George Michael is honored in a fine documentary released in October 2017, a film he wrote and directed and supervised about his life in show business before his death on Christmas Day 2016. The film was completed under David Austin's direction. The movie is a frank and honest account of George Michael's professional life and career. Though the film, various artists add to the narrative – Tony Bennett, Mary J. Blige, Emmanuelle Alt, Naomi Campbell, Ricky Gervais, Elton John, Liam Gallagher, Cindy Crawford, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Kate Moss Nile Rodgers, James Corden, Stevie Wonder, and many others.
The film highlights conversations with Michael, his crisis with Sony, his 'coming out' as a gay man, his driving force to be the best performer and songwriter ever known, his many successful videos and clips from live performances and much, much more. This is a very beautifully made film, steaming with love from Michael and from his many fans, and filled with information about the positive impact he made on the world. Completely entertaining and a fine tribute to an enormously gifted artist.

The last episode explores Mescaline, the psychoactive molecule in San Pedro and peyote cacti, a sacred medicine that Native Americans have had to fight for the right to use. At the Indigenous practices there's always an elder, someone who knows the territory very well, who's presiding. There's usually a group, a community is involved, There's always an intention, a purpose to what you're doing, and you're treating it as sacred, in order to achieve altered states of consciousness, which contribute to worship in various ways, or celebration or healing.
But maybe all this is not so new to Western culture after all. In the old Greek histories of Eleusis, people who were initiated there got the drink, the kykeon, and then they had the illumination. The precise recipe is a mystery, but we know that the kykeon was a psychoactive brew that was used at the Eleusinian mysteries, a sacred annual ritual of enlightenment practiced by some of the world's greatest minds including Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. So why did this ritual come to an end more than 1,000 years ago? Was the possibility of illumination or achieving a higher consciousness considered threatening to the powers that be? Have the drug wars been merely an extension of that fear?
Psychedelics has a major part in how we can heal as a community, how we can heal as a city, and how we can heal as a country. The current renaissance of psychedelics could not come at a better time as the world confronts a crisis in mental health. But psychedelics have much to offer. The psychedelic experience changes the mind in ways that will help scientists better understand how it works. All these altered states allow us to probe what is the greatest mystery in all of nature. The emergence from mere matter of something as miraculous as consciousness. But an even bigger question is whether psychedelics might help us address the environmental crisis of how we think about our place in nature. One of the greatest gifts of psychedelics is how they reanimate the natural world, allowing us to perceive the subject, the spirit of all species, not just our own. And to feel a deeper sense of interconnectedness with nature.

This highly anticipated psychedelic docuseries showcases what these substances teaches people about consciousness, dying, addiction, depression and transcendence. Filmmaker Alex Gibney and best-selling author Michael Pollan present it in four parts, each focused on a different mind-altering substance: LSD, psilocybin, MDMA, and mescaline. With Pollan as our guide, we journey to the frontiers of the new psychedelic renaissance -- and look back at almost-forgotten historical context -- to explore the potential of these substances to heal and change minds as well as culture.
The first chapter is a great introduction to the topic of LSD, from its 1943 origins to today's microdosing trend, for those who don’t already know a lot about the subject, and a fun and entertaining refresher on LSD for even experts in the field. The show takes us on a journey through the history of the powerful compound, from its discovery and its early medical use, to secret CIA mind-control studies, the counterculture and its banning, and finally to our current renaissance. It includes amazing clips of LSD’s inventor Albert Hofmann and powerful personal testimonies of individuals who have healed their suffering through LSD.

As NASA releases the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope, this film tells the inside story of the telescope's construction and the astronomers taking its first picture of distant stars and galaxies. Will it be the deepest image of our universe ever taken? The successor to Hubble, and 100 times more powerful, the James Webb is the most technically advanced telescope ever built. It will look further back in time than Hubble to an era around 200 million years after the Big Bang, when the first stars and galaxies appeared. Webb's primary mission is to capture the faint light from these objects on the edge of our visible universe so that scientists can learn how they formed, but its instruments are so sensitive it could also be the first telescope to detect signs of life on a distant planet.
The James Webb Telescope is an £8 billion gamble on the skills of its engineering team. It’s the first telescope designed to unfold in space – a complicated two-week operation in which 178 release devices must all work - 107 of them on the telescope's sun shield alone. If just one fails, the expensive telescope could become a giant piece of space junk.
From its conception in the late 1980s, the construction of Webb has posed a huge technical challenge. The team must build a mirror six times larger than Hubble’s and construct a vast sun shield the size of a tennis court, fold them up so they fit into an Ariane 5 rocket, then find a way to unfold them in space. This film tells the inside story of the James Webb Space Telescope in the words of the engineers who built it and the astronomers who will use it.

The film tells the story of the ill-fated Nazi Land Speed record attempts. This is a story of engineering excellence, Grand Prix racing, Nazi propaganda, celebrity, and an intense rivalry which would leave a speed record unbroken for 79 years and one of Nazi Germany's best racing drivers dead. During the rise of the Third Reich two German car manufacturers were ordered to build the most high performance vehicles the world had ever seen. What followed was a rivalry that would reap Grand Prix victories, international domination that was a propaganda coup, and provide world fame to its drivers who risked their lives smashing speed records that would stand for 79 years. All under the direct orders of the Fuhrer himself.
Bugatti and Alfa Romeo dominated racing before 1934. But the years from 1934 to 1939 were six tumultuous years in which Grand Prix racing was dominated by the German Auto Union, the arranged marriage of Audi, Horch, Wanderer, and DKW, and Mercedes-Benz teams and provided a spectacle of speed, sound and fury never previously attained and never since matched. There are few periods of racing that have excited as much interest, event attendance and sophistication of equipment as the era of the Silver Cars. They were so far ahead of their time that many of their accomplishments were not duplicated until Mercedes went racing again in the early 1950s. There is also something about men who faced the challenges of staying in a cockpit of a highly sophisticated machine capable of 200 mph with no safety systems. They were giants and among them were Italian Tazio Nuvolari and two greatest German pilots of the thirties, Rudolf Caracciola of Mercedes and Auto Union's Bernd Rosemeyer who duelled with faster, more innovative and sleeker machines, developed in wind tunnels.
This special documentary charts the rise of Nazi Germany's dominate 'Silver Arrow' Grand Prix and Speed Record cars of the 1930's. Leading motor racing and World War 2 experts James Holland, Richard Williams, Eberhard Reuss and Chris Routledge tell the story of the Nazi funded Auto Union and Mercedes Benz 'National Racing Cars'. Hitler's Supercars interweaves the rise of the Third Reich with the racing exploits it funded and what propaganda messages these racing cars where sending.

The Moon Landing celebrates the historic 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, in a fresh and distinctive style. This inspiring documentary subverts usual conventions by beginning with the momentous event, exploring the preceding dramatic sixty minutes in granular detail.
Packed with surprising details which reveal a whole new perspective on the story of how humans landed on the moon, this documentary rewinds one hour before Neil Armstrong's famous footstep to reveal a whole untold story, hidden in the forensic moment-by-moment details driven by powerful footage from the time and authentic audio recordings from the capsule and the command module and mission control in Houston. In the last 60 minutes, the Apollo mission could fall apart. Without dazzling on-the-spot ingenuity, a 240,000-mile helpline to Houston, and almost unnatural abilities to remain calm under incredible pressure, the first step onto another world might not happen at all.