The SXSW Film Festival came up with a game-changing plan today. The originally canceled fest is now set to happen but in digital form.
Read moreTaylor Schilling Rules in Safe but Watchable ‘Family' [Review]
Sometimes a performance can carry a film and make it work despite an average screenplay. It takes a talented actor or actress to make this happen, but when it does, it becomes a testament to their ability to carry a film all by themselves, which is that rare thing that producers in this industry always look for.
Read more‘A Vigilante’ Abuse Survivor Olivia Wilde Seeks Bloody Retribution [Review]
Revenge fantasy in cinema will never go out of style, but in a more sensitive age, vigilante films without a thoughtful touch can meet their own swift and merciless end. Take Eli Roth‘s neo-conservative wet dream remake of “Death Wish,” recently savaged by audiences and critics for its soulless, unthinking vengeance. The masculine, gung-ho individualism of this genre, aggressively promoting Second Amendment rights to enact revenge, might have worked a few years prior, but today, feels tone deaf, dated and poorly-timed.
Read more“For Sama": SXSW Grand Prize Winning Doc Is A Hard Watch About Syrian War [SXSW Review]
SXSW’s documentary grand jury prize winner comes hot off the heels of other powerful documentaries about the Syrian war, those include “Of Fathers and Sons,’” “Last Men in Aleppo” and the upcoming Sundance-winning “Midnight Traveller.” However, directors Waad Al-Kateab and Edward Watts’ “For Sama” might be the most poignant. not to mention the hardest watch out of any of them. Waad documents her last five years in Aleppo with the kind of intimacy and unrestraint of a true artist having to capture the essence of a impossibly bleak situation. Not only does Waad first-person narrate the whole thing, addressing her daughter Sama, but she manages to film everything and I do mean everything. Her camera is there when life is taken and when life is given, it’s an exemplary work of art in the midst of near apocalyptic times for the Syrian people, who have to manage both the invasion of ISIS and, even worse, the constant bombings by the Russian airforces on a daily basis.. Pregnant with Sama, Waad isn’t sure if she should go on about bringing a new person while she lives in Allepo, a city which quickly became the most dangerous in the world, according to many geography experts, but Waad goes on with it, and her revealing home video footage turns out to bring us the most fully-fleshed document of the Syrian war thus far. The horrific imagery from the hospital, where her husband resides as a doctor, is impossibly grim, but what Waad creates with “For Sama” is a historical document that will be re-watched for years to come and will bear viewers to ask the same question over and over again: where were we and why didn’t we help?
Lil Peep Doc “Everybody's Everything" Is A Haunting and Touching Statement on Millennial Angst [SXSW Review]
Born Gustav Elijah Åhr to white Harvard graduate parents, in suburban Pennsylvania of all places, Lil Peep stormed the independent music industry with his own brand of “Mumble Rap,” a genre that is defined by its unlimited amount of genre mashups and has its melodic flows and indecipherable lyrics mixed in with a thematic consciousness about anxiety, depression and being a millennial.
Read moreSXSW Announces Film Lineup; Includes New Films by Jordan Peele, Harmony Korine, John Lee Hancock and Lynn Shelton
This year’s SXSW is tempting me to cover it again. Jordan Peele's highly-anticipated follow-up to “Get Out,” titled “Us,” is already a bigger "get" than any film premiering at Sundance this year, and the rest of the lineup, announced just now, looks mighty impressive.
Read more'After Everything (Shotgun)' should have won the top dramatic prize at SXSW
Hannah Marks and Joey Power's "After Everything" was the best film to play in competition at this year's SXSW film festival. It represents a strong debut by the filmmaking duo because it agreeably understands, and never judges, the cash-strapped, NYC-based, millennial couple at the center of its tangled love story. The film is both idealistic and shrewdly cynical; it never necessarily sets for a settled mood because, well, that's now how life works. And yet, for a film dealing with such heavy themes, it manages to be curiously humorful.
Read moreSXSW Thoughts: “Ready Player One,” and “A Quiet Place.”
SXSW isn't necesarilly a festival that is known to produce a game-changer title. I mean, it does happen every few years that a great movie will premiere, but, for the most part, the festival is content with its assorted titles of low-budget hipster indie movies. If anything, the top-tier press will show up to the fest for the world premieres of an eventual wide-released film and this year those titles were "Ready Player One," "A Quiet Place," and "Blockers." I watched much of the competition title entries and didn't find much to be excited, to tell you the truth. I still have a few more films to see but there hasn't been a film on the same leve as past game-changers like "Krisha," Short-Term 12," and "Hush."
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