Lists and Suggestions

The 85-year-old Jiro Ono is considered by many to be the world's greatest sushi chef. He is the proprietor of a 10-seat sushi-only restaurant inauspiciously located in a Tokyo subway station. Despite its humble appearances, it is the first restaurant of its kind to be awarded a prestigious 3-star Michelin review, and sushi lovers from around the globe make repeated pilgrimages, calling months in advance and shelling out top dollar for a coveted seat at Jiro's sushi bar.

Academy Award nominated filmmaker Steve James' fascinating and complex portrait of contemporary Chicago delivers a deep, multifaceted look into the soul of a quintessentially American city, set against the backdrop of its history-making 2019 mayoral election, and the tumultuous 2020 summer of COVID-19 and social upheaval following the police killing of George Floyd.

Academy Award winner Alex Gibney directs a documentary investigating the rise and fall of Theranos, the one-time multibillion-dollar healthcare company founded by Elizabeth Holmes. In 2004, Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford to start a company that was going to revolutionize healthcare. In 2014, Theranos was valued at $9 billion, making Holmes, who was touted as "the next Steve Jobs," the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world. Just two years later, Theranos was cited as a "massive fraud" by the SEC, and its value was less than zero. Drawing on extraordinary access to never-before-seen footage and testimony from key insiders, director Alex Gibney will tell a Silicon Valley tale that was too good to be true. With all the drama of a real-life heist film, the documentary examines how this could have happened and who is responsible, while exploring the psychology of deception.

Over the past sixteen years, an extraordinary group of musicians has come together to celebrate the universal power of music. Named for the ancient trade route linking Asia, Africa, and Europe, the Silk Road Ensemble, an international collective created by legendary cellist Yo-Yo Ma, exemplifies music's ability to blur international boundaries, blend disparate cultures, and inspire hope for artists and audiences.

In this inspired, genre-twisting film, Oscar-nominated writer/director Sarah Polley discovers that the truth depends on who's telling it. Polley is both filmmaker and detective as she investigates the secrets behind a family of storytellers. She playfully interviews and interrogates a cast of characters of varying reliability, eliciting refreshingly candid, yet mostly contradictory, answers to the same questions.

In the Antarctic, every March since the beginning of time, the quest begins to find the perfect mate and start a family. This courtship will begin with a long journey - a journey that will take them hundreds of miles across the continent by foot, one by one in a single file. They will endure freezing temperatures, in brittle, icy winds and through deep, treacherous waters. They will risk starvation and attack by dangerous predators, under the harshest conditions on earth, all to find true love.

The act of killing is an examination of the murder of political dissidents in Indonesia by government sponsored death squads in the years following the military coup in 1965, in which the filmmakers were successful in persuading those responsible to reenact the killings for the camera in the fashion of American movies.

"At three years old, a chatty, energetic little boy named Owen Suskind suddenly stopped speaking and disappeared into autism. Almost four years passed and the only thing that seemed to engage Owen were Disney films. Then one day his father donned one of his son's puppets--Iago, the wisecracking parrot from Aladdin--and asked 'What's it like to be you?' Suddenly, Owen responded to his father using dialogue from the movie ... Life, Animated tells the remarkable story of how Owen found a pathway to language and a framework for making sense of the world through Disney animated films. By evocatively interweaving classic Disney sequences with vérité scene's from Owen's life, the film explores how identification and empathy with characters like Simba, Jafar and Ariel create a context for him to understand his feelings and interpret reality."--Container.

In the early 1970s, Sixto Rodriguez was a Detroit folksinger who had a short-lived recording career. Unknown to him, his musical story continued in South Africa where he became a pop music icon. Long rumored there to be dead, two fans, record store owner Stephen Segerman and journalist Craig Bartholomew-Strydom, decided to seek out the truth of his fate.

What does the weight of time's passage feel like for a family caught in the jaws of a brutal carceral system? Both a breathtaking cinematic love story and a bruising indictment of American injustice, the Academy Award-nominated feature documentary debut of Garrett Bradley traces the decades-long quest of Sibil Fox Richardson, an indefatigable mother of six and a fiercely outspoken prison abolitionist, to free her husband from the Louisiana State Penitentiary, where he is serving a sixty-year sentence for robbery. Gracefully interweaving twenty years' worth of Richardson's own intimate home movies with luminously expressive monochrome footage of her present-day joys and struggles, Bradley crafts in this film a transcendentally poetic, soul-shaking look at the devastating toll of mass incarceration and one family's extraordinary efforts to stay whole.

The show takes audiences inside the hearts and minds of the Sesame Street creators, artists, and educators who established one of the most influential and enduring children's programs in television history. With exclusive behind-the-scenes footage and over 20 original interviews, it introduces audiences to the people who entertained and educated children like never before.

Through the eyes of three stray dogs wandering the streets of Istanbul, the film explores what it means to live without status or security. As they search for food and shelter, Zeytin, Nazar and Kartal embark on inconspicuous journeys through Turkish society that allow viewers an unvarnished portrait of human life through the unfamiliar gaze of dogs.

If it hadn't been for a bottle of scotch and a late-night visit from musician Gregg Allman, Jimmy Carter might never have been elected the 39th President of the United States. This documentary charts the mostly forgotten story of how Carter, a lover of all types of music, forged a tight bond with musicians Willie Nelson, the Allman Brothers, Bob Dylan and others.

Samuele is twelve years old and lives on an island in the middle of the sea. He goes to school, and loves shooting his slingshot and going hunting. He likes land games, even though everything around him speaks of the sea and the men, women, and children who try to cross it to get to his island. But his is not an island like the others, its name is Lampedusa and it is the most symbolic border of Europe, crossed by thousands of migrants in the last twenty years in search of freedom.

In his acclaimed debut as a filmmaker, Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson presents a powerful and transporting documentary, part music film, part historical record, created around an epic event that celebrated Black history, culture, and fashion. Over the course of six weeks in the summer of 1969, just one hundred miles south of Woodstock, The Harlem Cultural Festival was filmed in Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park). The footage was largely forgotten, until now. This documentary shines a light on the importance of history to our spiritual well-being and stands as a testament to the healing power of music during times of unrest, both past, and present. The feature includes concert performances by Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Sly & the Family Stone, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Mahalia Jackson, B.B. King, The 5th Dimension, and more.

Despite attempts by his friends, loved ones and his new girlfriend to dissuade him from this dangerous feat, Alex Honnold, the worlds most accomplished free soloist climber, prepares mentally and physically for his most daring adventure to date: scaling the 3200-foot El Capitan in Yosemite without a rope or safety gear. If he succeeds, it will mark the largest wall he, or anyone else, for that matter, has ascended without any kind of equipment.

The Friedmans seem to be a typical family from affluent Great Neck, Long Island. One Thanksgiving, as the family gathers for a quiet holiday dinner, a police battering ram splinters the front door and officers rush inside. The police charge Arnold and his son Jesse with hundreds of shocking crimes. As police investigate, and the community reacts, the fabric of the family begins to disintegrate, revealing questions about justice, family and finally the truth.

The astonishing true story of three men who make the chance discovery, at the age of nineteen, that they are identical triplets, separated at birth and adopted to different parents. The trio's joyous reunion in 1980 catapults them to fame but it also sets in motion a chain of events that unearths an extraordinary and disturbing secret that goes far beyond their own lives, a secret that goes to the very heart of all human behavior.

"This meditation on cinema's past from Decasia director Bill Morrison pieces together the bizarre true history of a long-lost collection of 533 nitrate film prints from the early 1900s. Located just south of the Arctic Circle, Dawson City was settled in 1896 and became the center of the Canadian Gold Rush that brought 100,000 prospectors to the area. It was also the final stop for a distribution chain that sent prints and newsreels to the Yukon. The films were seldom, if ever, returned. The now-famous Dawson City Collection was uncovered in 1978 when a bulldozer working its way through a parking lot dug up a horde of film cans. Morrison draws on these permafrost-protected, rare silent films and newsreels, pairing them with archival footage, interviews, historical photographs, and an enigmatic score by Sigur Ros collaborator and composer Alex Somers. Dawson City : Frozen Time depicts the unique history of this Canadian Gold Rush town by chronicling the life cycle of a singular film collection through its exile, burial, rediscovery, and salvation"--Container.

In the late 1970s, Miss Wyoming Joyce McKinney became a tabloid staple when she kidnapped her former beau, a Mormon missionary, and tied him to a bed to 'deprogram' his religious beliefs-by having nonstop sex with him. Director Errol Morris follows the salacious adventures of this beauty queen with an IQ of 168 whose single-minded devotion to the man of her dreams led her across the globe, into jail and onto the front page.

As one of America's most beloved children's show hosts, Mr. Rogers remains one of the most iconic television figures for families worldwide. This documentary takes a closer look at the person behind the show, persona, and personality that helped define what it meant to be a good person and be a part of a healthy community. Through his children's show, Mr. Rogers would go on to inspire a generation by not skirting real world issues, confronting issues of social justice and maturity through a lens that provided an educational aspect that was approachable by kids and appreciated by the entire family.