The King
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Forty years after the death of Elvis Presley, two-time Sundance Grand Jury winner Eugene Jarecki’s new film takes the King’s 1963 Rolls-Royce on a musical road trip across America. From Memphis to New York, Las Vegas, and beyond, the journey traces the rise and fall of Elvis as a metaphor for the country he left behind. In this groundbreaking film, Jarecki paints a visionary portrait of the state of the American dream and a penetrating look at how the hell we got here. A diverse cast of Americans, both famous and not, join the journey, including Alec Baldwin, Rosanne Cash, Chuck D, Emmylou Harris, Ethan Hawke, Van Jones, Mike Myers, and Dan Rather, among many others.
Embrace of the Serpent
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At once blistering and poetic, the ravages of colonialism cast a dark shadow over the South American landscape in Embrace of the Serpent, the third feature by Ciro Guerra and a 2016 Academy Award-nominee. Filmed in stunning black-and-white, Embrace of the Serpent centers on Karamakate, an Amazonian shaman and the last survivor of his people, and the two scientists who, over the course of 40 years, build a friendship with him. The film was inspired by the real-life journals kept by Theodor Koch-Grunberg (portrayed by Jan Bijvoet) and Richard Evans Schultes (Brionne Davis), who traveled through the Colombian Amazon in search of the sacred and difficult-to-find psychedelic Yakruna plant.
Shepard & Dark
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A documentary portrait of the unlikely decades-long friendship between actor and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sam Shepard and reclusive oddball Johnny Dark, through a correspondence of handwritten letters dating back to the 1960s.
Buzzard
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Marty is a caustic con artist drifting from one scam to the next. When his latest ruse goes awry, mounting paranoia forces him from his temp job to the streets of Detroit with nothing more than a pocket full of bogus checks and a dangerously altered Nintendo® Power Glove. Albert Camus meets Freddy Krueger in Buzzard, a hellish and hilarious riff on the struggles of the American working class from director Joel Potrykus.
Dark Days
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For years, a homeless community took root in a train tunnel beneath New York City, braving dangerous conditions and perpetual night. Dark Days explores this surprisingly domestic subterranean world, unearthing a way of life unimaginable to those above. Through stories simultaneously heartbreaking, hilarious, intimate, and off the cuff, tunnel dwellers reveal their reasons for taking refuge and their struggle to survive underground.
Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman
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Narrated by Dustin Hoffman, Visual Acoustics celebrates the life and career of Julius Shulman, the world's greatest architectural photographer, whose images brought modern architecture to the American mainstream. Shulman captured the work of nearly every major modern and progressive architect since the 1930s including Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra, John Lautner, and Frank Gehry. His images epitomized the singular beauty of Southern California's modernist movement and brought its iconic structures to the attention of the general public.
Tugging The Worm
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In this hand-drawn short, a bird-like creature is drawn into an astral dimension rife with violence, vice, and vehicular homicide, rendered on black in electric lime greens and acid yellows. Animator James Duesing writes, "'Tugging the Worm' is an animation which is made up of 3500 drawings... the completed piece took approximately four years and a lot of Prismacolors to complete."
Night Flight - Short Cuts: "Mark Hamill"
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Mark Hamill joins Radio 1990’s Lisa Robinson to discuss moving beyond Luke Skywalker following the original Star Wars trilogy. The conversation spans his Broadway comedy Room Service, his stage work in Amadeus (including why he wasn’t cast in the film), and George Lucas’s then-plans for future Star Wars films.
Night Flight - Short Cuts "Garrett Morris"
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In this candid Night Flight interview, Morris reflects on his unlikely path to Saturday Night Live, the early years alongside John Belushi and Gilda Radner, and why competition was built into both comedy and fabric of American culture itself.
Night Flight - Short Cuts: "Alice in Chains"
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In this new Short Cut arrival, Alice in Chains’ Jerry Cantrell and Layne Staley trade jokes about Hollywood and growing up as KISS heads. They reminisce about the first time hearing Metallica and touring with Iggy Pop. An essential snapshot of the Seattle band.
Night Flight - Short Cuts: "Steve Miller"
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In this Night Flight Short Cut, Steve Miller reflects on the unexpected global success of “Abracadabra” and traces a career doing things on his own terms with an eye toward worldwide touring and cultural exchange.
Night Flight - Short Cuts: "Devo"
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With their signature deadpan delivery, this new Night Flight Short Cut captures Devo not just as a band, but as a fully realized creative apparatus. Taken from Night Flight's 1982 interview, the group outlines its theory of Devolution spanning technology, biology, and politics in pointedly postmodern terms: “There’s no center, there’s no firm issues or something holding everyone together... you can see it in the clothes, in the architecture, in Ronnie Reagan”
Night Flight - Short Cuts: "Debbie Gibson"
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“The first piece of fan mail I ever wrote was to George Michael!” Writing songs since childhood and breaking through as a teenager, Debbie Gibson reflects on a rise that felt anything but overnight in this original Night Flight interview.
Night Flight - Short Cuts: "Skid Row"
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From a chance meeting in a New Jersey music store to club shows honed with advice from hometown champion Jon Bon Jovi, Skid Row trace their rise in this Night Flight Short Cut. This exclusive episode also captures Sebastian Bach in a late-night hotel fever dream, reading fan mail and air moshing.
Night Flight - Short Cuts: "Eurythmics"
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Circa 1984, Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart talk fame, image, and why they refuse to be neatly categorized by the media. From their Grammys stunt with Lennox in male drag to their skepticism of music videos, this special Short Cut also covers their intuitive and at times combustible creative process, the kind that can turn an argument into the riff for “Here Comes the Rain Again.”
Art and Craft
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Mark Landis has been called one of the most prolific art forgers in US history. His body of work spans thirty years, covering a wide range of painting styles and periods that including 15th Century Icons, Picasso, and even Walt Disney. Art and Craft starts out as a cat-and-mouse art caper – but what emerges is an story of obsession and the universal need for community, appreciation, and purpose.
OBEX
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NIGHT FLIGHT PLUS STREAMING PREMIERE: In pre-internet 1987, Conor and his dog Sandy live a life of seclusion, lost in the slow-rendering graphics of early Macs and televisions aglow with late night horror movie marathons. But when he begins playing OBEX, a new and mysterious, state-of-the-art computer game, he finds himself trapped in a low-tech, but high-stakes analog hellscape as the line between reality and game blurs. Audacious and uncanny, writer-director Albert Birney's OBEX is a delightfully skewed lo-fi fantasy. Shot in striking black and white, this surreally nostalgic nightmare revisits the dawn of personal computing to reflect on the loneliness of our always-online present day.
Vulcanizadora
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In director Joel Potrykus's Vulcanizadora, two friends trudge through a Michigan forest with the intention of following through on a disturbing pact. Once their plan goes shockingly awry, the haunting consequences of their failure can't stay hidden for long.
Once Within a Time
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Celebrated director Godfrey Reggio (Koyaanisqatsi) returns after ten years with a new experimental film unlike any other from his already daring career. Once Within a Time is a bardic fairy tale about the end of the world and the beginning of a new one, tinged with apocalyptic comedy, rapturous cinematography, unforgettable vistas, and the innocence and hopes of a new generation. Featuring an electrifying score composed by Reggio’s longtime collaborator Philip Glass with additional vocals from Sussan Deyhim, Once Within a Time is an indie revelation.
Flipside
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When filmmaker Chris Wilcha (The Target Shoots First) revisits the record store he worked at as a teenager in New Jersey, he finds the once-thriving bastion of music and weirdness from his youth slowly falling apart and out of touch with the times. Flipside documents his tragicomic attempt to revive the store while revisiting other documentary projects he has abandoned over the years. In the process, Wilcha captures This American Life icon Ira Glass in the midst of a creative rebirth, discovers the origin story of David Bowie’s ode to a New Jersey cable TV hero, and uncovers the unlikely connection between jazz photographer Herman Leonard and TV writer David Milch (Deadwood). This disparate collection of stories coheres into something strange and expansive—a moving meditation on music, work, and the sacrifices and satisfaction of trying to live a creative life.
Rem Koolhaas: A Kind of Architect
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Rarely has an architect caused as much sensation outside of the architecture community as Rem Koolhaas. His outstanding creations, such as the Dutch Embassy in Berlin and the Casa da Música concert hall in Porto, are working examples of the Dutchman's visionary theories about architecture and urban society. A Kind of Architect is an engaging portrait of Koolhaas that takes us to the heart of his ideas. Directors Markus Heidingsfelder and Min Tesch have made a visually inventive, thought-provoking film about the architect, prompting Koolhaas to state, "It's the only film about me that I have liked."
John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection
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Written and directed by Faraut and narrated by Mathieu Amalric, In the Realm of Perfection revisits the rich bounty of 16-mm-shot footage of the left-handed tennis star John McEnroe, at the time the world’s top-ranked player, as he competes in the French Open at Paris’s Roland Garros Stadium in 1984. Close-ups and slow motion sequences of McEnroe competing, as well as instances of his notorious temper tantrums, highlight a ”man who played on the edge of his senses.” Far from a traditional documentary, Faraut probes the archival film to unpack both McEnroe’s attention to the sport and the footage itself, creating a lively and immersive look at a driven athlete, a study on the sport of tennis and the human body and movement, and finally how these all intersect with cinema itself.

NFTV 3

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