Film Category: Thematic

The Arbor
Clio Barnard

This unconventional portrait of the late British playwright Andrea Dunbar features actors lip-synching audio interviews with her family, friends, and neighbors.

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Creature Comforts
Nick Park

This five-minute animated film by Nick Park (of Wallace & Gromit fame) introduces us to a series of zoo animals being interviewed about their lives…

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Devil’s Playground
Lucy Walker

Amish teenagers choose between their faith and the temptations of the modern world following a period of experimentation known as rumspringa.

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The Five Obstructions
Lars von Trier, Jørgen Leth

Lars von Trier challenges fellow filmmaker Jørgen Leth to create five new iterations of his film The Perfect Human, placing a new restriction on each production.

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Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie
Marcel Ophüls

This epic examination of the life of Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyons,” doggedly explores questions of evil, complicity, memory, responsibility, and evasion.

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The Kid Stays in the Picture
Nanette Burstein, Brett Morgen

Robert Evans, the first actor to become head of a major film studio, narrates this Hollywood insider tell-all detailing his rise, his fall, and his rise again.

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Land of Silence and Darkness
Werner Herzog

Fini Straubinger, deaf and blind since her teens, attempts to help those who are similarly afflicted overcome their isolation.

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The Lion’s Mouth Opens
Lucy Walker

With the support of family and friends, a young woman takes the daring step of determining whether she carries the genetic marker for Huntington’s disease.

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Metallica: Some Kind of Monster
Joe Berlinger, Bruce Sinofsky

At work on their album St. Anger, the members of the legendary band find themselves embroiled in bitter disputes, so they bring in their therapist to help.

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On the Bowery
Lionel Rogosin

Part-time rairoad worker Ray Salyer spends three days drinking and drifting on Manhattan’s Skid Row in this seminal postwar work of docufiction.

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