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As Netflix prepares to release Lucy Walker’s latest documentary “Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa” — which follows a mountain climber attempting her record tenth ascent up Mt. Everest — on July 31 the Paris Theater is set to celebrate the director’s unique career with a new retrospective.

The historic New York theater, which was acquired by Netflix in 2019, will screen 11 of Walker’s films from July 24-August 7 in a retrospective titled “Mountain Queen and the Cinematic Summits of Lucy Walker.” In addition to Walker’s new film, the series will include “Devil’s Playground,” her 2002 documentary about Amish teenagers engaging in the tradition of rumspringa; her 2006 mountain climbing documentary “Blindsight;” her Oscar-nominated 2010 documentary about Brazilian landfill workers “Waste Land;” the 2013 snowboarding documentary “The Crash Reel;” and her 2021 wildfire documentary “Bring Your Own Brigade.” Five of Walker’s short films will also be screened throughout the retrospective.

“The moment when one...

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Will Smith gets up close and personal with some of the planet’s most breathtaking spectacles in “Welcome to Earth,” a six-part limited series from National Geographic, which premiered on Disney+ December 8.

Guided by elite explorers from all over the world, 51-year-old Smith embarks on the once-in-a-lifetime journey to discover “hidden worlds that sit beyond our senses.”

In the first episode, Erik Weihenmayer, a blind mountaineer, and volcanologist Jeff Johnson lead Smith on a trek to Mount Yasur, an active volcano in the South Pacific. The episode delves deep into the science of sound, and shows Smith doing everything from staring at boiling lava to dodging boulders while climbing into the crater of Mount Yasur.

Disney Plus and National Geographic released the first official trailer for the six-part original series “Welcome to Earth,” starring Will Smith and streaming this December.

The series follows Smith on an adventure around the world, guided by accredited travelers as he explores Earth’s greatest wonders as well as its most hidden secrets.

“I’ve got a confession to make. I’ve never climbed a mountain, never swum in a lake. I was in a cave once. I’m beginning to think that I might be missing something,” Smith says in the trailer. “I asked the best modern day explorers: take me to the ends of the Earth. And they said, ‘Oh, we can go further than that.'”

The guides leading Smith through this journey of exploration include marine biologist and National Geographic explorer Diva Amon, polar expeditions Dwayne Fields, engineer and National Geographic explorer Albert Lin, National Geographic...

Disability Awareness Month is recognized across the U.S. in October, prompting Indiewire's latest curated selections for Hulu's Documentaries page - a diverse selection of films highlighting engaging subjects living with a wide spectrum of disabilities, both physical and developmental. Watch these and other docs now for free!Jason McAfee's "Charlie Don't Surf" follows three men in wheelchairs to Costa Rica to learn to surf.Neither physical nor emotional limitations are enough to stop the wounded veterans, or their blind guide, Erik Weihenmayer, from attempting to climb a Himalayan mountain in Michael Brown's "High Ground."Weihenmayer also leads a group of six blind Tibetan teenagers up a Mount Everest peak in Lucy Walker's acclaimed "Blindsight."Ami, a man immobilized by Muscular Dystrophy, takes a road trip to find the doctor who told his parents he'd die as a child in Dani Menkin's "39 Pounds of Love.""Up Syndrome...

By Allen Gardner

Pier Paolo Pasolini’S Trilogy Of Life (Criterion) Pier Paolo Pasolini was Italy’s last Neo-Realist, a product of post-ww II Europe who was fervently Catholic, openly gay, defiantly Marxist, and one of the most original voices of the 20th century’s second half. Before his brutal murder in 1975 (after the premiere of his still-controversial swan song, “Salo”), Pasolini directed a trilogy of films based on masterpieces of medieval literature: Boccaccio’s “The Decameron,” Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales,” and “The Thousand and One Nights (also known as “The Arabian Nights”). The three films celebrate the uninhibited, earthy, raw carnal nature of the original texts, leaving little to the imagination, but also offering Pasolini’s own very unique and pointed views on modern society, consumerism, religious and sexual mores (and hypocrisies), and an unexpurgated celebration of the human body, both male and female. Extraordinary production design by Dante Ferretti and another evocative,...

Red Flag Releasing's High Ground documentary adds a first trailer The Michael Brown film opens in Los Angeles on November 2nd, with names like Steve Baskis, Dan Sidles, Katherine Ragazzino, Matt Nyman, Brian Mockenahaupt, Cody Miranda and Nicolette Maroulis included in the documentary. In High Ground, eleven veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan join an expedition to climb the 20,000 foot Himalayan giant Mount Lobuche. With blind adventurer Erik Weihenmayer and a team of Everest summiters as their guides, they set out on an emotional and gripping climb to reach the top in an attempt to heal the emotional and physical wounds of the longest war in U.S. history. Representing nearly every branch of the military, the veterans, and the Gold Star Mom who joins their trek, bring humor and deep emotion to this hero’s journey all captured with breathtaking, vertigo-inducing cinematography by three-time Emmy® winner, director Brown.

Red Flag Releasing's High Ground documentary adds a first trailer The Michael Brown film opens in Los Angeles on November 2nd, with names like Steve Baskis, Dan Sidles, Katherine Ragazzino, Matt Nyman, Brian Mockenahaupt, Cody Miranda and Nicolette Maroulis included in the documentary. In High Ground, eleven veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan join an expedition to climb the 20,000 foot Himalayan giant Mount Lobuche. With blind adventurer Erik Weihenmayer and a team of Everest summiters as their guides, they set out on an emotional and gripping climb to reach the top in an attempt to heal the emotional and physical wounds of the longest war in U.S. history. Representing nearly every branch of the military, the veterans, and the Gold Star Mom who joins their trek, bring humor and deep emotion to this hero’s journey all captured with breathtaking, vertigo-inducing cinematography by three-time Emmy® winner, director Brown.

Ready to be inspired today? "He made me promise him that if something were to happen to me, and I were to come back a different person, I would not give up." Today's trailer is for the documentary called High Ground, an emotional and gripping film that everyone should take an interest in. On one hand, it is about the challenge a group of veterans face climbing a 20,000 foot Himalayan peak called Mount Lobuche, while on the other it's about the great emotional difficulties that veterans face returning injured from a war. Everything about this looks wonderful and inspiring, the perfect kind of doc to feature for this week. Enjoy! Watch the official trailer for Michael Brown's High Ground, in high def from Apple: Eleven veterans returning from the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars join an expedition to climb the 20,000 foot Himalayan giant Mount Lobuche. With blind adventurer Erik Weihenmayer and...

If women have struggled to regularly breakthrough with the big narrative films that dominate the box office and turn directors into stars, the low-budget/small-crew environment of documentary filmmaking is one area where female directors have excelled. One of the most promising documentarians of the past decade, having been nominated for an Oscar the past two years, is British filmmaker Lucy Walker.

After some work in television, Walker made her entrance on the scene in 2002 with the documentary Devil’s Playground, a gritty and fascinating look at the Amish practice of rumspringa, where teenagers are given a chance to live outside the strict Amish rules in order to decide whether to commit themselves to the community. Equal parts shocking and predictable, the reaction to freedom from these strict constraints can be quite extreme.

Her second effort, 2006′s Blindsight, examines the work of the organization Braille Without Borders mentoring blind teenagers in Tibet.

Red Flag Releasing has acquired Michael Brown's documentary High Ground. The indie distributor plans a late summer release. High Ground follows 11 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans and one Gold Star mother as they summit the 20,000 foot-high Mount Lobuche in the Himalayas with blind guide Erik Weihenmayer and his team. The soldiers represent nearly every branch of the military and recount their war experiences during the journey as an act of healing. Don Hahn (African Cats, Earth) produced. “High Ground is a beautiful and emotional film, and we are proud to help bring its message to veterans and their families," said Red Flag's Paul

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After a month in Morocco enduring whitewater rapids, steep climbs, rugged terrain and foul-mannered camels, one team rappelled down a final wall to claim three Ford Explorers and the collective $150,000 prize. The winners, who hoisted a banner in their signature color of purple after crossing the finish line to bear-hug host Dave Salmoni, were the Gypsies: John Post, 25, a sustainable farmer in Pensacola Beach, Fla.; Taylor Filasky, 31, a video producer in San Diego; and Eric Bach, 26, an entrepreneur in San Francisco. "Getting to watch our journey had been absolutely amazing," Filasky tells People in a call from their finale viewing...

Expedition Impossible is right around the corner, and I have a lot of preview material to get your ready. If you're a fan of other competition reality shows, but don't think there is enough chance that the contestants might - fall to their death, succumb to heat stroke, or break a bone - then here is the show for you.

The show takes 13 teams of, more or less, ordinary individuals, and throws them to the mercy of the elements, unique and sometimes terrifying challenges, and the last team to finish each week ends their journey.

Kicking off with a mere climb up a giant sand dune, and a trek on camels, the teams are then left scratching their heads in the middle of the dessert with the unhelpful instruction that they have to find some water. As the heat rages down on them, the strength of will and teamwork of...

The folks over at ABC must be pretty happy about the success of NBC's The Voice despite the long-standing dominance of American Idol when it comes to competitive singing reality shows.

Why? Because on June 21st ABC kicks off Expedition Impossible, which on the surface at least, looks like a cross between CBS' The Amazing Race and Discovery's Out of the Wild. And as any competitive reality fan knows, The Amazing Race is the 900 pound gorilla when it comes to this kind of reality programming. But if there is room for both The Voice and Idol, maybe Expedition Impossible can score in the ratings as well.

An ABC press release describes the show this way:

ABC's exciting new summer series, "Expedition Impossible," announces the show's 13 teams of three who will find themselves racing in a fun expedition across vast deserts, over snow capped mountains and through raging rivers in the beautifully exotic,...

Now that Mark Burnett is stealing some thunder away from American Idol with The Voice, is he now hoping to suck a little steam out of The Amazing Race?

You be the judge: Burnett is the man behind a new summer reality show for ABC dubbed Expedition Impossible, which features 13 teams of three players who will travel across deserts, mountains and rivers in the “exotic, fabled Kingdom of Morocco.” Fun? Each week a new stage of the expedition will be revealed to the competitors, who must find a way to work together to complete the trip. After 10 legs of competition,...

By Kim Palacios

The rumors are true—Peter Facinelli’s official web site has confirmed that the actor will be playing one of several previously rumored roles. In the upcoming biopic about former world champion boxer Vinny “Paz” Pazienza, Facinelli will play “The Pazmanian Devil” himself.

Paz, a lightweight and light middleweight boxer who rose to fame in the mid 1980’s, was first known for his skill as a fighter. In both 1987 and 1990, he won International Boxing Federation (Ibf) World Champion titles, and was on his way to competing as a welterweight.

A tragic car accident in 1991 found him bedridden for some three months, and told by doctors that he would never fight again. Paz persevered and, after just one year of training, returned to professional boxing. But his story didn’t end with a single comeback victory—indeed Paz’s career after the accident was longer than before. He...