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An ailing Billy Joel was not in attendance tonight at the world premiere HBO documentary about his life and music but sent word to a packed Beacon Theater in NYC via its director.

“Billy wishes he were here tonight, and he asked us to convey his greetings to you all. He said ‘getting old sucks, but it’s still preferable to getting cremated’,” relayed Susan Lacy, who helmed and produced the doc Billy Joel: And So It Goes with Jessica Levin. Part 1 of 2 opened the Tribeca Festival Wednesday.

“Billy may be considered the poet laureate of New York. You feel the essence of our city in his lyrics,” said Tribeca Enterprises’ Robert De Niro introducing the festival and the film with co-founder Jane Rosenthal.

Joel’s scrappiness and immense talent are both vivid in the film about the Long Island bard who formed his first cover band, The Lonely Souls,...

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“We’d rather march to hear Willkie on national unity than be marched into a concentration camp,” Harry Warner firmly stated in the summer of 1941. The mogul was responding to criticism for his encouraging studio employees to attend a rally at the Hollywood Bowl featuring 1940 Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie, a strong advocate for U.S. intervention in World War II. That same summer, a competing rally was held at the Hollywood Bowl on behalf of the America First movement. The keynote speaker was famed aviator and eugenics enthusiast Charles Lindbergh. The same aviator who, at an America First rally in Des Moines on Sept. 11, 1941, argued that one of the biggest threats to the United States was the Jewish-controlled media. Lindbergh’s hate-fueled rhetoric is covered at length in the new PBS docuseries, The U.S. and the Holocaust, produced by Ken Burns,...

You might have thought that you didn’t really need to consume any more content about Andy Warhol. After all, the New York artist has been ubiquitous throughout pop culture for more than half a century. In fact, he kind of invented pop culture. But viewers who devour all six episodes of Netflix’s “The Andy Warhol Diaries” will realize that Warhol’s life had a lot more dimensions than a flat silkscreen of a Campbell’s soup can.

I thought I had a passing knowledge of Warhol and his life. Like most admirers of the groundbreaking music of the ‘60s and ‘70s, I had luxuriated in Todd Haynes’ “Velvet Underground” feature documentary last year. At Moca’s massive 2002 retrospective in Los Angeles, I developed an appreciation for Warhol’s early illustrations and figurative paintings, and over the years, I watched Jared Harris being ambushed by Lili Taylor in “Who...

Recently completing one of the longest shoots of his career with The Irishman, most other directors would consider that an accomplishment enough, but in between takes, Martin Scorsese somehow found time to construct a new curriculum as part of his “The Story of Movies” film course, produced with his company Film Foundation. This latest edition is “Portraits of America: Democracy on Film” and is free for students. However, if one would just like to follow along with their own personal screenings, the full list is available.

“We all need to make sense of what we’re seeing. For young people born into this world now, it’s absolutely crucial that they get guided,” Scorsese says (via IndieWire). “They have to learn how to sort the differences between art and pure commerce, between cinema and content, between the secrets of images that are individually crafted and the secrets of images that are mass-produced.

Martin Scorsese and his nonprofit organization The Film Foundation have announced their brand-new film curriculum, “Portraits of America: Democracy on Film.” The curriculum is the latest addition to the group’s ongoing film course “The Story of Movies,” which aims to teach students how to read the language of film and place motion pictures in the context of history, art, and society. Both “Democracy on Film” and the course are completely free for schools and universities.

“Portraits of America: Democracy on Film” is broken down into eight different sections, all of which include in-depth looks at some of the most important American films ever made, from Chaplin to Ford, Coppola, Spielberg, and ultimately Scorsese himself. The program is presented in partnership with Afscme. Scorsese announced the curriculum at a March 27 press conference in New York City.

“We all need to make sense of what we’re seeing,” Scorsese explained. “For...