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From the rutted football pitches and lethal minefields of Kosovo, comes the compelling story of a football dream amid the on-going Balkan nightmare.

Filmmaker Doug Aubrey follows football coach Scotty Lee on a near heart-of-darkness type journey through a country scarred by inter-ethnic hatred and littered with the lethal debris of NATO’s war.

A Different Pitch is a unique and at times shocking grass-roots insight into the effects of war on a generation.

It is a timely reminder that Football, the people’s game, is not just a way of life, but can actually help save lives.

An intriguing premise for a full-length feature, the idea behind Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait is simple. Back in April of 2005, Real Madrid–replete with Zinedine Zidane, arguably the world’s finest footballer at the time–played Villareal in the Spanish league. At that game, seventeen cameras were all trained on Zidane.

The film? At heart, it’s 90 minutes of following the great man around a football field. Yet it’s fascinating. Really. Save for the odd subtitled comment, and a not-entirely-comfortable compilation of the day’s news that’s interspersed at half time, the focus is purely one man playing a game of football. It’s not a raging success by any means, and there are moments in Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait where the interest level significantly drops. Yet when it works, it really works astoundingly well, and you’d be hard-pushed to find any other film that does anything even vaguely similar. It’s backed, it should be noted, with excellent supporting music too.

The 2006 World Cup, of course, gave Zidane’s career an ending it never really deserved. And while Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait isn’t a dish that everyone’s going to warm to, those that do will surely be left reflecting on one of football’s greatest geniuses, rather than one mad moment in Germany. Turner Prize-winning artist and filmmaker Douglas Gordon teams up with French artist Philippe Parreno to create a work glorious in its simplicity.

Garry Kasparov is arguably the greatest chess player who has ever lived. In 1997 he played a chess match against IBM’s computer Deep Blue. Kasparov lost the match. This film shows the match and the events surrounding it from Kasparov’s perspective. It delves into the psychological aspects of the game, paranoia surrounding it and suspicions that have arisen around IBM’s true tactics. It consists of interviews with Kasparov, his manager, chess experts, and members of the IBM Deep Blue team, as well as original footage of the match itself.

The good parts of the movie is that you have interviews with Kasparov and the IBM team. Kasparov is a charming guy. The IBM team are open and friendly. The movie shows both the bad and good sides of Kasparov, who displays dignity and his temper when he is being pushed around by IBM. The Deep Blue team are interesting, but the IBM company does not come off well. They milk the match for all advertising they could get. The movie keeps touting that it was a victory of machine intelligence over Man, but the point I get from it is, several computer geeks and chess grand masters after years of effort can put together a program that can barely beat a world champion, if they take every single psychological and technical advantage they can.

Bruce Lee (27 November 1940 – 20 July 1973) was an American-born martial artist, philosopher, instructor, martial arts actor and the founder of the Jeet Kune Do combat form.

He was widely regarded as the most influential martial artist of the twentieth century and a cultural icon. He was also the father of actor Brandon Lee and of actress Shannon Lee. Lee was born in San Francisco, California, and raised in Hong Kong.

His Hong Kong and Hollywood-produced films elevated the traditional Hong Kong martial arts film to a new level of popularity and acclaim, and sparked the first major surge of interest in Chinese martial arts in the West.

The direction and tone of his films changed and influenced martial arts and martial arts films in Hong Kong and the rest of the world as well. Lee became an iconic figure particularly to the Chinese, as he portrayed Chinese national pride and Chinese nationalism in his movies. He primarily practiced Chinese martial arts (Kung Fu).

Pop culture junkies tend to think of Hulk Hogan, Sylvester Stallone, and Arnold Schwarzenegger as entertainment figures. In Poughkeepsie, NY, back in the 1980s, filmmaker Christopher Bell and his brothers viewed them as heroes and became bodybuilders. Like the Hulkster, Mike and Mark Bell even turned to professional wrestling. Chris, a former staffer at Venice’s famous Gold’s Gym, doesn’t use anabolic steroids–he did try them once–but his heroes have and his brothers do, leading him to look deeper at this increasingly common practice.

While Bell explores the health costs of juicing, he’s mostly concerned with the moral consequences involved in the use of performance-enhancing substances. Though he refrains from judgment, he stopped taking steroids because it felt dishonest. Naturally, his burly brothers feel otherwise. Aside from his family, Bell speaks with doctors, lawyers, congressmen, gym rats, and professional athletes, like Olympic sprinters Ben Johnson and Carl Lewis and Tour de France cyclist Floyd Landis.

He also includes footage of José Canseco, Barry Bonds, and Mark McGwire testifying during the federal grand jury and congressional hearings on steroid use in the major leagues (prompted by the publication of Canseco’s Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant ‘Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big). For the most part, Bell doesn’t leave any stone unturned and the personal nature of his entertaining and enlightening inquiry elevates Bigger, Stronger, Faster, i.e. The Side Effects of Being American, above your average exposé. Recommended to athletes, sports fans, health nuts, and of course, pop culture junkies

Arnold Schwarzenegger gained his first real notoriety outside body-building circles with this documentary about a group of men training for the Mr. Olympia contest.

Arnold had already won the title six times before, and was training for his seventh victory before retiring to fully pursue his acting career (which began to catch fire with his likable turn in Stay Hungry, released the same year) when this was shot.

Here he displays an easy charm and wicked sense of humor as he plays mind games with his competitors and explains how getting pumped up for competition always reminded him of sex (which might explain why he seems so cheerful).

Writer-director Dana Brown — whose dad, Bruce, helmed the classic surfing flick The Endless Summer — follows in his father’s footsteps and takes a 21st-century look at the sport, employing up-to-date cinematographic technology to bring the audience right into those monster waves. The film stars dedicated surfers Ken “Skindog” Collins, Laird Hamilton, Rochelle Ballard, and Gerry Lopez as they test the waters around the globe.

Where Bruce Brown cast his beach bums as nomads, wandering in search of the perfect wave and sharing smiles with like-minded dudes, junior is eager to capture the sport as a broader phenomenon, showing women, kids, and men caught in curls everywhere from shores of Ireland to the beaches of Vietnam. In one sequence, he latches onto a group of top female surfers and takes to Tahiti’s famous Teahupo’o Beach.

He also follows three Irish brothers as they not only introduce some local kids to surfing but also invite Protestant boys and girls to join Catholic kids for the lessons. As can be expected, the surfing footage is heart-pounding stuff; you’ll be amazed just how close Brown will bring you to the action. Slow-motion camera work elongates some of the most spectacular rides, and you’ll feel every wipeout as though it had happened to you.

Before there was sunscreen, high-tech wet suits, and corporate-sponsored surfing competitions, there was Bruce Brown, the original beach bum and the director of the greatest surf movie ever made, The Endless Summer. This 1966 documentary spurred a generation of surfers to devote their lives to surfing and compelled people in places far away from California and Hawaii to take up what was, at that time, still a faddish and exotic sport.

It’s built around a simple but brilliant concept: Two champion California surfers, Mike Hynson and Robert August, take a trip around the world, following the seasons so that wherever they go, it’s always summer. From Australia to Africa to Tahiti, they travel the globe in search of the perfect wave.

In one of the documentary’s most memorable scenes, they instruct African tribal villagers who have never seen a surfboard in the fine points of hanging ten. Technically primitive by today’s standards, the film’s 16mm cinematography nonetheless captures the lyrical beauty of ‘60s long-board surfing.

Brown supplies the witty running narration and injects the film with frequent doses of goofy, slapstick humor. The Endless Summer is as laid back and fun loving as its surfing protagonists; yet, despite its utter lack of pretension, there is ultimately an underlying poetry in the surfers’ quest for an ideal.

The set piece of this hyperbolic ode to surfing is Laird Hamilton’s 2000 trip to Tahiti, where a monster wave provided the opportunity for what the movie portentously calls “the most significant ride in surfing history.” If you’re inclined to regard the sport as important and its practitioners as heroic, you’ll likely enjoy this beautifully photographed documentary, which presents Hamilton as a towering figure.

Certainly he’s responsible for much of the sport’s current popularity: A fierce competitor who seems genuinely driven, he’s a popular cover boy who’s landed modeling assignments and lucrative endorsement deals that include an American Express commercial.

Writer-director Stacy Peralta depicts Hamilton and his fellow surfers as not only dedicated but even obsessive, chasing the biggest waves with the single-minded determination of Captain Ahab pursuing Moby-Dick. Peralta’s images testify to the physical battering surfers undergo, and the onscreen participants pay tribute to brethren who lost their lives.

In 1985, two adventurous young mountaineers, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, set off to climb the treacherous west face of the Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. They were experienced climbers, and climbed “Alpine-style,” climbing the mountain in “one great push,” without setting up ropes or base camps ahead of time. After dealing with a snowstorm and some dangerous climbing over powder formations, they reached the summit (about 21,000 feet) on the third day. The climb down proved to be far more difficult.

Simpson fell and broke his leg badly. Yates decided to try to lower Simpson down the mountain, one 300-foot section of rope at a time. The climbers had run out of gas to melt snow, so they couldn’t risk stopping as night came, and a violent snowstorm began. Their plodding, painful journey hit a snag when Yates inadvertently lowered Simpson over the edge of a cliff.

In the storm, the men couldn’t hear each other’s cries, and, Yates, uncertain as to Simpson’s position, and gradually sliding down the slope himself, decided to cut the rope that connected them, sending Simpson plummeting to certain death. Miraculously, Simpson survived the fall, and was faced with the prospect of getting off the mountain alone with no food, no water, and a broken leg.

In Touching the Void, filmmaker Kevin Macdonald (One Day in September) tells their story, based on Simpson’s book, using contemporary interviews with the two men, and a reenactment of their climb and descent, featuring Brendan Mackey as Simpson and Nicholas Aaron as Yates. Touching the Void was shown at the 2003 Toronto Film Festival…