2015 SXSW Film Festival

‘Krisha’ Review: A Disorienting Family Drama
‘Krisha’ Review: A Disorienting Family Drama
‘Krisha’ Review: A Disorienting Family Drama
From the moment the titular Krisha appears on screen in Trey Edward Shults’ feature film debut, a current of unhinged anxiety is released. As menacing strings prickle over the soundtrack, the opening shot zooms in on Krisha’s face as she stares transfixed into the camera, her lips tight, chin quivering and eyebrows raised in a vulnerable, yet almost antagonistic manner. It’s an image that quickly establishes the blunt emotionalism of ‘Krisha,’ a film that grips the audience at the throat and keeps squeezing tighter and tighter.
‘Trainwreck’ Review: Amy Schumer’s Debut is Nearly Flawless
‘Trainwreck’ Review: Amy Schumer’s Debut is Nearly Flawless
‘Trainwreck’ Review: Amy Schumer’s Debut is Nearly Flawless
Amy Schumer has built a sizable fan base thanks to her Comedy Central series, which showcases her specific brand of honest and often subversive sense of humor. There’s no denying her intense relatability — and it’s that quality that serves her well in her debut film, Trainwreck. Written and produced by Schumer and directed by Judd Apatow, the film centers on a fictional version of Schumer. We’ll never know how fictional this Amy is (and we shouldn’t), which makes her cinematic alter ego all the more appealing.
‘Spy’ Review: An Empowering but Uneven Female Spy Spoof
‘Spy’ Review: An Empowering but Uneven Female Spy Spoof
‘Spy’ Review: An Empowering but Uneven Female Spy Spoof
Paul Feig’s The Heat took a genre that has traditionally belonged to men — the buddy cop movie — and gave it a female twist. Feig’s new movie, Spy, does much the same thing, this time for spy films, a world that has long been by, about, and for dudes and their power fantasies. Spy explicitly subverts the genre’s typical gender dynamics by casting Melissa McCarthy as a lowly, desk-bound CIA analyst named Susan Cooper, who has spent her entire career in the shadow of a glamorous James Bond-esque spy (Jude Law) and then finally gets her opportunity to step into the spotlight and become a full-fledged field agent.
‘Furious 7’ Review: One Last Ride, And It’s a Good One
‘Furious 7’ Review: One Last Ride, And It’s a Good One
‘Furious 7’ Review: One Last Ride, And It’s a Good One
Furious 7 almost certainly won’t be the last Fast & Furious movie. But at times it feels like a series finale. There are numerous callbacks and homages to the franchise’s entire 15-year history. The setpieces are bigger and crazier than ever; it’s hard to imagine anyone topping them. And before the chases really get rolling, the mood is often downright mournful. Two different scenes are set in graveyards, and characters talk about taking “one last ride” together.
‘Get Hard’ Review: Two Hilarious Actors, One Bad Movie
‘Get Hard’ Review: Two Hilarious Actors, One Bad Movie
‘Get Hard’ Review: Two Hilarious Actors, One Bad Movie
Individually, Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart are undeniably hilarious guys. Bringing two major comedic forces together on the big screen just makes sense on both a commercial and entertainment level. Unfortunately, Get Hard largely squanders the talents of Ferrell and Hart on an outdated premise with tired jokes, delivering what essentially amounts to one overlong joke about the terrors of prison rape.
Extended ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ Footage Revealed at SXSW
Extended ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ Footage Revealed at SXSW
Extended ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ Footage Revealed at SXSW
Last night, following a very special screening of The Road Warrior at SXSW, director George Miller treated us to seven minutes of action-packed new footage from Mad Max: Fury Road, as well as an exclusive new trailer created just for the fest. The new footage was brutal and gorgeous, and gave us a nice taste of Charlize Theron’s intensely bad ass Imperator Furiosa.
SXSW Review: ‘Raiders!’
SXSW Review: ‘Raiders!’
SXSW Review: ‘Raiders!’
Movies are often compared to dreams. If that’s true, then filmmakers are dreamers. When Eric Zala and Chris Strompolos were kids, they dreamed of making movies, so they spent most of their childhood summers in Mississippi making a shot-for shot remake of Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. The project eventually consumed seven years of their lives and nearly destroyed their friendship, but in the end, Zala and Strompolos completed their film, which they called Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation.
SXSW Review: ‘Ex Machina’
SXSW Review: ‘Ex Machina’
SXSW Review: ‘Ex Machina’
Ex Machina is Alex Garland’s first film as a director but it’s very simpatico with his screenplays for movies like 28 Days Later, Sunshine, and Dredd. As a writer, Garland likes to work in compact universes — an abandoned city, a spaceship headed to the sun, a gang-infested high-rise — where characters are trapped together and pitted against one another. In Ex Machina’s story of a brilliant technologist who creates artificial intelligence, he’s found a man who fashions himself as something of an inquisitive god, and there’s a bit of that notion in Garland’s work as well — he builds little petrie dishes of life, testing mankind’s resolve under extreme stress to see whether we crack under the pressure. His findings are usually not promising.
SXSW Review: ‘7 Days in Hell’
SXSW Review: ‘7 Days in Hell’
SXSW Review: ‘7 Days in Hell’
If comedy filmmakers weren’t already jealous of their television brethren, they will be after they watch HBO’s 7 Days in Hell, which uses the cable network’s permissive attitude toward adult material to tell envelope-pushing jokes that no mainstream movie could ever hope to get past the MPAA. 7 Days in Hell is funny enough to play in a multiplex (even if, at 50 minutes, it’s not quite feature length), but its hilariously vulgar jokes would definitely saddle it with a box-office poisoning NC-17 rating. On HBO, though, anything goes, and thank goodness because director Jake Syzmanski and writer Murray Miller were able to produce a mockumentary that giddilypulses with a sense of absolute freedom — freedom from content restrictions and freedom to experiment with weird strains of comedy that would never fly in a mainstream Hollywood film.
SXSW Review: ‘Unfriended’
SXSW Review: ‘Unfriended’
SXSW Review: ‘Unfriended’
Unfriended wants to do for social media what The Ring did for VHS tapes — take a piece of everyday technology and turn it into an object of uncommon terror. A bunch of teenagers on Skype have their group call interrupted by an intruder who claims to be a dead classmate who killed herself after she was cyberbullied. The entire movie takes place on a computer screen as one of the girls in the group, Blaire (Shelley Hennig), browses the Internet, checks her Facebook, and chats with her friends about the anonymous assailant who abuses and threatens them and then starts picking them off one-by-one. What follows becomes an original gloss on a very unoriginal subgenre. Its very clever and creepy merging of movie and technology is nearly ruined by a stale horror clichés.

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