With Wild Horses, Robert Duvall returns to the director’s chair after a 13 year stay of absence. Though he attempts to craft an unlikely movie with meaning inside the confines of a thriller/western, the film gets away from him. From our review;
The Diabolical is the first – and oddly enough only – horror movie I’ve seen at SXSW that actually tries to be scary. More often than not at this year’s fest, we saw midnighters going for a creepy but never quite scary vibe (The Boy, The Frontier), attempting to be satirical (Ava’s Possessions, Excess Flesh)...
Ted (Jared Breeze) is a serial killer in the making. He’s only nine years old but all the warning signs are there in Craig William Macneill’s slow burning but explosively rewarding The Boy. Like the great unmade redneck prequel to The Good Son, The Boy shows the quiet transformation of ennui to psychosis as an...
Creative Control takes place in a world of technology just a few year’s out from today. Cell phones and computer screens are composed of sheer cuts of opaque glass and flicker with images only visible to their owner. Apps are controlled with the slightest wave of a finger, like a symphony composer directing his orchestra....
Fresno benefits greatly from the duel casting of Judy Greer and Natasha Lyonne as scrubby, flawed sisters who drag each other down a spiral of bad decisions. At the helm, Jamie Babbit makes her own series of bad decisions, often unable to get out of the way of a problematic script from Karey Dornetto and...
To watch The Frontier is to take a drivers seat in the Delorean and dial the settings to 1971. It has a distinctively “homage” feeling to it – as if it were a previously unreleased Hitchcock movie, filmed a short peck after The Birds. Unlike The Guest or Cold in July, The Frontier doesn’t play...
The comic combination of Nick Kroll, Rose Bryne and Bobby Carnavale is enough to sell this wry but formulaic family-member-moves-home farce wholesale. Ironic that Bryne and Carnavale just co-starred side-by-side in Paul Feig’s underwhelming Melissa McCarthy vehicle Spy as arms dealing peers and they here play another side to partners in crime as a husband...
The old “I could watch so-and-so read a phone book” adage speaks to an ability to turn the banal into something unexpected and has been liberally applied to the works of anyone from Bill Murray to Daniel Day Lewis. In a similar but distinctly different vein, there’s something mundanely alluring about planting Jason Schwartzman in...
In psychology class, you learn about the concept of diffusion of responsibility, a sociopathic event that explains that when more people are present or complicit in an unfavorable event, the less personally responsible that group will feel for its outcome. The public murder of Kitty Genovese – in which a woman was stabbed to death...
One of the most interesting, complex films of SXSW 2015 to date is Ross Partridge‘s Lamb. With the film, Partridge subverts our psychological expectations, flipping a difficult concept on its head and bleeding it for all its unsettling, deep dramatic worth. From our review: Not one to worry about getting too literal with their metaphors, Partridge...