings between Alameda and the Los Angeles River.
April 1994 in the Lacandona Jungle, Chiapas, México. The Zapatista women talk about the living conditions of Mexican indigenous populations and the life of peasant women. They explain the reasons for their struggle and their uprising.
The '40s and '50s were a classic period in New York City nightlife, when the saloonkeeper was king and regular folks could drink with celebrities like Frank Sinatra and Jackie Gleason. In this documentary, Kristi Jacobson profiles her grandfather, the king of kings: Toots Shor of the eponymous restaurant and saloon, which was once the place to be seen in Manhattan. Edward R. Murrow called Toots Shor the owner of America’s greatest saloon. He became the unlikely den-mother to the heroes of America's golden age. Politicians and gangsters, sports heroes and movie stars - Sinatra, Gleason, DiMaggio, Ruth, Costello, Eisenhower, Nixon, Warren - for 30 years, they all found their way to Toots' eponymous saloon on New York's West 51st Street.
From award-winning director Phil Grabsky comes this fresh new look at arguably the world’s favourite artist – through his own words. Using letters and other private writings I, Claude Monet reveals new insight into the man who not only painted the picture that gave birth to impressionism but who was perhaps the most influential and successful painter of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Despite this, and perhaps because of it, Monet’s life is a gripping tale about a man who, behind his sun-dazzled canvases, suffered from feelings of depression, loneliness, even suicide. Then, as his art developed and his love of gardening led to the glories of his garden at Giverney, his humour, insight and love of life is revealed. Shot on location in Paris, London, Normandy and Venice I, Claude Monet is a cinematic immersion into some of the most loved and iconic scenes in Western Art.
Germany in Autumn does not have a plot per se; it mixes documentary footage, along with standard movie scenes, to give the audience the mood of Germany during the late 1970s. The movie covers the two month time period during 1977 when a businessman was kidnapped, and later murdered, by the left-wing terrorists known as the RAF-Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Fraction). The businessman had been kidnapped in an effort to secure the release of the orginal leaders of the RAF, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang. When the kidnapping effort and a plane hijacking effort failed, the three most prominent leaders of the RAF, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe, all committed suicide in prison. It has become an article of faith within the left-wing community that these three were actually murdered by the state.
As beautiful and sleek as it is deadly, 52 Blocks merits special conservation efforts as the United States' only existing native martial culture, as it is indeed, the jazz of the martial arts world. Across the African diaspora, there are manifestations of African-derived warrior-dances, capoeira in brazil, mani in Cuba, ladja in Martinique, pinge in Haiti- yet the US offshoot has remained esoteric, because it was suppressed throughout slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow and then obscured in the criminal justice system. The history, interviews and training of the martial arts style that created Breakdance and boxing greats like Mike Tyson.
A short documentary illustrating how art can influence public perception towards environmental issues. Green Patriot Posters is a highly acclaimed multimedia design campaign that challenges artists to deepen public understanding and ignite collective action in the fight against climate change. So far, it has reached five million people through print media, public space and digital culture. The film features interviews with key Green Patriot Posters contributors (Shepard Fairey, Michael Bierut, DJ Spooky, Mathilde Fallot) and its founders (The Canary Project, Dmitri Siegel).
A contemplation of art and adventure in the southern wilds of New Zealand by both a landscape photographer and an adventure filmmaker. This film is the unexpected result of their two unique perspectives.
Sitting at her typewriter, listening to tango music, she dreams. Buenos Aires and Montevideo are far away, a different world where, long ago, the tango came into being. A dream about dance and music, as well as about unfulfilled desire and wanderlust behind the Berlin Wall.
Photographer Gundula Schulze wrote her graduate thesis on "nude photography of women in East Germany". It's a subject she continues to pursue in her photography. She considers the stereotype of superficial nude photography anachronistic, and talks vividly about being at pains to develop a relationship of trust with the women she photographs. Schulze wants to show what makes up the "whole woman", living up to her position in East Germany. Scenes of women in the professional world have been edited into the film.
How far would you go to pursue your passion? At 87 years old, Hank Virgona commutes to his Union Square studio six days a week and makes art. Despite poor health, cancer, lack of revenue and obscurity as an artist, Hank is unrelenting in his quest to understand how life and art are the same.
Materia oscura tells the story of a war zone in peacetime. The film location is the Salto di Quirra test range (Sardinia, Italy) where, for over fifty years, governments around the world have tested 'new weapons' and where the Italian government has carried out controlled explosions of old weapon stocks, inexorably endangering the territory.