CURRENT TV PLACES "THE WAR ROOM" AT #6 ON ITS LIST OF "50 DOCUMENTARIES TO SEE BEFORE YOU DIE""

For the past month of August, Current TV has been airing a brand-new series "exploring the most powerful, memorable and moving documentary feature films to have hit our cinema screens in recent years," covering documentary films that have been released between 1988 and 2010.

Tonight, they'll be broadcasting segments on their top ten selections, including The War Room, which was ranked at #6.

Congratulations to all and stay tuned for more exciting news on The War Room!

JACQUY PFEIFFER, DESSERT PROFESSIONAL'S NEWEST HALL OF FAME HONOREE

Dessert Professional magazine, the nation's leading publication of the pastry, ice cream and chocolate industries, named the top toques of tuile, cocoa and sugar at a ceremony on Monday, June 6 at The Institute for Culinary Education in New York, and Jacquy Pfeiffer was this year's Hall Of Fame honoree. Congratulations, Jacquy!

SILVERDOCS TO HONOR CHRIS HEGEDUS AND D A PENNEBAKER

The AFI-Discovery Channel Silverdocs Documentary Festival will honor the work of Chris Hegedus and D A Pennebaker at this year’s Charles Guggenheim Symposium, to be held on June 23.

The Symposium, named after four-time Oscar winner Charles Guggenheim, honors filmmakers who are masters of the documentary form.

“With a collective body of work spanning over fifty years, Hegedus and Pennebaker have influenced a generation of filmmakers in direct cinema. Whether it be Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign, the three-day 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, an intimate portrait of Bob Dylan or a behind-the-scenes view of dot com mania, they have captured some of the most important subjects and iconic figures of our time,” said Silverdocs festival director Sky Sitney. “We are thrilled to recognize their vast contribution to cinema in the documentary form.”

Following a screening of excerpts from their work, Hegedus and Pennebaker will be joined by special guests to discuss their filmmaking efforts thus far.

Past Guggenheim honourees include Barbara Kopple, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Spike Lee, Albert Maysles and Frederick Wiseman.



Advance tickets are available from the festival's website.

"DONT LOOK BACK" NOW PLAYING AT FILM FORUM - HELD OVER BY POPULAR DEMAND!

Wednesday, May 18 – Thursday, June 2

Showtimes: 1:00, 4:45, 8:30

D A Pennebaker in person on

Tuesday, May 31 at the 8:30 show!

Read A.O. Scott's review in The New York Times:


"Dont Look Back [sic] is so perfect and prescient that Todd Haynes, in some parts of I’m Not There, had only to restage some of what Mr. Pennebaker had captured. Watching the original now, in the wake of I’m Not There, you may be astonished at Bob Dylan’s uncanny ability to impersonate Cate Blanchett.

"Like A Hard Day’s Night — or, for that matter, Jean-Luc Godard’s contemporaneous films — Dont Look Back retains a startling hold on the present tense."


Advance tickets may be purchased online

D A PENNEBAKER'S "DONT LOOK BACK" - NOW AVAILABLE ON BLU-RAY

D A Pennebaker's classic film, Dont Look Back, is now available in a new high-definition transfer on Blu-Ray with lossless DTS-HD audio.

"The image is reasonably well defined and in the outdoor and brightly lit sequences, it looks rather good, considering its 16mm source elements and its age...Much better is the excellent DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mix. What's great about this lossless track is its excellent fidelity in reproducing some wonderful early Dylan performances. There's a rather surprising lack of hiss and tinniness in any of these performances...Dylan's guitar rings out loud and clear and his voice also sounds clear and well defined...it's a really well done lossless reproduction of a vintage track that is most likely going to delight most Dylan fans...4 1/2 out of 5 stars." - Jeffrey Kauffman, Blu-Ray.com

Dont Look Back has "gotten better as a home-video experience, compliments of its new high-def format...4 out of 4 stars." - Mike Scott, The Times-Picayune

"Dont Look Back is beautiful because of its unpolished feel. Blu-ray is exceptionally good at making film look like film, and it definitely does here...The 2.0 DTS-HD Master Audio is just as raw, immediate, and impressive." - DVD Verdict

"Seminal. Not only cemented the musician's status as an icon of sixties cool; it's also a crash course in the breathtaking immediacy of vérité filmmaking." – New York magazine

"If the art of being cool could be learned from a film, then the only one you'd ever need to study would be Dont Look Back." – Angela Ashman, The Village Voice

“Evokes the 60s like few other documents; Dylan’s relentless heaping of scorn on the mainstream press, before the coercive tentacles of ‘creative management’ made such things virtually impossible, is especially telling... Memorable for its goofy, syncopated opening sequence alone.” – Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

"An unforgettable all-access pass behind the scenes of Bob Dylan's '65 British tour, D.A. Pennebaker's landmark 1967 rock doc all but invented the form while presaging the music video… The concert footage of the young Dylan in his punky prime is electrifying, but the most fun comes from the privileged glimpses of his sadistic wit." - Jim Ridley, The Village Voice

Now available from Amazon.com

RICHARD LEACOCK 1921 - 2011

Read Brian Winston's tribute at Visible Evidence.

More tributes can be found at MUBI.

"KINGS OF PASTRY" IS COMING TO DVD!

Available now - order it today!

Long before "The Social Network," there was "Startup.com"...

Startup.com follows the adventures of two friends as they create an award winning website that facilitates interaction between local government, citizens and businesses.

They wrestle with growing pains, tackle technical difficulties and charter the unpredictable venture capital waters, but none of these challenges prepare these young entrepreneurs for their own conflict over the management of their company, a conflict that will not only endanger their careers but irrevocably endanger their friendship. Sound familiar?

"Remarkable...Startup.com may be to our time what Wall Street was to the ‘80s. Grade A"
- Entertainment Weekly

"As an inside view of the bursting of the internet bubble, Startup.com is definitive."
- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

"One of the most involving pieces of eavesdropping you're likely to experience."
- The New York Times

Buy the DVD from Amazon or rent it from Amazon Video on Demand or the iTunes Store.