Not only are the SXSW programmers an astute bunch of film enthusiasts who scour the globe for the finest in independent cinema … they also really dig horror flicks. Of course you’ll always find a solid batch of scary, suspenseful movies tucked away in the “Midnight” section (every good film festival has some sort of […]
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“Growing up can be a little bit scary and weird,” explains Kayla (Elsie Fisher) in one of the YouTube videos that frame Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade – and also, it seems, articulating one of the many running themes in this year’s SXSW Film Festival slate. That’s not terribly surprising, as the coming-of-age drama is one […]
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On Saturday, March 10, every film that screened in The Paramount – SXSW’s premier venue in downtown Austin – was directed by a woman. It was representative of this year’s lineup, with the strongest showing (at 33% of features and 59% of shorts) of female filmmakers in the festival’s history. And Saturday culminated with a […]
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Love, Simon is the first film about a gay teenager’s coming out ever distributed in wide release by a major studio. We’ve seen mainstream films with queer youth as supporting characters, and numerous coming-out-centered films that played the arthouse circuit. But one of the majors (20th Century Fox in this case), backing a sort of […]
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The arena. The Pongitron. “How’s that for a bad hit, Team Leader?” The Ball Chase. The music of Guns N’ Roses. The liberation of Pong City One. Any of these phrases instantly brings to mind one of the most notorious cult films of all time: Pong: The Motion Picture. Released in December 1992 in Europe […]
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Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, first published in 1962, is one of the most beloved young adult novels not to have already been turned into a movie (except for a 2003 TV version that nobody, least of all L’Engle, liked), so Disney’s new big-screen adaptation has a lot riding on it. Unfortunately, it’s The […]
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The old clock on the wall tells us it’s Friday. I guess it’s more of a calendar than a clock. Whatever it is, it says it’s Friday, so this must be the Friday Movie Pile. Put on your movie pants (not included) and figure out what you’re going to see this weekend! A Wrinkle in […]
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As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, the 1980s weren’t a great time to be a female. The end of second-wave feminism in the ‘70s left many Americans believing equality among the sexes was “solved.” As author Susan Faludi described, there was a backlash that sought to undo everything the Women’s Libbers had pressed for by […]
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In January, Wired magazine released a video that, in their words, “breaks down the history of people miniaturization in movies.” VFX Supervisor Jamie Price covers films through the decades depicting humans who have been shrunken down or were tiny to begin with. While he does an expert job of explaining the technical processes used to […]
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In 1963, Betty Friedan published her landmark work The Feminine Mystique, which analyzed the dramatic shift in women’s roles in postwar America and helped launch what came to be known as second-wave feminism. Women were suddenly marrying younger, having more children, and were largely relinquishing their professional identities in favor of raising families. Friedan wrote, […]
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Eventually, the cold and pitiless Red Sparrow is about a young Russian woman who becomes a spy and gets tangled up with a CIA operative running a counter-mission. It takes a while to get there, though, and when we do, it’s not the kind of espionage caper that’s “fun” or “has action” but rather the kind […]
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Oh, hi. We didn’t see you come in. We were just going through the Friday Movie Pile, and — what’s that? The Friday Movie Pile? Why, that’s where we dump all of the week’s new movies onto the floor and sort them out. It’s actually pretty self-explanatory. Join us, won’t you? Red Sparrow (R, 2:19) […]
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