Every SXSW review on Silver Screen Riot.
OG Black Flag vocalist Henry Rollins has been lending himself out to little movie roles since he left the band in 1986. Arguably his most prominent and commercial appearance came out of his run on Sons of Anarchy as the muscle of white supremacist group the League of American Nationalists. In the role, Rollins hinted...
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)...
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...
This is the future. Bicycles remain the only mode of transport and they scream down rubble road decorated with human skulls, past junk yards littered with bits and bobs of discarded robots and towards the odd outskirts ripe for plundering. The land is overrun with masked miscreants of a steam-punk Road Warrior meets Jason Voorhees...
Like Funyuns, Melissa McCarthy is an acquired taste. In her least delicate projects, she vaults around the frame, sharting and cursing to the apparent delight of squealing audiences that I just don’t relate to. Even in Paul Feig‘s Spy – a film that affords her at least an attempt at a three-dimensional character – a...
Eugene Kotlyarenko sets the cinematic stove to a low-broil in semi-autobiographical A Wonderful Cloud, a lackadaisical, off-kilter romp through a broken relationship in Los Angeles. The events – like the comedy – are low-key and faintly directional, though are predominantly characterized by an overwhelming essence of a half-committed shrug. The fact that Kotlyarenko and co-star...
Traditionally, the horror movies begins with the tabula rasa and from there builds upwards with little narrative Lincoln Logs stacked on shower scares and mirror pop-ins. Ava’s Possessions shrewdly flips the formula on its head, poising an intriguing conceit in the exploration of what transpires after a ghastly, cathartic event. Where is the werewolf at...
Petting Zoo exists in the crossroads between Texas-sized conservative values and an emerging genus of first-generation aspirations as 17-year-old Layla finds herself simultaneously presented with a college scholarship and a bun in the oven. Writer, director Micah Magee‘s tale of unexpected pregnancy is one that cuts close to home, having been a pregnant teen herself....