This year's South By Southwest Film Conference and Festival (SXSW 2015), which will run from March 13-21 in Austin, Texas, has unveiled the lineup for its beloved Midnighters section, which aims to showcase the best and brightest in genre filmmaking, from thriller to horror to science-fiction. Attendees will witness 11 titles including nine world premieres at Midnighters this year, with filmmakers like Karyn Kusama and Rodney Ascher in the mix.
A few days ago, we'd have said that Marvel would have to move heaven and earth to convince Sony to let Spider-Man play in its cinematic sandbox, so now that such a deal has finally come to fruition, it only follows that there are some fascinating details to parse out, both about the financial and logistical aspects of the webslinger's future.
Few filmmakers have been as pivotal to the mumblecore movement as Joe Swanberg, whose micro-budgeted, improv-heavy dramas have brought him widespread acclaim and considerable success over the past decade. In 2013, he had the biggest hit of his career with Drinking Buddies and followed it up with another high-profile project, titled Happy Christmas, which sent his profile soaring even higher. Now, Swanberg is continuing his progression toward mainstream cinema by taking on his first studio film.
Any Halloween fan will tell you that, as far as Michael Myers goes, one thing is for certain - the guy doesn't stay dead for long. Dimension Films is actively plotting the fearsome killer's latest return to the big screen, and in order to get the ball rolling on what one source called a franchise "recalibration," the studio has hired Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan, the screenwriting duo behind multiple Saw movies, to pen the script.
One of the most popular television series of all time may be poised to return to airwaves, with news that NBC is looking at possibly bringing Dick Wolf's original Law & Order back to the land of the living.
Last night at the Grammy Awards, Universal teased that it would be dropping a new trailer for this summer's hotly anticipated N.W.A. biopic Straight Outta Compton, and now the studio has made good on that promise, unleashing a red-band trailer that doesn't shy away from the social and political impact that the famous hip-hop group had on their gritty South Central world.
The only legitimately scary thing about the budding Universal Monsters franchise so far is that its launching platform, Dracula Untold, has about as much bite as the Twilight saga. If that sounds harsh, well, that's because it's meant to - as franchise starters go, this lazy actioner is as lifeless and absent-minded as they come, never supplying even the tiny amount of intelligence that would have been necessary to buy Dracula, that most reliable of movie monsters, as a sword-wielding action hero of the armor-clad variety.
The first thing one notices about Robert Durst, the enigmatic center of HBO's riveting documentary series The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, is his eyes. His pupils are massive and jet-black, almost demonic in appearance, and there's not a spark of life in them. The effect is unnerving but, more than that, they make Durst seem barely human. That, during his interviews with filmmaker Andrew Jarecki, he either twitches uncontrollably, blinking with aberrant speed, or doesn't blink at all, just adds to the overall impression that, as his former mother-in-law puts it, the guy is a total "oddball."
Dennis Lehane's books have yielded some terrific crime dramas set in Boston, from Mystic River to Gone Baby Gone, so it's more than a little strange to consider that for The Drop, Lehane's first screenplay, he adapted his short story "Animal Rescue" but traded in Dorchester for the mean streets of Brooklyn.
After being canceled by CBS, brought back and then canceled again by the same network, Poppy Montgomery-led detective drama Unforgettable is getting a new lease on life courtesy of A&E, which has picked it up for a fourth season.
