Editor’s note: This review was originally published as part of our SXSW 2011 coverage on March 15, 2011. But, just like another stand-out horror flick from that festival (look down!), we’re bumping this baby back up to remind all of you dear readers that the film is finally hitting limited theaters this Friday, February 3. Some films send their characters to hell and back, but few do so with the genre-bending, mind-fucking intensity of Kill List. Equal parts drama, thriller, and horror, the movie takes both characters and viewers on a hellish descent down the bloody rabbit hole with stops along the way for mystery, murder, and flesh-busting madness. Jay (Neil Maskell) has been out of work for eight months, and his wife Shel (MyAnna Buring) is not about to let him forget it. They fight constantly about finances pausing periodically to assure their young son that mommy and daddy still love each other before returning to the fray. Jay’s friend Gal (Michael Smiley) comes over for dinner along with his new girlfriend, Fiona (Emma Fryer), and the four spend a raucous night of laughs and alcohol punctuated with an ugly and awkward outburst between the feuding couple.

Editor’s note: This review was originally published as part of our SXSW 2011 coverage on March 17, 2011. We’re bumping this baby back up to remind all of you dear readers that the film is finally hitting limited theaters this Friday, February 3. Claire (Sara Paxton) and Luke (Pat Healy) do not have what you might call glamorous jobs. They manage the front desk at the oldest hotel in town that just happens to be closing its doors forever. These unflappable, amateur paranormal investigators decide that their last hurrah will involve drinking beer and capturing definitive proof that this tiny little inn is indeed haunted. But when a washed up actress-turned psychic checks into the hotel, she becomes convinced that the novel little pastime these two share may end up being their undoing. I don’t know, I’ve had worse jobs. I really enjoyed The Innkeepers. It’s a very basic horror film that actually benefits as much from its comedic elements as it does its frights. The crux of the film is the relationship between Sara Paxton and Pat Healy who play the desk clerks at the failed Yankee Peddler Inn. I had a blast with these two wannabe ghost hunters. Their dry back-and-forth fosters some fantastic laughs. The dialogue batted between them is very genuine which is both a compliment and a criticism; it’s genuine to a fault. Occasionally, though not often, the lines ring true but un-cinematic in a way that makes them flat and dull. It’s a strange [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

Lots of great stuff comes from Great Britain. Fish and chips, the Beatles, history, and the basis for all American television are but a few of the treasures that we’ve looked on with jealousy…and then shamelessly imported. Of course, movies and horror in particular are no exception, but perhaps one of the greatest things that the British perfected was the horror anthology. Amicus made a name for themselves with great anthology films like Tales from the Crypt, From Beyond the Grave and Asylum, films that starred fine British actors like Peter Cushing and Donald Pleasance. Taking a page from the past, three crazy directors have banded together to produce a new British anthology film, Little Deaths. It opens with Sean Hogan’s story entitled House & Home. Richard and Victoria are a typical couple, solidly upper middle class, maybe even more well to do than that. It’s clear from the get go that Victoria is in control of the relationship, but it’s also clear that something not quite right is going on. Richard’s been more or less stalking a young homeless girl, and finally approaches her posing as a Christian interested in her well-being. He invites her home for dinner. The couple drugs her wine and, after she bathes, make small talk until she passes out. She wakes naked and bound to a bed with a gag in her mouth. Richard and Victoria prepare to have their way with her, but they’re in for a big surprise themselves.

 Director Tom McCarthy is back with his third feature film, following the incredibly well received and reviewed films The Station Agent and The Visitor. I’m ashamed to say I’ve seen neither, but based on reactions from trusted colleagues, I have no doubt they are both great films. Unfortunately, Win Win didn’t bowl me over. It’s a fine film that has a good deal of warmth and charm, but it just doesn’t cross that line from good to great. Mike Flaherty (Paul Giamatti) is a typical family man. He has a nice home, a loving wife, and a few adorable kids. He spends his time working in a private law practice and coaching the local high school wrestling team. But lately the work has gone from steady flow to trickle. The office needs a new furnace, the kids need food and clothes and the mortgage isn’t going anywhere, but the money is starting to dry up. Mike reaches his breaking point, unable to tell his wife Jackie (Amy Ryan) about the financial troubles and admit to what he sees as a failure as the provider, and decides to take advantage of a situation with an elderly client. Leo Poplar (Burt Young) has been deemed incapacitated by the court and despite his strong desire to stay in his own home, he’s going to have to be moved to an assisted living facility. Leo has no family to speak of, only a daughter he hasn’t spoken to or heard from in years. [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

The thought of an indie film about a struggling guitar player teaming up with a C-list TV star may inspire cringes in potential viewers. It certainly sounds like a festival film you’ve already seen. Did I mention that the guitar player was quietly pining for his ex to fill the emotional heartache quota? And that the film is shot in black and white? Despite what these revelations may do to your preconceived notions, Surrogate Valentine is a genuinely funny and enjoyable film that transcends these indie film cliches. The aforementioned guitar player is Goh, co-writer Goh Nakamura essentially playing himself in the lead role. He’s a musician trying his best to make it, teaching guitar lessons and playing shows all along the West coast, but particularly trying to make a dent in the Seattle music scene. When his friend Amy (Joy Osmanski) offers him a paid gig teaching a TV star how to play guitar for her indie film, which is kinda sorta based on Goh and his relationship with Rachel (Lynn Chen), who he still has feelings for, he reluctantly agrees, dragging Danny Turner (Chadd Stoops) along with him on a road trip to Seattle.

If you don’t know who Duncan Jones is, it’s high time you learn. Jones burst onto the movie scene with his debut feature Moon, a low-budget sci-fi flick that wowed audiences at Sundance back in 2009. Picked up by Sony for US distribution, Moon is a subtle, quiet film featuring an incredible performance from Sam Rockwell, but the best part about it is that it’s a smart film. With the bright shiny colors and backseat plot propelling Avatar to eleventy billion dollars worldwide, it’s surprising that anyone rolled the dice on a small, smart sci-fi film. It’s refreshing that someone had the balls to say “yes” and doubly refreshing that audiences mostly embraced it. Now Jones is back at the helm with about 35 million of Summit’s hard-earned Twilight dollars to play with for his second feature, Source Code. Note: I saw Source Code blind and I think that’s a good way to see this type of film. I’m told the trailer gives away basically the same information that I’ll reveal below but it could be considered spoiler-y. If you’d rather go into not knowing anything, and I highly recommend that method of film-viewing, then please skip the next three paragraphs.

Film festivals always seem to end up with a few paint by numbers indie films. Throw in an angsty 30-something unhappy with his life, an awkward relationship with a cute girl and a few gay characters and you have Beginners, or any number of other quirky indie dramedies you might have seen. Despite a pretty stellar cast including Ewan McGregor, Christopher Plummer and Melanie Laurent, Mike Mills’s movie is a bland and pretentious film that doesn’t add up to much. The film focuses primarily on McGregor’s Oliver, the aforementioned angsty 30-something who’s been thrown into a bit of an existential crisis by the last few years of his father’s life. After the death of his mother, his father Hal finally has the courage to tell Oliver that he’s gay and has been his whole life. With no one to embarrass or disappoint with his true self, Hal lives his remaining few years out in the open enjoying and celebrating who he is, dating a much younger man while organizing parties and pride marches and letter writing campaigns to right wing politicians. But eventually Hal succumbs to the cancer that has riddled his body and the party is over. The film begins with Oliver cleaning out his father’s stuff after his death, but a good portion of the story takes place in flashbacks showing Hal’s last few years as well as some of Oliver’s childhood and his relationship with his mother.

Ah snap! You just stepped into The FP! This is the place where pride is measured by street cred and scores are settled in the ultimate competition: The Revelation. When the greatest competitors around, the guys from the 248, decide to accept the challenge of those dastardly 245’ers, everyone expects the 248 to arise victorious. The champion of the 248, BTRO (Brandon Barrera), arrives ready for battle and fully prepared to take down the evil leader of the 245: L Dubba E (Lee Valmassy). He brings along his brother, and protégée, JTRO (Jason Trost) to take down another 245 soldier in an opening bout; which he does with ease. But in a nasty turn of events, L Dubba E beats BTRO so savagely in the tournament that he ends up dead. With his hero slain, JTRO vows never to compete again and leaves the FP. Months later, an old friend catches up with JTRO and beseeches him to return home; enlightening him on the sad state of affairs in the FP since JTRO’s retreat. Begrudgingly, JTRO returns to the FP and tries to rebuild his life piece by piece.

How would you prepare for the end of the world? Or, better yet…how would you prepare for the post-apocalypse? The day when the world is dust, the population is ravished, the landscapes are deserts, and the road is everywhere and everything. Basically, the world is Australia. How would you prepare? How could you?

You can cower in a corner at the thought, or you can be like Woodrow and Aiden and devote your adult life to building flamethrowers and finding ways to inject your muscle car with steroids so that you can rule the land, run the gamut, and in the meantime while you wait for the end of the world you can ride around in a vehicle built for pure testosterone and testicles.

Problems arise, though, when Woodrow and Aiden’s plans for building their car of destruction are interrupted by Woodrow’s encounter leading to relationship with Milly. The relationship itself doesn’t supply the complications so much as the complications that develop within the romance causing a drastic change in character for the unassuming nice guy Woodrow. Infidelity leads to depression, depression leads to anger, anger leads to places people shouldn’t go and all of a sudden the vehicle built to represent them in a future apocalypse becomes a symbol of Woodrow’s progression/regression from sensitive to pained callousness.

Jake Gyllenhaal last foray into the action lead world wasn’t exactly a successful one. If you don’t know which film I’m referring to, it was the one where he had that interesting accent and played a prince of Persia. Still don’t recall that film? Understandable. But a year after seeing it, you may actually still remember director Duncan Jones’s Source Code and the lead hero of the film, Colter Stevens. Gyllenhaal is a charming guy. He’s the type of person you could throw a stupid question at who would give you back an interesting or, at the very least, a funny answer. Gyllenhaal rarely gets to show these charms on the big screen, which is a shame, but Duncan Jones smartly allows him to. Gyllenhaal’s Colter Stevens is the type of leading man all us nerds like: he’s brash, witty, vulnerable, and even acts like a jerk at times. During a recent roundtable interview at SXSW we discussed what type of hero Colter is, Duncan Jones’s style, the script, the ending, and what’s going on with Nailed. There are a few spoilers, but they’re all clearly labeled and skippable:

Mike Mills‘s latest film, Beginners, bares many similarities to his directorial debut, Thumbsucker. Both films are personal tales from the acclaimed filmmaker, they cover similar thematics, and are honest and, somewhat, dark stories told in a heightened manner. That style is mostly due to, as Mills claims, his art background. Nearly every frame in Beginners feels precise and beautifully composed. The auteur director has a style of his own, despite all the inspirations he mentions in our chat. Woody Allen is definitely the clearest influence, but this is the type of film that even Allen himself hasn’t made in quite some time. Here’s what director Mike Mills had to say about losing a father, finding financing, and creating art.

When it was announced that the newest film from eighteen-year-old director Emily Hagins, entitled My Sucky Teen Romance, was going to premiere at SxSW, I was ecstatic. Almost every member of our SXSW coverage team either lives or has previously lived in Austin and knows Emily personally. Hell, some of us even donated our time to assist in the movie’s completion. That made it slightly difficult to lend our voices to reviewing the film. So do we decline to review it? Do we expend no words on it at all? Yes…and no. There is a story here, and a damn good one at that, completely divorced from the film itself. Emily’s story. Hagins wrote her first feature-length film, Pathogen, at age 11.  The next year, she earned a grant from the Austin Film Society to produce Pathogen, effectively becoming the youngest recipient of that award. Her tireless dedication to making her first feature film, and the fact that she wasn’t even in high school yet, attracted the attention of a trio of documentary filmmakers who noticed Hagins’s casting call posted on a local website called Austinactors.net. They crafted their 2009 film Zombie Girl: The Movie around her efforts. Between 7th and 8th grade, when the biggest thing that happened to most of us was getting our first kiss at a skating party, she was hard at work on The Retelling, her second feature. And now, here at SXSW 2011, Hagins’s third film played to bright marquee lights and packed houses [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

Detention appears to be built from the ground up as a movie whose detractors will inevitably be told that they “just don’t get it.” A hyper-stylized, post-modern teen slasher of sorts, the movie mixes an incredibly self-aware attitude with onscreen text and graphics, a shattered fourth wall, a confused mash-up of 80s and 90s homage, time travel, suspected bestiality, Hoobastank, suicide bombers, Fraggle Rock, and more. It also claims to be a comedy.

If there must be one film to be labeled as the true winner of this year’s SXSW, it’s without a doubt Joe Cornish‘s feature debut film, Attack the Block. The comedic chase film is by all accounts a universally loved film here at the festival, and for good reason. The story follows a group of hooligans from the projects fighting off an alien invasion, and what could be cooler than that? Anything? No? Thought so. If you need further proof as to why the film is so beloved, then check out Brian Salisbury’s excellent review to discover why it is truly the bee’s knees. Very few films this year will contain half the energy and style that Attack the Block has, similarly to the work of Edgar Wright, who’s an executive producer of the film. Cornish’s Attack the Block and Edgar Wright’s work have such a specific energy to them that it’s difficult to imagine how they crack that pace and feel in script form, and that’s what we discussed amongst other things in our pleasant 15-minute conversation.

Welcome back to Junkfood Cinema; I am not Banksy. But like that ninja/superhero street artist, I appear from nowhere and deface your perfectly good internet walls with my tasteless taste in movies. I will eviscerate history’s most problem-laden cinematic missteps before circumventing any notions of a favorable reputation by singing the film’s dubious praises. To drive the proverbial nail into the coffin, and into your aorta, I will then pair the movie with an appropriate junk food selection to ruin your swimsuit season. South by Southwest is a film festival that carries with it a debauchery only outdone by the Mos Eisley-level of scum and villainy that is Fantastic Fest. With the daunting schedule of pounding beers, drinking lager in line for various films, and taking a break from running from venue to venue with an ice cold brew, it can be really hard to grant the same level of attention and diligence to one’s weekly features that one normally does. But luckily for me, the Ain’t It Cool News secret screening during SxSW provided the perfect fodder for this week’s column. This week’s snack: Dragonslayer.

Ten minutes in to Jodie Foster’s The Beaver, you may forget that you’re watching Mel Gibson. In light of all the things that have happened to Gibson off-screen, this is probably a good thing. But more importantly, it is something that any actor sets out to accomplish in every role they play: total immersion. It’s that immersion that makes this one of Gibson’s best performances to date. Could it be the best performance we’ve ever seen from him? That’s for history to decide. But this one is damn good. And it’s made better by the well-crafted film that surrounds him.

Pee-wee Herman and hipsters were not topics of discussions I was looking to tackle with Michelle Monaghan. Knowing I only had 10-minutes with Monaghan, I wanted to make every second count… so obviously, discussing how hipster infested Austin is and how I just had a run in with Pee-wee ‘frickin’ Herman before the interview probably were somewhat of sidetracks, and so was some nice small talk at the beginning. As for Source Code, it’s a tricky film to discuss. To fully delve into the film and its ideas, one most go into spoiler territory to get a fully meaty convo about the film, so beware of one or two spoiler alerts. But mainly, Monaghan and I briefly discuss Jake Gyllenhaal’s grey area and likable hero, attempting to grasp unique ideas in script form, and the questions the film raises. 

Attack the Block needs subtitles for an American release. That’s the divisive concept that has caused me to lose hours of time to Twitter this morning. Everyone with an emotional stake in the matter — from the purists who say that a movie should be released unaltered to those who love the movie so dearly that they’d accept (almost) any solution that would get it out there in front of American audiences — has an opinion about the matter. And the truth is that Attack the Block doesn’t need subtitles. But distributors think it might. Traditional distributors. Which is part of the reason why this film deserves a home at Drafthouse Films. That and as Brian Salisbury explained in his review, the film is excellent. So excellent that it’s rallied passion behind its cause — people who saw it premiere in Austin at SXSW this week want one thing: for the rest of you to be able to see it.

If there’s one thing consistently more frustrating than a film being out-and-out unwatchable it’s a film on the cusp of being really good if not for something irredeemable getting in the film’s own way. All of the elements to make the vision happen are there and firing; the acting is solid to standout across the board, the non-linear structure is used well, and the writing is done well…for the most part. Where 96 Minutes loses effectiveness in intensity and diverts into frustration is in the primary catalyst for the film’s conflict. Partly the character at the center of it, but mostly our lack of significant knowledge about him that justifies him doing what he does and allowing us to connect with the motive. I gather that there’s much more to him beyond ignorance and anger at his current situation (at least I hope so), but all of that story happens over the course of the prior 16 years before the 96 minutes of time we experience.

SXSW 2011 may be coming to a close, but we’ll be sharing more interviews and reviews as the week rolls on. All of which will have barbecue stains. It’s a big night tonight. Neil is standing in line for Hobo With a Shotgun, cleverly putting his hat out and asking for money to buy a lawnmower. Rob has been lured into a vegan screening of a low-budget Asian pink film. Brian is wandering around town trying to figure out just how much he loved Attack the Block. Luke and Adam are luring people into Asian pink film screenings, and Jack hasn’t been seen since last Thursday. We’ll be earning a few awards for our coverage, no doubt, but SXSW has crowned a few winners this evening – the most awarded being the Rachel Harris comedy Natural Selection. You thought for a second they were posthumously celebrating Charles Darwin, didn’t you? Congratulations to all the winners, and to all the films at SXSW. Here are the winners as listed in the official press release: