Though Henry Kissinger is often giving short statements to the media, he refuses detailed interviews about his own life. Now he has agreed to answer questions about his person in an extensive documentary.

Takes place over the course of one feverish night in a Manhattan police precinct and neighboring bar.

A Harvard graduate and self-described addictive personality (his scripts for "The Gambler" and "The Pick-Up Artist" are largely autobiographical), Mr. Toback is also an engaging raconteur who recounts past sexual and pharmaceutical exploits with some pride. Yet scenes on the set of his 2004 movie, "When Will I Be Loved," offer only frustrating glimpses of a directing style that thrives on improvisation, interrupted as they are by a parade of celebrity admirers. Robert Downey Jr., admittedly a kindred spirit, likens his friend to Shakespeare, while Roger Ebert suggests that self-indulgence is an unmistakable mark of greatness. The athlete Jim Brown concurs, wistfully recalling the orgies of yesteryear. Less effusive is Woody Allen; perhaps he wasn't invited. Jarecki wastes no time getting down to business. The first image onscreen is of the great final shot from "Fingers," in which a shattered Harvey Keitel sits naked, looking into the camera. It's the picture of a man who has gone so far beyond his moral and psychological limits that he'll never come back. This is followed by sex scenes from various Toback movies, which are in turn followed by scenes of graphic violence, while, over the soundtrack Joey Lauren Adams, as a philosophy professor in "Harvard Man," talks about the differences between fear and dread. It's as succinct a summation of the moral and intellectual scope of the Toback universe as you can hope to get in under a minute. "The Outsider" follows Toback over the course of 12 days, as he shoots his most recent picture, "When Will I Be Loved" (2004)," starring Neve Campbell and Dominic Chianese (Uncle Junior on "The Sopranos"). With the creation and distribution of that film as his documentary's anchor, Jarecki proceeds to tell the story of Toback's career and personal obsessions, his bouts with compulsive gambling, his sexual explorations and his youthful experimentation with LSD, which ended in disaster. Along the way, Jarecki gets insightful comments from Woody Allen, football great Jim Brown, Brooke Shields, Harvey Keitel, Norman Mailer and especially Robert Downey Jr., who has made three Toback films and could almost be called Toback's screen alter ego. Asked how he felt after first reading one of Toback's scripts, Downey says, "I felt like Shakespeare didn't die." Under Jarecki's scrutiny, Toback comes across as funny and idiosyncratic, manipulative in a genial way, and fully aware of the nature and message of his work. For an artist who is attracted to extremes, this ability to stand at a remove and objectively look at and understand what he is doing has served Toback well. It's probably the crucial difference between him and other viscerally driven filmmakers, such as Abel Ferrara. Seeing himself from the outside keeps him from getting lost and allows his work to maintain a tight structure and a sense of humor. "The Outsider" shows the highs and lows of making films outside the Hollywood system, when the focus and exhilaration of the filmmaking is followed by a struggle to find distribution. After all these years, the struggle still seems to take Toback by surprise. But then, the irony is as absurd as it's terrible: Sometimes the price of making movies worth seeing is that few people get to see them. Named for auteur d'excés James Toback, whose career since Fingershas been one big guilty pleasure, Nicholas Jarecki's The Outsider is among the great docs about moviemaking; you'd compare it to Hearts of Darkness and Burden of Dreams if only Toback, a notorious gambler, had won the chips to indulge himself as thoroughly on location as his addictive personality would prefer. Here the indie hustler's equivalent of directorial jungle madness is taking $2 million from British bankers on condition of starting to shoot a script, any script, in less than a month; a few short days into the two-week (!) production of When Will I Be Loved, Toback's New Wave–in–New York ditty with Neve Campbell as a penthouse-lounging femme fatale, the filmmaker has eight uncast roles and a shitload of dialogue left to write. Pontificating off the cuff, Toback could be describing his own narcissist's m.o. when, with characteristic modesty, he calls Loved an "exploration of sexual and psychological and philosophical capacity"—this before giving blow-by-blow direction to Frederick Weller and three nubile blondes for an endearingly gratuitous ménage à quatre scene in sunny Central Park.

Newly discovered interviews with friends of Truman Capote made by Paris Review co-founder George Plimpton invigorate this fascinating documentary on the author (and socialite) behind Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood, while situating Capote in the 20th-century American literary canon.

Utitlising humour, fantasy, animation, poetry and theatrics, Hochman and her crew challenge the male establishment for ignoring the first meeting of the National Women's Political Caucus and Shirley Chisholm's bid for US vice-president.

It's 1974. Muhammad Ali is 32 and thought by many to be past his prime. George Foreman is ten years younger and the heavyweight champion of the world. Promoter Don King wants to make a name for himself and offers both fighters five million dollars apiece to fight one another, and when they accept, King has only to come up with the money. He finds a willing backer in Mobutu Sese Suko, the dictator of Zaire, and the "Rumble in the Jungle" is set, including a musical festival featuring some of America's top black performers, like James Brown and B.B. King.

The infamously macho American author shares a 1971 New York City panel with a group of famous feminists and responds as well to a lively critique from other intellectual women in the audience, in this time capsule of what a sophisticated political and literary public discussion was like in the early days of Women's Liberation.

CREMASTER 2 is rendered as a gothic Western that introduces conflict into the system. On the biological level it corresponds to the phase of fetal development during which sexual division begins. In Matthew Barney's abstraction of this process, the system resists partition and tries to remain in the state of equilibrium imagined in Cremaster 1.

'Best of Enemies' is a documentary about the legendary series of nationally televised debates in 1968 between two great public intellectuals, the liberal Gore Vidal and the conservative William F. Buckley Jr. Intended as commentary on the issues of their day, these vitriolic and explosive encounters came to define the modern era of public discourse in the media, marking the big bang moment of our contemporary media landscape when spectacle trumped content and argument replaced substance. Best of Enemies delves into the entangled biographies of these two great thinkers and luxuriates in the language and the theater of their debates, begging the question, 'What has television done to the way we discuss politics in our democracy today?'

Pauline Kael (1919–2001) was undoubtedly one of the greatest names in film criticism. A Californian native, she wrote her first review in 1953 and joined ‘The New Yorker’ in 1968. Praised for her highly opinionated and feisty writing style and criticised for her subjective and sometimes ruthless reviews, Kael’s writing was refreshingly and intensely rooted in her experience of watching a film as a member of the audience. Loved and hated in equal measure – loved by other critics for whom she was immensely influential, and hated by filmmakers whose films she trashed - Kael destroyed films that have since become classics such as The Sound of Music and raved about others such as Bonnie and Clyde. She was also aware of the perennial difficulties for women working in the movies and in film criticism, and fiercely fought sexism, both in her reviews and in her media appearances.

A young black pianist becomes embroiled in the lives of an upper-class white family set among the racial tensions, infidelity, violence, and other nostalgic events in early 1900s New York City.

Also known as Walden, Jonas Mekas’s first diary film is a six-reel chronicle of his life in 1960s New York, interweaving moments with family, friends, lovers, and artistic idols. Blending everyday encounters with portraits of the avant-garde art scene, it forms an epic, personal meditation on community, creativity, and the passage of time.