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Sisters of the Sun

   2014    Science
The constellation of the Pleiades provides a vehicle for us to explore a series of paradoxes and epochal discoveries for humanity. The untold story of the modern "sisters of the sun," the early 20th century female astronomers, led by two deaf women, at Harvard who catalogued the stars. It's also the story of the young British woman who joined forces with them, her defiance of the world's leading expert, and how she taught the world what the stars are really made of.
Series: Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey

A New War Begins

   2012    History
This series shines a spotlight on the influential builders, dreamers and believers whose feats transformed the United States, a nation decaying from the inside after the Civil War, into the greatest economic and technological superpower the world had ever seen. The Men Who Built America is the story of a nation at the crossroads and of the people who catapulted it to prosperity. In the first episode, Cornelius Vanderbilt grows from a steamboat entrepreneur to the head of a railroad empire, and gets into a heated rivalry with Jim Fisk and Jay Gould; the up and coming John D. Rockefeller founds Standard Oil. Many business owners lay their own rail lines which leads to the Panic of 1873. Later, Rockefeller starts to expand his wealth by diverting his business from the railroads to a new innovation, oil pipelines.
Series: The Men Who Built America

David Bowie: The Last Five Years

   2017    History
Experience the evolving genius of rock icon David Bowie in this documentary that chronicles the last five years of his life.
The film features never-before-seen footage of Bowie as well as conversations with the musicians, producers, and music video directors who worked with him on his final tour back in the early 2000s (when he had a heart attack that compelled him to turn away from live performances); the Man Who Fell to Earth–inspired musical Lazarus; and his final two albums, 2013’s The Next Day and Blackstar, which was released two days before Bowie died of cancer.

When Knowledge Conquered Fear

   2014    Science
The episode begins with Tyson describing how pattern recognition manifested in early civilization as using astronomy and astrology to predict the passing of the seasons, including how the passage of a comet was often taken as an omen. Tyson continues to explain that the origin of comets only became known in the 20th century due to the work of Jan Oort and his hypothesis of the Oort cloud. Tyson then continues to relate the collaboration between Edmond Halley and Isaac Newton in the last part of the 17th century in Cambridge. The collaboration would result in the publication of Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, the first major work to describe the laws of physics in mathematical terms, despite objections and claims of plagiarism from Robert Hooke and financial difficulties of the Royal Society of London. Tyson explains how this work challenged the prevailing notion that God had planned out the heavens, but would end up influencing many factors of modern life, including space flight. Tyson further describes Halley's contributions including determining Earth's distance to the sun, the motion of stars and predicting the orbit of then-unnamed Halley's Comet using Newton's laws. Tyson contrasts these scientific approaches to understanding the galaxy compared to what earlier civilizations had done, and considers this advancement as mankind's first steps into exploring the universe. The episode ends with an animation of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies' merging based on the principles of Newton's laws.
Series: Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey

Kid 90

   2021    Culture
As a teenager in the 90s, Soleil Moon Frye carried a video camera everywhere she went documenting her group of friends as they grew up in Hollywood and New York City. Frye spent four years going through footage she had shot and used hundreds of hours of films to build an intimate look at young Hollywood starlets growing up in the 1990s.
David Arquette, Balthazar Getty, Brian Austin Green, Stephen Dorff, Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Danny Boy O'Connor, Heather McComb appear in the film, while Harold Hunter, Justin Pierce, Jenny Lewis, Sara Gilbert, Charlie Sheen, Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Wahlberg, Corey Feldman, Michael Rapaport, and Jonathan Brandis appear in the film through footage shot by Frye.

QT8: The First Eight

   2019    History
The film chronicles the life of Quentin Tarantino, from his start at Video Archives up to the releasing of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The documentary features interviews from his frequent collaborators of his films. The filmmaker Richard Linklater explores Quentin Tarantino from his trendsetting work on Reservoir Dogs and examines how his films have changed the movie making landscape forever.