#richard-linklater

#richard-linklater

When Jeff Nichols set out to make 2016's Midnight Special, his intention was to create a film about parenthood, the feelings of powerlessness that come with it, and the faith required to let your child be their own person in the world. When his son had a seizure at 8 months old, Nichols realized that he 'had no real control over the health and well-being of [his] child.'

DreamQuil is filled with so many anxieties that now feel commonplace, or that growing leaders in the development of AI will call 'inevitable.' Ads present tidy solutions to Carol before she even realizes she has a problem, as if the tech around her home is listening to every conversation. Some ads even feature her likeness, reaffirming the fears that AI will replace actors like Banks in real life.

It's been 40 years since Richard Linklater founded the Austin Film Society, beginning his crusade to make scrappy, personal, romantic and boisterous cinema. It's fitting for a director who first broke out in the 1990s "Indiewood" boom that his latest film, Nouvelle Vague, is an origin story of cinema's enfant terrible par excellence, Jean-Luc Godard, mounting his iconic debut film Breathless. As Linklater's first non-English film, Nouvelle Vague feels like a film fanatic has staged and animated decades' worth of behind-the-scenes anecdotes - genuine and apocryphal alike - to show a turning point for cinema as the Texan director imagines it: lively and collaborative, tetchy and confounding, an amusing slew of rules broken and manifesto points declared.

Please don't. Your colleagues have already done so. I have an opinion on the matter, but it's trivial. I'm a filmmaker, not a political scientist. As a citizen, he continues, I'm concerned about the deterioration of our democracies, but I have nothing substantial to add about that individual. I trust that Trump will leave sooner or later and that another president will come along to try to fix what he's broken. That's all I can say, he shrugs. So, let's talk about film instead.

I was a struggling filmmaker. I was trying to find myself and it wasn't happening. I was ready to give up on filmmaking as I was about to turn 30. I didn't feel like I could do this to myself, my family and friends any longer. I was living in South Austin making the minimum amount of money, eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and making bad art. But then Sundance gave me my career with this $3 short film that we submitted to the festival on a lark.

George Lucas should have died. It was 1962; the 17-year-old had just crashed his yellow Autobianchi convertible into a walnut tree, in Modesto, California. The car rolled, bounced and came to rest - it was "beyond mangled, flipped upside down and twisted like a crushed Coke can against the tree". When the teenager woke in hospital two weeks later, his heart having nearly stopped, he had a new philosophy: "Maybe there's a reason I survived this accident that nobody should have survived."

Starring Brad Pitt as the titular Cliff Booth along with Elizabeth Debicki, Scott Caan, Carla Gugino, and more, the trailer depicts Booth after the events of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. "So you helped rick subdue those hippie intruders, huh?," he's asked before replying "Something like that." The teaser then shows various scenes and scenarios from the film, but with minimal dialogue; though each time a character cusses or flips someone off, it's bleeped and censored.

Sam Raimi is one of Hollywood's finest purveyors of junk. I say this with love and reverence, and with full acknowledgment that he's the man behind such masterpieces as Evil Dead II and A Simple Plan. But the director has spent decades digging for gold amid pulpier genres, turning out oddball horror, thriller, and comic-book movies. As his career went on, Raimi graduated to making blockbuster versions of junk, including the first Spider-Man trilogy and, most recently, a Doctor Strange sequel for Marvel.

10 Cloverfield Lane Mary Elizabeth Winstead, John Goodman and John Gallagher Jr are locked in an underground bunker for the majority of this left-field sequel to Cloverfield, with thrilling results. In the film's final throes, Winstead's character exits the bunker, and finds that her captor was telling the truth about an alien invasion above - a twist that completely and ruinously dissipates the hard-earned tension that came before.