Tag: sxsw2016

Another South By Southwest (SXSW) film festival has come and gone, and along with it another memorable adventure in Austin, Texas. Our team of three did our best to see as many films as possible, talk to as many filmmakers...

You can search the wide world over, but you’ll never find a man like Pee Wee Herman. He’s sweet, innocent, lively, potentially insane, but chock full of heart. It’s difficult to speculate how Herman was able to construct such an...

A funny thing happened on the way to the Paramount Theatre. The theatre, built in 1915, seats some 1,300 people. It is elegant, it is classic, and it is a miserable place to watch a movie. Naturally, it serves as...

In 1982, Reagan's America looked pretty darn convincing ... on television ... if you were 11 years old. But for hundreds of farmers across the heartland of the U.S.A., times were desperate. They were losing their farms, their homes, their...

In October 1981, Sister Tadea Benz, a 76-year-old nun, was raped, strangled, beaten and stabbed to death. Johnny Frank Garrett, age 17 at the time the crimes were committed, was later convicted. He was executed in February 1992, one of...

"You don't have to live like a refugee," Tom Petty sang in 1979. The musician was reacting to the pressures of the music business when he wrote the lyrics, he said later, but the song has resonated for years because...

Ah, young love! Unexplored emotions come tumbling together, and every thought feels awkward. The gestures are fumbling, tentative, and clumsy: Where do I put my hand? Is it OK if I do ... that? Far more than a straightforward teen...

A muscular thriller, Don't Breathe manhandles a vaguely familiar premise into a fresh, frenzied experience. Directed by Fede Alvarez (2013's Evil Dead, pictured above), the setup is brisk. Three Detroit teenagers (Jane Levy, Dylan Minette, Daniel Zovatto) have made an...

The shoes in questions were made for Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, but the true, fascinating, ever more complex world of The Slippers begins in earnest after she took them off. Granted, the new documentary by Morgan White...

A little past two in the morning, I began weeping. I blame filmmaker Yen Tan. His short film, 1985, screens today at SXSW, but Mr. Tan kindly made it available for me to watch in advance. Though I'm sure it...

Beyond the red-carpet gala screenings of highly anticipated movies that will soon open across the country -- think Richard Linklater's Everybody Wants Some, Jeff Nichols' Midnight Special, Ti West's In a Valley of Violence, Fede Alvarez's untitled thriller -- and...

Ready to premiere shortly as part of SXSW's Narrative Feature Competition, The Arbalest has a very intriguing premise: Foster Kalt, a famous toy inventor in the 1970s, reflects on his lifelong obsession with Sylvia Frank. From his first meeting with...

We have the first look at four new photos from American Fable, which will soon have its world premiere at SXSW in Austin, Teas. As the photos suggest, it's a dark thriller from writer/director Anne Hamilton, a protégé of Terrence...

We're gearing up to cover SXSW 2016, which begins next week in Austin, Texas, and to kick things off, we're happy to premiere the poster for Yen Tan's short film 1985. Mr. Tan wrote and directed the film, which stars...