Watching Movie Online

Release Date: January 8, 2010 (NY)
Studio: First Run Features
Director: Kate Davis, Franco Sacchi, David Heilbroner

“Waiting for Armageddon” explores the culture of 50 million American Evangelicals who believe that Bible prophecy dictates the future of mankind and that Israel and the Jewish people play pivotal roles in ensuring Christ’s return. The film raises questions regarding how this theology shapes U.S.- Middle East relations and how it may even encourage an international holy war.

Using intimate portraits and archival footage to explore how literal belief in Biblical prophecy – including the Rapture and Armageddon – exerts a dangerous influence on U.S. relations in the Middle East, Waiting for Armageddon tells its story through the eyes of three evangelical families who are certain that upon Christ’s Second Coming they will be “raptured” or lifted into the skies to join Christ while the rest of humanity suffers for seven years during “The Tribulation.”

The film then follows a Christian Study Tour group to Israel – among the tens of thousands of Evangelicals who pour into the Holy Land each year. The tourists are baptized in the River Jordon, sing the US national anthem on the Sea of Galilee, proclaim love for Israel, and describe how the Dome of the Rock, one of the holiest sites in Islam, must be destroyed in order for Jesus to return. A controversial, potentially explosive relationship between Christian Evangelicals, Jews, and Muslims emerges. At an evangelical conference in Dallas, Texas, the film’s characters urge others to spread Biblical literalism and counter the dangerous effects of post-modernism. The climax of the gathering comes as Pastor John Hagee, the enormously influential Texas Minister of an 18,000-member mega-church, declares, “World War III has started.”

Popularity: 14% [?]

Release Date: January 8, 2010 (NY)
Studio: Icarus Films
Director: Petra Seeger

“In Search of Memory” is a critically-acclaimed biographical documentary on the life and work of neuroscientist Eric Kandel, winner in 2000 of the Nobel Prize for Medicine for his research on the physiological basis of the brain’s memory storage.

Kandel, born in Vienna in 1929, emigrated to the U.S. at the age of nine to escape Nazi persecution. After early studies in history and literature, he focused on medicine and became a psychoanalyst before devoting his life, for the last fifty years, to neuroscience. His research field, which is closely linked with his traumatic childhood experience during the Nazi era in Vienna and the Holocaust, is the search for memory. He relates his life story and scientific work in his award-winning autobiography, “In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind,” in 2006.

The documentary interweaves Kandel’s life story with the latest advances in neuroscience. Petra follows Kandel on a very personal journey into his own memory, which takes us to the external and internal locations of his childhood in Vienna, using both archival footage and dramatic re-creations, to his laboratory work at Columbia University in New York, and, through his research, right into the center of the brain, as he explains where and how our memories are stored.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Release Date: January 6, 2010 (NY)
Studio: Cinema Guild
Director: Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Ilisa Barbash

A paean to the waning world of the Old West, Sweetgrass captures modern cowboys’ overland journey, wrangling thousands of sheep, as they move across Montana’s Absaroka-Beartooth Mountains, amid sweepingly dramatic vistas and endless skies. Husband and wife filmmakers / anthropologists Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash spent three summers high in the Rockies among the herders and their charges to chronicle this extraordinary 200-mile journey.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Release Date: January 6, 2010 (NY)

Studio: Wynne Films

Director: Mai Iskander

Garbage Dreams follows three teenage boys born into the trash trade and growing up in the world’s largest garbage village, a Coptic Christian community on the outskirts of Cairo. It is the home to 60,000 Zaballeen – Arabic for “garbage people.” Far ahead of any modern “Green” initiatives, the Zaballeen survive by recycling 80 percent of the garbage they collect. When their community is suddenly faced with the globalization of its trade, each of the teenage boys is forced to make choices that will impact his future and the survival of his community. Filmed over four years, GARBAGE DREAMS reveals a little-known, resourceful and resilient subculture at the moment when its very way of life is threatened. Shortly after viewing the film, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced a donation of $1 million to support the work of The Spirit of Youth Association, an organization whose work is highlighted in the documentary.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Release Date: December 4, 2009 (NY)
Studio: Variance Films
Director: Aaron Aites, Audrey Ewell

“Until the Light Takes Us” tells the story of black metal. Part music scene and part cultural uprising, black metal rose to worldwide notoriety in the mid-nineties when a rash of suicides, murders, and church burnings accompanied the explosive artistic growth and output of a music scene that would forever redefine what heavy metal is and what it stands for to other musicians, artists and music fans world-wide. “Until the Light Takes Us” goes behind the highly sensationalized media reports of “Satanists running amok in Europe” to examine the complex and largely misunderstood principles and beliefs that led to this rebellion against both Christianity and modern culture.

To capture this on film, directors Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell moved to Norway and lived with the musicians for several years, building relationships that allowed them to create a surprisingly intimate portrait of this violent, but ultimately misunderstood, movement. The result is a poignant, moving story that’s as much about the idea that reality is composed of whatever the most people believe, regardless of what’s actually true, as it is about a music scene that blazed a path of murder and arson across the northern sky.

Starring:

Varg Vikernes

Fenriz

Popularity: 6% [?]

Release Date: November 6, 2009 (NY; LA release: Nov. 13)
Studio: Vitagraph Films
Director: Chris Smith

Chris Smith has shown an affinity for outsiders in films like “American Movie” and “The Yes Men.” In “Collapse,” Smith departs stylistically from his past documentaries by interviewing his subject Michael Ruppert in a format that recalls the work of Errol Morris and Spalding Gray. Ruppert, a former Los Angeles police officer turned independent reporter, predicted the current financial crisis in his self-published newsletter at a time when most Wall Street and Washington analysts were still in denial. A character study of the apocalyptic imagination, “Collapse” is a portrait of a man who believes with total conviction that industrial civilization is on the verge of collapse.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Release Date: October 2, 2009 (limited; expands: Oct. 9)
Studio: Lionsgate
Director: Kristopher Belman

“More Than a Game” tells the true story of five talented young basketball players, including future NBA superstar LeBron James, and their remarkable journey from Akron, Ohio to the national high school championship series.

Five talented young basketball players from Akron, Ohio star in “More Than a Game,” a remarkable true-life coming of age story about friendship and loyalty in the face of great adversity. Coached by a charismatic but inexperienced player’s father, and led by future NBA superstar LeBron James, the “Fab Five’s” improbable nine-year journey leads them from a decrepit inner-city gym to the doorstep of a national high school championship. Along the way, the close-knit team is repeatedly tested — both on and off the court — as James’ exploding worldwide celebrity threatens to destroy everything they’ve set out to achieve together.

“More Than a Game” combines a series of unforgettable one-on-one interviews with rare news footage, never-before-seen home videos, and personal family photographs to bring this heart-wrenching and wholly American story to life.

Starring:

LeBron James

Popularity: 4% [?]

Release Date: October 2, 2009 (NY)
Studio: Aliquot Films
Director: Abel Ferrara

Abel Ferrara’s “Chelsea on the Rocks” is a fascinating, freewheeling personal journey inside the walls, history and mythology of Manhattan’s celebrated bohemian landmark, The Chelsea Hotel.

Since 1883, The Chelsea Hotel has been a home to artists great and small, from icons such as Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Tennessee Williams, Charles Bukowski, Andy Warhol, and Mark Twain, to assorted aspirants, junkies, prostitutes, and hermits. But new management has begun evicting boho tenants in favor of a more upscale crowd, prompting long-time resident – and consummate New Yorker – Ferrara to capture the ragged splendor of the place before its unique spirit is lost forever. Trolling the low-lit halls, visiting the hotel’s cast of memorable characters and raconteurs, and hanging out in the gallery-like lobby strewn with tenants’ paintings, “Chelsea on the Rocks” is shot through with an infectious brio, gallows humor and a hard-knock warmth to match its uniquely beloved subject. As yet another of New York’s cultural landmarks threatens to effectively vanish for the sake of a bland corporate status quo, Ferrara passionately shows how it’s often the misfit structures – and dwellers – that possess a city’s soul.

Starring:

Milos Forman,

Ethan Hawke

Dennis Hopper

R. Crumb

Popularity: 4% [?]