SXSW

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.
SXSW 2015 Preview: 10 Must-See Movies
SXSW 2015 Preview: 10 Must-See Movies
SXSW 2015 Preview: 10 Must-See Movies
In a couple hours, the ScreenCrush staff will head down to Austin, Texas for the annual celebration of movies, music, and smoked meats known as South by Southwest. The 2015 lineup is one of the strongest in years, and we’ll only be in town for a couple days, so we’ve spent way too many hours studying the lineup and trying to figure out the best way to maximize our time, see as many great films (and eat as much barbecue) as humanly possible. Our extensive research yielded the following list of ten movies we’re dying to see at SXSW 2015; click the link in each title to go to each’s page at SXSW.com, where you’ll find all the details on screening times and locations. In alphabetical order, here’s Screencrush’s 10 most anticipated movies at South by Southwest:
SXSW 2015 Film Lineup Announced
SXSW 2015 Film Lineup Announced
SXSW 2015 Film Lineup Announced
The dust has barely settled from the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, and already we’ve got a look at the lineup for the 2015 South by Southwest Film Festival. After an initial announcement that included opening night film ‘Brand,’ about comedian Russell Brand,’ things have filled out really nicely with a ton of promising-sounding selections.
SXSW Announces First Wave of 2015 Programming, Including Russell Brand Documentary
SXSW Announces First Wave of 2015 Programming, Including Russell Brand Documentary
SXSW Announces First Wave of 2015 Programming, Including Russell Brand Documentary
It’s approximately -10,000 degrees in New York City today, so there are few things that sound more appealing right now than a week in sunny, warm Austin, Texas surrounded by cinephiles, barbecue, and, of course, the movies of the South by Southwest Film Festival. As if in answer to our prayers for some kind of relief (or as a cruel prank from an uncaring diety who knows we’re still two months of winter away from March), SXSW unveiled their first wave of 2015 programming today, including several very intriguing titles.
‘Short Term 12′ Review
‘Short Term 12′ Review
‘Short Term 12′ Review
There's an old expression about how all great art comes from suffering. Writer/director Destin Cretton may not agree with that statement, but his new film 'Short Term 12' is a great testament to it. It is set in a group home for troubled teens, where kids who have been discarded by life are saved and cared for -- at least until they turn 18 and get discarded again. These kids know suffering, and t
‘You’re Next’ Review
‘You’re Next’ Review
‘You’re Next’ Review
Watching Hollywood's endless parade of genre remakes, sequels and ripoffs can get pretty discouraging -- enough to convince you there's no undiscovered country left out there; that it's all been done before and filmmakers will keep repeating themselves over and over again until the end of time. Thank goodness, then, for something like 'You're Next,' which is scary and fun, and, best of all, fresh
'The Lords of Salem' Review
'The Lords of Salem' Review
'The Lords of Salem' Review
'The Lords of Salem,' Rob Zombie's long-awaited (though not so highly anticipated) follow-up to 'H2' shows a director who desperately wants to prove he's matured visually, but the results are unsurprisingly derivative.

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