Music Box Films (Firm)

This part of The Story of Film shows how the trauma of war made cinema more daring. The story starts in Italy, and then we go to Hollywood, discover Orson Welles and chart the darkening of American film and the drama of the McCarthy era. Screenwriters Paul Schrader and Robert Towne discuss theses years. The director of Singin’ in the Rain, Stanley Donen, talks exclusively about his career, and we discover that British films like The Third Man best...

In 100 Bloody Acres, brothers Reg and Lindsay Morgan are struggling to keep their organic blood and bone fertilizer business in motion. Their secret “recipe” for success (using dead car crash victims in their product) was a huge boon to business, but lately supply has been gravely low. Months have passed since their last find, and an important new customer is now waiting on a delivery. When junior partner Reg (Damon Herriman of Justified) stumbles...

This part explores the story of sex and melodrama in the movies of the 50s. We discover James Dean, On the Waterfront and the glossy weepies of the time, but also travel to Egypt, India, China, Mexico, Britain and Japan to find that movies there were also full of rage and passion. Features exclusive interviews with the people who worked with Satyajit Ray, with legendary actress Kyoko Kagawa--who starred in films by Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu,...

In the final part of The Story of Film: An Odyssey, movies come full circle. They get more serious after 9/11, and Romanian movies come to the fore, followed by David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive becoming one of the most complex dream films ever made and Inception turning film into a game. In Moscow, master director Alexander Sokurov talks exclusively about his innovative films and then there’s a surprise: The Story of Film goes beyond the present,...

The Story of Film: An Odyssey is an unprecedented cinematic event, an epic journey through the history of world cinema that is a treat for movie lovers around the globe. Guided by film historian Mark Cousins, this bold 15-part love letter to the movies begins with the invention of motion pictures at the end of the 19th century and concludes with the multi-billion dollar globalized digital industry of the 21st.. The Story of Film: An Odyssey heralds...

This is the story of the movies that tried to change the world in the 70s. We start in Germany with Wim Wenders, head to Britain in the 70s and talk exclusively to Ken Loach, travel to Italy, see the birth of new Australian cinema, and then arrive in Japan, which was making the most moving films in the world. Even bigger, bolder questions about film were being asked in Africa and South America, and the story ends with John Lennon’s favorite film,...

Melvin Van Peebles will always be known as the man who not only changed the face of black cinema, but independent cinema forever, when he made his groundbreaking (and taboo breaking) film "Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song." But’s he’s always been a lot more than that, as a playwright, actor, author, stage performer, musician and who knows what else he’s done in his 80 years. And he’s likely not through yet...But how did a guy who grew up...

From acclaimed director Pawel Pawlikowski (Last Resort, My Summer of Love) comes Ida, a moving and intimate drama about a young novitiate nun in 1960s Poland who, on the verge of taking her vows, makes a shocking discovery about her past.. 18-year old Anna (stunning newcomer Agata Trzebuchowska), a sheltered orphan raised in a convent, is preparing to become a nun when the Mother Superior insists she first visit her sole living relative. Naive, innocent...

The film charts the unlikely career of the genre-defying collective notorious for being--as rock critic Greil Marcus notes--"the band that took punk ideology most seriously." Born out of the 1977 British punk scene, the Mekons progressed from a group of socialist art students with no musical skills to the prolific, raucous progeny of Hank Williams. Joe Angio's exuberant documentary follows their improbable history - a surprising and influential embrace...

Few saw it coming, but cinema around the world in the 90s entered a golden age. The story starts in Iran, where we meet Abbas Kiarostami, who rethought movie making and made it more real. Then we meet Shinya Tsukamoto, who laid the ground for the bold new Japanese horror cinema. From Tokyo, the story moves to Paris where one of the world’s greatest directors, Claire Denis, talks exclusively about her work. The story ends in Mexico with the blossoming...