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For director Shaun Seneviratne, life is cinema and cinema is life. His first feature film, Ben and Suzanne: A Reunion in Four Parts, which debuted at SXSW this year, places the viewer as a fly on the wall, witnesses to a week in the life of a couple’s attempt to figure out their future. It is the result of a fourteen-year-long filmmaking process.
Read MoreWith All That Jazz, Fosse not only created a pageant of his own death, but the glorious death of the original movie musical altogether.
Read MoreThis week in Austin screenings, 6/21-6/27.
Read MoreDesert Hearts has become a touchstone for queer audiences across generations, a lesbian love story written and directed by women that gives space to the emotions and sexuality of two women’s relationship.
Read MoreMovie musicals have been a persistent staple in American culture nearly as long as movies themselves have. Therefore, it is worth discussing ten movie musicals you may have seldom stopped to consider next to standards like Singin’ in the Rain or Cabaret or Grease. These unsung heroes of the movie musical genre are begging for more love and attention.
Read MoreIn 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.
Read MoreThis week in Austin screenings 6/14-6/20.
Read MoreWhat sets Mishima apart from Schrader’s other works is its unconventional structure and style.
Read MoreHit 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.
Read MoreIn all of cinema’s short history, has there ever been another joke as filthy, funny, perverse – and of course, well-earned – as the canonization of John Waters? At this exact moment, you can go out and spend forty hard-earned dollars on a “culturally important” boutique Blu-ray of a film which concludes on a cross-dresser eating literal, actual dog turds. If there's a more beautiful representation of the lurking good taste which occasionally threatens to puncture the bubble of our stolid society, I've yet to see it. But then again, Pink Flamingos was never about good taste.
Read MoreA definitive ranking of every outfit Honey Kitsuragi wears in Hideakki Anno’s 2004 Cutie Honey adaptation.
Read MoreThis week in Austin screenings 6/7 - 6/13.
Read MoreA 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.
Read MoreAhead of her directorial debut The Watchers, we sat down with Ishana Night Shyamalan to talk about her influences, working with Dakota Fanning, and what’s missing in the modern horror genre.
Read MoreI had the pleasure of speaking with Sean about the process of making “Tennis, Oranges,” quiet spaces in LA Chinatown, and the power of saying as little as possible.
Read MoreLana Wilson’s new documentary, Look Into My Eyes, presents through juxtaposition of hurt and healing the film’s ethos: human is to be messy.
Read MoreThis week in Austin screenings 5/31-6/6.
Read MoreGeorge 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.
Read MoreWhat 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.
Read MoreBaby 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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