Stages is a moving and surprisingly funny vérité exploration of the unexpected power of the simple act of storytelling. In New York City's oldest community center, a group of older Puerto Rican women and inner-city youth come together to create an original play out of the stories of their lives. Weaving together themes of immigration, identity, aging and coming of age, Stages offers an intimate portrait of an unlikely ensemble, transformed by the...

On a dim winter afternoon, a young Irish immigrant opens the gas taps in his Brooklyn tenement. He is determined to prove--to the subway bosses who have recently fired him, to his badgering, pregnant wife--"that the hours of his life belong to himself alone." In the aftermath of the fire that follows, Sister St. Savior, an aging nun, a Little Sister of the Sick Poor, appears, unbidden, to direct the way forward for his widow and his unborn child....

In this extraordinarily intimate film, seven years in the making, we are taken into the depths of the Hasidim's joyous, sometimes harsh, and often beautiful world. With their use of the Yiddish language, their distinctive clothes and their strict observance to Jewish ritual and law, the Hasidim are considered by many an insular people with little connection to mainstream America. And yet their values are those that many Americans find most precious:...

"It isn't paranoia if it's really happening ... Anna Fox lives alone -- a recluse in her New York City home, unable to venture outside. She spends her days drinking wine (maybe too much), watching old movies, recalling happier times ... and spying on her neighbors. Then the Russells move into the house across the way: a father, mother, their teenaged son. The perfect family. But when Anna, gazing out her window one night, sees something she shouldn't,...

Patti's Smith's exquisite prose is generously illustrated in this full-color edition of her classic coming-of-age memoir, Just Kids. New York locations vividly come to life where, as young artists, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe met and fell in love: a first apartment in Brooklyn, Times Square with John and Yoko's iconic billboard, Max's Kansas City, or the gritty fire escape of the Hotel Chelsea. The extraordinary people who passed through their...

In fall 2006, former DJ, point guard and teacher turned first-time principal, James O'Brien, opened a small public high school in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, where 1/3 of residents live below the poverty line and the graduation rate is 40%. With infectious optimism, O'Brien and his team of eight undertook an unconventional approach and ambitious mission: Create a school with an arts-oriented curriculum that also emphasizes self-development, community...

Stone Barrington thought he'd heard the last of former girlfriend Arrington after she left him to marry Vance Calder, Hollywood's hottest star. The last thing Stone expected was a desperate call from Calder. Arrington has vanished, and her new fiancé wants Stone to come to LA and find her.

In a town where the sharks drive Bentleys and no one can be trusted, Stone soon discovers he's drowning in a sea of empty clues that takes him from

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Sandy Kinsolving's once-glittering life hangs by a threat; his future depends on his wife's inheritance and whether or not she's about to throw him out on his ear. What he wouldn't give for a solution to his money and marriage problems.

If this were an Alfred Hitchcock movie, the solution would be obvious. Enter a stranger with wife problems of his own, who offers a violent — and mutually advantageous — proposal.

Them in

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Brooklyn Matters reveals how a few powerful men tried to tilt the Brooklyn landscape in favor of big real estate at the expense of urban livability. Disregarding time-honored urban planning principles and manipulating a desperate need in the African-American community for jobs and affordable housing, they pushed their own interests forward--luxury housing and a 20,000 seat sports arena. The film poses vital, timely questions that are relevant to cities...

He asked for spare change; she kept walking. But something made her turn around and go back. They met nearly every week for years, and built an unexpected, life-changing friendship that has today spanned almost three decades.