Harry Potter 20th Anniversary: Return to Hogwarts
★ 7.3 · 2022 · 103m · Documentary
An enchanting making-of story told through all-new in-depth interviews and cast conversations, inviting fans on a magical first-person journey through one of the most beloved film franchises of all time.
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Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy
2023 · ★ 5
This is not a documentary about the making of Midnight Cowboy. It is about a humane and groundbreaking masterpiece and the flawed but gifted people who made it. It is about a troubled era of cultural ferment, social and political change, about broken dreams and strivers, then and now. It is about an era that made a movie and a movie that made an era.
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Visions Cinema: Film as a Way of Life: Hong Kong Cinema - A Report by Tony Rayns
1983
Examines the early 1980s Hong Kong filmmaking community. Tony Rayns interviews some of the new generation of filmmakers and figures from the wider film culture.
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Never Surrender: A Galaxy Quest Documentary
2019 · ★ 7.4
A feature-length documentary about the film Galaxy Quest and its legacy, celebrating its milestone 20th anniversary.
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Discovering Cinema: Learning to Talk
2003 · ★ 7.5
Documentary illustrating the birth of sound cinema.
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A Cooler Climate
2022 · ★ 8
In 1960, acclaimed filmmaker James Ivory traveled to Afghanistan to shoot scenes for a documentary that was never completed. In 2022, he decided to revisit this unique footage, which takes him back to his adventurous youth.
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Going Attractions: The Definitive Story of the Movie Palace
2019 · ★ 6.3
Celebrating the splendor and grandeur of the great cinemas of the United States, built when movies were the acme of entertainment and the stories were larger than life, as were the venues designed to show them. The film also tracks the eventual decline of the palaces, through to today’s current preservation efforts. A tribute to America’s great art form and the great monuments created for audiences to enjoy them in.
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You Must Remember This: The Warner Bros. Story
2008 · ★ 8.5
Jack L. Warner, Harry Warner, Albert Warner and Sam Warner were siblings who were born in Poland and emigrated to Canada near the turn of the century. In 1903, the brothers entered the budding motion picture business. In time, the Warner Brothers moved into film production and would open their own studio in 1923.
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Lumière, Le Cinéma!
2024 · ★ 7
In one of those wonderful coincidences of history, lumière, the French word for “light,” was also the last name of brothers Auguste and Louis, whose brilliant invention, the cinematograph, helped to inaugurate the most beloved art form of the last 130 years. Institute Lumière director Thierry Frémaux uses Lumière, Le Cinema! to guide the viewer through over a hundred shorts—some famous, some forgotten, some never before seen—directed by Lumière and company. In the process, Frémaux illuminates how the brothers employed the camera as a creative instrument as they (and their operators) mastered framing, staging, and subject selection for quotidian and exotic microdocumentaries as well as the first ever fictional motion pictures. The result is not only a glorious re(telling) of the genesis of cinema but a profound meditation on the beautiful world captured—and the mysterious world imagined—by the Lumières.
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End of the Commune?
1970 · ★ 8
A documentary about Fassbinder and the early years of the legendary Antiteater, the group he was a member/leader of. You can here see and hear some of the actors he was going to use in his movies for the next years. The movie shows rehearsals for his play "The Coffeehouse," which also became a television movie, and you can watch unique footage from the 19th Film Festival in Berlin (1969) where "Love is Colder Than Death" was shown. As told in this documentary, his first feature movie was given a cold shoulder by many of the journalists and visitors at the festival. You can in "End of the Commune" watch Fassbinder and actor Ulli Lommel walk out on stage after the opening of "Love is Colder Than Death,” while a man in the audience is shouting "Out with the director!” In this documentary, Fassbinder also talks a lot about his father, who was a respectable doctor.
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2011
The actors in My Wife's Relations (1922) are discussed in this documentary.
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2010
This visual essay by John Bengtson, author of Silent Echoes: Discovering Early Hollywood Through the Films of Buster Keaton, reveals the locations where Keaton's 1923 comedy feature Three Ages was filmed in Hollywood, USC, and Los Angeles.
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