
Lee Mark Ranaldo (born February 3, 1956) is an American guitarist, singer and songwriter, best known as a co-founder of the rock band Sonic Youth. In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked Ranaldo at number 33 on its "Greatest Guitarists of All Time" list. In May 2012, Spin published a staff-selected top 100 guitarist list, ranking Ranaldo and his Sonic Youth bandmate Thurston Moore together at number 1.
Explore all movies appearances

New York-based 16-year-old Joey Wethersby's parents were part of a 1990s one-hit wonder band. After encouraging her parents to start a new band, Joey finds herself traveling nightly to an alternate reality where everyone repeatedly says the titular three-word phrase.

Sonic Youth in 1991 on Neil Young's Smell the Horse tour, captured by Crazy Horse Guitar/Bass Tech Mondo aka Armando Garcia.

Lee Renaldo, Pascal Comelade and Ramon Prats perform a legacy-inspired suite on the Velvet Undergroud. Manuel Huerga captured the dress rehearsal and the concert with a single camera, and turned what was shot into an immersive experience.

For over 70 years, Jonas Mekas, internationally known as the "godfather" of avant-garde cinema, documented his life in what came to be known as his diary films. From his arrival in New York City as a displaced person in 1949 to his death in 2019, he chronicled the trauma and loss of exile while pioneering institutions to support the growth of independent film in the United States. Fragments of Paradise is an intimate look at his life and work constructed from thousands of hours of his own video and film diaries-including never-before-seen tapes and unpublished audio recordings. It is a story about finding beauty amidst profound loss, and a man who tried to make sense of it all... with a camera.

A concert film of Sonic Youth performing their Daydream Nation album in full with a bonus encore of Rather Ripped songs at the ABC in Glasgow in 2007.

From their roots as a brutal, confrontational industrial band, through breakups and chaos, to their odds-defying current status as one of the most accomplished and ambitious bands in the world, one whose concerts are more like ecstatic rituals than nostalgic trips. SWANS has always been a collection of singular performers, but there's been one constant since its formation in 1982--singer, songwriter Michael Gira. 'Where Does a Body End?' is a SWANS documentary with unfettered access to hundreds of hours of Gira/SWANS archives of never-seen-before recordings, videos, and photographs. An unfiltered story of a life in the arts, frequent difficulty spanning decades without a safety net, creating work because Gira says "What else am I going to do?"

As a fixture of the New York music scene for 30 years, Sonic Youth performed in New York City innumerable times, and served as ersatz cultural ambassadors for the city when traveling. As part of the 2019 Rooftop Films programming, Sonic Youth will present a New York-specific collection of film and videos from their private archives. Much of the material to be presented is completely unseen, threaded together with a few items which are out there in the public knowledge but here presented from the best source available to the band.

A fly-on-the-wall documentary about the recording of the music score by Sonic Youth.

The untold story of a series of Reagan-era guerrilla punk and industrial desert happenings in Southern California that are now recognized as the inspiration for Burning Man, Lollapalooza, and Coachella. Interviews and rare performance footage of Sonic Youth, Minutemen, Meat Puppets, Redd Kross, Einstürzende Neubauten, Survival Research Laboratories, Savage Republic, Swans and more.

Filmed during dozens of recording sessions, Hello Hello Hello is a story of the creative process - Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth) collaborating with producer Raül Refree, across a year and 3,842 miles with a little help from their friends. Novelist Jonathan Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude) plays writer/lyricist/muse to Ranaldo's artist/composer wanderings, across soundscapes created alongside friends and musical guest artists including Nels Cline (Wilco), Sharon Van Etten, Alan Licht, Kid Millions (Oneida), and Steve Shelley (Sonic Youth). Theirs is an unusually intimate and personal process in the creation of Ranaldo's album, Electric Trim (Mute, 2017), a bold, new sound and a lush and striking departure from Ranaldo's signature work.
Subscribe for exclusive insights on movies, TV shows, and games! Get top picks, fascinating facts, in-depth analysis, and more delivered straight to your inbox.