A Quiet Place: Day One poses the question: What if you eschewed a family-driven survival story in favor of a plot with stakes no higher than that of a video game side quest?
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Embracing global cinema has the ability to cross cultural and cinematic barriers: how the filmmaker uses action and visual storytelling as a universal language, how the filmmaker connects their personal story to broader themes, and how the filmmaker embraces the absurdity of the world around us. In Tsui Hark’s Wicked City (1992), we have one of global cinema’s finest and oddest examples.
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Lanthimos loves a fall from grace and loves to see characters smart enough to make the right moves but dumb enough to think that the good days will last forever.
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Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1967) remains a masterpiece of visual comedy reminding viewers of our own contemporary constructions that threaten to engulf us.
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In director Chris Smith’s blitzy kitsch-soaked documentary, DEVO, Mothersbaugh and Casale give an oral history of the experimental music project’s suburban origins, their wacky audio-visual antics on the punk circuit, and their brief, but explosive time as one of the most famous bands in the world.
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Hit Man, the latest from Austin’s own director Richard Linklater and actor Glen Powell, looks like the opposite of film noir, particularly as described by Schrader, at first. It’is a funny, sexy, sunny character study, in which Powell and co-star Adria Arjona build a thorny romance that turns on curiosity as much as it does attraction. Powell’s mild-mannered philosophy professor Gary Johnson, who’s moonlightsing as an imposter hitman for the New Orleans Police Department, provides a chance for him to go both broad and deep. It’s consistently a hoot.
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A promising but flawed directorial debut from Ishana Night Shyamalan, The Watchers dazzles with its visuals but lacks the pacing and subtle writing needed to elevate it into greatness.
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Lana Wilson’s new documentary, Look Into My Eyes, presents through juxtaposition of hurt and healing the film’s ethos: human is to be messy.
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George Miller and company’s Mad Max movies run on a variety of tensions, and from these tensions arises impeccably staged set pieces, striking character work, and narrative flexibility in the form of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.
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What if Terrence Malick (Days of Heaven, Knight of Cups) took on Friday the 13th? That conceit is the backbone of Chris Nash’s In A Violent Nature, which on paper comes across as a spiritual sequel to that one Saturday Night Live sketch of Wes Anderson making a home invasion horror movie. Pairing wistfully beautiful shots of the Canadian wilderness with over-the-top violence and gore, In A Violent Nature becomes just a bit more than Mad Libs creation.
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Baby Blood transgressively counters the ever so nauseating idealized, kitsch aesthetic of pregnancy that we are accustomed to. The kitsch aesthetic of pregnancy arises out of societal expectations of what a mother should be, transforming what is a neutral occurrence into a moral imperative. The horror aesthetic in Baby Blood turns these expectations on their head, creating a narrative that encourages the pregnant character to refuse all repressive expectations of motherhood and pregnancy she encounters.
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Time Passages is a deftly woven scrapbook and an act of mourning.
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Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat’s Sugarcane, which had its Texas premiere at the Austin Film Society’s Doc Days festival, takes a deeply personal approach to what could be a sensationalistic true-crime story.
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The performances in The Fall Guy are great, but the real star of the show are the stunts.
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Following the breakout success of his Oscar-winning Drive My Car, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi gained a larger audience: a Western one that was primed to see his vision expand, perhaps beyond the borders of his native Japan. But his followup, Evil Does Not Exist, instead remains within his present field of vision and becomes his most contained film to date.
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Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar is only the director’s second feature film, but crystallizes a style that she’s honed over two decades.
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Seeking Mavis Beacon is inventive and powerful, playful and thoughtful in turn.
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Union, which had its Texas premiere at the Austin Film Society’s Doc Days festival on May Day, takes us back to one of the first beacons of hope in the current unionizing moment.
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Told exclusively through iPhone footage, laptop cameras, and text exchanges, Patricia Franquesa’s My Sextortion Diary plays out more like a thriller more akin to films like Missing, Searching, and UnFriended than the traditional talking head documentary.
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The first feature-length film from Rocket Jump (Freddie Wong and Matthew Arnold), We’re All Gonna Die has some rough edges but is at its greatest when it finds the balance between emotional and comedic.
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