SXSW ‘24: Crafty ‘SEW TORN’ A Choice Midnighter

March 13, 2024 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Calum Worthy, Eve Connolly, Freddy Macdonald, John Lynch, Sew Torn, SXSW, SXSW 2024 4 Comments

Sew Torn, Freddy Macdonald’s crafty seamstress thriller told in three vignettes, calls to mind the Choose Your Own Adventure books popularized before the internet. Invariably, readers would determine which path their protagonist should take, with most roads leading to a less-than-fortunate ending. In Sew Torn, a pivotal decision takes shape when Barbara Duggen (Eve Connolly) stumbles upon a drug deal gone wrong: a suitcase of money and two barely living motorcyclists crashed on an otherwise idyllic stretch of Swiss motorway. Read More

SXSW ’22: Punchy ‘BODIES BODIES BODIES’ Subverts Slasher Formula

March 14, 2022 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Amandla Stenberg, Bodies Bodies Bodies, Chase Sui Wonders, Halina Reijn, Lee Pace, Maria Bakalova, Peter Davidson, Rachel Sennott, SXSW, SXSW 2022 Leave a comment

Everyone’s always a suspect in any slasher movie worth its salt and that’s true up until the very last moments in Halina Reijn’s Bodies Bodies Bodies. The film, which stars a slew of established and rising talent in the form of Maria Bakalova, Lee Pace, Amandla Stenberg, Chase Sui Wonders, Peter Davidson, and a scene-stealing Rachel Sennott, cleverly subverts what we know of the genre trappings and what we – perhaps falsely? – assume to be true. Read More

SXSW ‘22: Yearning Homoerotic Thriller ‘IT IS IN US ALL’

March 14, 2022 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Antonia Campbell Hughes, Cosmo Jarvis, Movie Reviews, Reviews, Rhys Mannion, SXSW, SXSW 2022 Leave a comment

When out-of-tower Hamish (Cosmo Jarvis) gets in a head-on-collision with Irish teenagers Callum and Evan (Rhys Mannion), only the later survives. Reeling from the fallout, the unscathed Evan and banged up Hamish wind up in a complicated dance, caught somewhere between trauma bonding and flirtation in a film that’s slow to reveal its hand. Their relationship becomes bizarrely intimate but undercut with a simmering level of foreboding in actress-turned-first-time-director Antonia Campbell Hughes‘ introspective thriller It Is In Us All. Read More

SXSW ’22: Mind-Blowing ‘EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE’ Is the Multiverse of Madness We Deserve

March 12, 2022 by Matt Oakes Posted in Most Popular, Out in Theaters Tagged Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheiner, Everything Everywhere All At Once, James Hong, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ke Huy Quan, Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, SXSW, SXSW 2022 3 Comments

Everything Everywhere All At Once truly is the multiverse of madness that we deserve. Hilarious, utterly singular, and weirdly profound, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheiner (aka “The Daniels”) have cooked up something wholly original with their martial-arts multiversal science-fiction story about a Chinese family that owns a laundry mat. A genius-level explosion of creativity that blends Wuxia sci-fi with the vast endlessness that is literally the spectrum of onscreen possibility, there’s is a film that borders on the insane and is never anything less than wowing. To say I had a smile plastered on my face the entire time would be to overlook that fact that everyone around me did as well. Read More

Talking with SXSW Breakout Mallory Everton: Star, Writer, and Director of ‘RECOVERY’

March 23, 2021 by Matt Oakes Posted in Interviews Tagged Interviews, Mallory Everton, Recovery, Steven Meek, SXSW, SXSW 2021, Talking With..., Whitney Call 1 Comment

Look, just about the last thing on earth that anyone is craving nowadays is more COVID-19 talk. No one wants mask jokes or commentary on toilet paper shortages nor do they want to deep dive into the horrors of having lost 550,000 Americans and counting to a pandemic that quickly became a hot-button political issue. And yet, Mallory Everton has managed to make a pandemic-set COVID comedy that feels rejuvenating and alive, maybe disproving the age-old adage that laughter is the “best” medicine (vaccines still probably have it beat) while underscoring enduring importance of comedy in a time of crisis. Read More

SXSW 2021: ‘SOUND OF VIOLENCE’ Is the Ultra-Campy ASMR Slasher You Didn’t Know You Needed

March 18, 2021 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Alex Noyer, Horror, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Lili Simmons, Reviews, Sonya Munro, Sound of Violence, SXSW, SXSW 2021 Leave a comment

There is a scene early on in the absolutely bonkers horror camp-fest Sound of Violence where murderess-musician-mistress Alexis (Jasmin Savoy Brown) kidnaps a homeless man and rigs him up like an electric drum set. Part-hardware, part-flesh, done up as if Kevin Mcalester and Jigsaw were there to help perfect the evil mastermind mechanics. A meat tenderizer dangles above his skull, a mallet aimed at his kneecaps, scalpels bisecting his wrists like cello bows. Alexis nervously puts on her earphones and gets to work. Read More

SXSW 2021: Urgent School Shooter Teen Drama ‘THE FALLOUT’ is the First Defining Movie of Gen-Z

March 18, 2021 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews, Most Popular Tagged Jenna Ortega, John Ortiz, Julie Bowen, Lumi Pollack, Maddie Ziegler, Megan Park, Niles Fitch, Reviews, Shailene Woodley, SXSW, SXSW 2021, Will Ropp) 4 Comments

We’re only minutes into The Fallout before the carefree world of 16-year old Vada (Jenna Ortega in a star-making role) is turned upside down by a school shooting. Up to that point, her biggest concerns were nagging parents, knowing the answers to an upcoming quiz, and which flavor cake-pop to get at the Starbucks drive through. When her doting little sister Amelia (Lumi Pollack) texts her “911” (she’s gotten her first period and needs to be talked off a ledge), Vada goes to the bathroom to provide some much-needed sisterly advice. She’ll remain trapped there, with popular girl Mia (Maddie Ziegler), when gunshots start ripping off in the hall outside, accompanied by piercing screams of abject terror. Read More

SXSW 2021: Goretastic ‘JAKOB’S WIFE’ Is the Most Fun Vampire Movie in Years

March 17, 2021 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Barbara Crampton, Jakob’s Wife, Kathy Charles, Mark Steenland, Reviews, SXSW, SXSW 2021, Travis Stevens 2 Comments

According to Biblical etymology, the name Jakob as found in Genesis is derived from the word for “heel”. In Jakob’s Wife, the eponymous Jakob (Larry Fessenden) is indeed a heel; an old-fashion minister who looks down his nose at his parishioners and town’s hoi polloi and treats his wife as a subservient inferior. When an old flame comes through town, obedient church mouse spouse Anne (a perfectly cast Barbara Crampton) gives into temptation…and is delivered unto the ultimate evil: a primordial vampire hiding out in the abandoned mill in their small town. Read More

SXSW 2021: Dead in the Water ‘OFFSEASON’ A Bloated, Shambling Corpse of a Seaside Haunter

March 17, 2021 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Jocelin Donahue, Joe Swanberg, Melora Walters, Mickey Keating, Offseason, SXSW, SXSW 2021 Leave a comment

A featherlight folk horror from Mickey Keating (Carnage Park), Offseason fails to conjure much of a reason for its existence, plundering the corpses of similar seaside folklore horror stories but bringing zero new ideas or visual intrigue to the table. At only 83 minutes, the barebones haunted town horror tale still majorly drags, a problem born from its dramatically inert narrative and exacerbated by numerous pacing problems. There are a couple (as in exactly two) memorable visual tableaus that shock the viewer out of a state of near-total apathy but it’s far too little too late to salvage Keating’s creation from sinking to the depths of horror movie irrelevancy. Read More

SXSW 2021: ‘THE FEAST’ Is Scrumptiously Unnerving Folk Horror

March 17, 2021 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Annes Elwy, Julian Lewis Jones, Lee Haven Jones, Nia Roberts, Roger Williams, SXSW, SXSW 2021, The Feast Leave a comment

High in the Welsh hills, an elemental force awakens. This land is sacred and foreign; a far-flung neverland where verdant hills and the marble-mouthed language both prove striking and ancient. A place where helping neighbors lend a hand and whisper of mythical no-no’s. The first shot of Lee Haven Jones’ gothic folk horror juxtaposes man’s greed and his demise as a ruddy pipe in close up drills muddy oil from the ground. In the distance, a construction site worker flops over and dies. Man takes. Man dies. The cycle begins. Read More