Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
On Christmas Day 1990, a shooting broke out between teens inside a movie theatre in New York during a screening of The Godfather Part III. The crossfire left one innocent bystander, 15-year-old Tremain Hall, dead. The story became a tabloid sensation, with the perpetrator, 17-year-old Lawrence Bartley, becoming a face of senseless youth violence in the then crime-ridden city. But, as Second Shot reveals, beyond the headlines was a much more complex story of struggle and shattered dreams. Revisiting the murder from the vantage of some three decades later, the short documentary finds Bartley a model prisoner with deep regret over his crime, and the victim’s brother, Chad Hall, still broken by the loss and unwilling to forgive him. With Bartley up for parole, the US director Andrew Michael Ellis interviews those affected by the shooting, as well as legal experts, to explore if keeping him locked up would be an act of justice or simply perpetuate the pain of that fateful night.
video
Family life
One family’s harrowing escape from postwar Vietnam, told in a poignant metaphor
10 minutes
video
Fairness and equality
Visit the small Texas community that lives in the shadow of SpaceX launches
14 minutes
video
War and peace
A frontline soldier’s moving account of the fabled ‘Christmas truce’ of 1914
12 minutes
video
Bioethics
What a 1970 experiment reveals about the possibility and perils of ‘head transplants’
6 minutes
video
History of technology
Replicating Shakespearean-era printing brings its own dramas and comedy
19 minutes
video
Animals and humans
The wild tale of a young animal keeper, an angry tiger and a torn circle net
10 minutes
video
Technology and the self
Why single Chinese women are freezing their eggs in California
24 minutes
video
Beauty and aesthetics
Can you see music in this painting? How synaesthesia fuelled Kandinsky’s art
10 minutes
video
The ancient world
Petty squabbles and bloody battles – the life of an ancient Roman soldier
18 minutes