Has it Really Been 20 Years Since Toy Story?

Given the length of the lines (at least 100 people were turned away at the door) for South by Southwest’s, “Infinity & Beyond: Pixar & 20 Years Since Toy Story”  panel, many of us have a friend and clearly miss our old Buzz Lightyear and Woody the cowboy toys. But this ‘behind the scenes’ look into the Pixar films that made so many of us animation junkies was the next best thing.

SXSW 2015: A Q&A With the Director & Star of She’s The Best Thing In It

Films by women, about women, and in many ways, targeted to women were a huge part of this year’s South by Southwest festival. Women were tremendously prominent in the line-up, serving as two of the four SXSW film keynote speakers: Ava DuVernay, the noted director of Selma, and Christine Vachon, who has produced some of the most celebrated American indie features, including the Academy Award wining Boys Don’t Cry.

SXSW 2015: Andrew Bujalksi on Writing and Directing Results

Writer/director Andrew Bujalski came into this year’s SXSW having already made four well respected, funny/weird films. His 2002 debut, Funny Ha Ha, is considered the first mumblecore film, and revolves around the lives of recent college grads who try, in their own singular ways, to put off adulthood for as long as possible. The film landed on New York Times critic A.O. Scott's top ten list for the year, and put Bujalski at the very forefront of a new wave of indie films.

SXSW 2015: Selma Director Ava DuVernay’s Moving Keynote Address

In her South by Southwest keynote address, director Ava DuVernay discussed taking on one of the greatest challenges for any filmmaker; the depiction of a historical event. For DuVernay, of course, it was the challenge of making Selma, the story of Martin Luther King Jr. leading the historic, dangerous march from Selma, Ala., to Montgomery in support of African American voting rights in 1965. She accepted the project knowing she was the seventh choice for director (at various points Stephen Frears,

SXSW 2015: Alison Bechdel, Joshua Openheimer & Maria Hinojosa talk Storytelling

Maria Hinojosa, the executive producer and anchor of Latino USA on NPR, led a discussion between two leading lights in their respective fields; graphic memoirist Alison Bechdel and documentarian Joshua Oppenheimer. Bechdel’s last two works, the groundbreaking “Fun Home,” about her childhood and, more specifically, her closeted father, and “Are You My Mother?” which explores her relationship with her mother through the prism of psychoanalytic theory. Oppenheimer’s last two films, The Act of Killing (2012) and his latest,

SXSW 2015: Honeytrap Writer/Director Rebecca Johnson

In America we call them projects, and they’ve been the locus of many crucial, incredible films, quiet a few from Spike Lee, including Do the Right Thing and Clockers. They’re called favelas in Brazil, the setting for the Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund’s explosive City of God, while in Britain they’re called estates. These are places where large groups of lower income families and individuals, often minorities, are grouped together in sprwling,

SXSW 2015 Preview: Women to Watch

The programming at SXSW has become more robust each and every year. Part of the appeal of the festival's selections is the wide representation of female filmmakers, who have produced an especially rich mix of films for this year's slate.There are far too many filmmakers to chose from, so here's just a very quick peek at some of these talented women and the projects they've brought down to Austin.

Hannah Fidell 6 Years

Hannah Fidell is back after winning the Chicken and Egg award here in 2013 for her film A Teacher.

SXSW 2015 Preview: Hot Docs

We’re back in Austin for the SXSW film festival, and holy hell there’s a lot of stuff to see and do. The festival officially kicks off this Friday with the documentary Brand: A Second Coming, director Ondi Timoner’s profile of the comedian/author/activist Russell Brand’s evolution from hard charging bon vivant to political disruptor and revolutionary who has his own YouTube channel devoted to delivering subscribers the ‘Trews’ (true news).

Brand’s brand of verbosity and high energy is a fitting way to launch a festival with 100 world premieres,

Bert Marcus on his Knockout Documentary Champs

As star-studded as the front row of any primetime heavyweight fight, the boxing doc Champs calls on A-listers from Mark Wahlberg and Ron Howard to Denzel Washington and Mary J. Blige to weigh in on one of the most brutal sports in history. Beautifully shot reenactments and first-hand stories are interspersed with real footage of some of the most famous brawls of all-time, making for a riveting ride. But this isn't just any sports documentary —

The Return of Cinderella

Disney’s original animated Cinderella, an inescapable fact of most Western childhoods, won the Golden Bear in the musical film category at the very first Berlinale in 1951. A live-action contemporary version, nearly singing-free and also produced under Disney’s auspices, premiered at the most recent Berlinale, some 64-years after the original. Directed by Kenneth Branagh and starring Lily James (best known as Rose in Downton Abbey) in the titular role,

Director Michele Josue’s Matt Shepard is A Friend of Mine

The documentary Matt Shepard is A Friend of Mine puts a human face on the young man who paid the ultimate price for homophobia. Michele Josue’s accomplished debut film — poignant, revealing, powerful in its anger, grief and humanity — reminds us 15 years later what his friends, family and the world lost when Shepard was beaten to death in a notorious hate crime.

“There was a long list of motivations for me to make this film,”

Director Henry Corra on his Heartbreaking, Beautiful Farewell to Hollywood

When director Henry Corra met aspiring young filmmaker Regina Nicholson at a film festival, neither knew they would be embarking on a journey that would become literally about life and death.

The result of their collaboration is Farewell to Hollywood: The Life and Death of Reggie Nicholson, an intimate documentary that emerges as a powerful portrait of the spunky Nicholson as she goes through cancer treatment and estrangement from her parents to realizing her dream of making a personal,

Director Niki Caro Finds her Place in McFarland, USA

Niki Caro is one of the more astute, thoughtful directors working today. Whether she’s adapting a novel about a peasant winemaker in 19th century France (A Heavenly Vintage, 2009), or fictionalizing the account of the first major successful sexual harassment case in the U.S. (North Country, 2005), Caro’s ability to get inside the lives of very different people and to contextualize their plights with just the right amount (and the exactly right kind) of detail is obvious to anyone who watches her films.

Oscar-Nominee Richard Linklater on Playing With Time in Boyhood

There are few filmmakers who have the dedication and patience of Richard Linklater. Boyhood proved that. For those of you who might just be emerging from a cinematic hibernation, here is what you missed; for twelve years, the writer/director returned to the same actors and script to chronicle the fictional story of a boy growing up in Texas. Little-known actor Ellar Coltrane was hired over a decade ago, at the age of six,

Berlinale 2015: Christian Bale & Natalie Portman Discuss Knight of Cups

Watching Terence Malick’s Knight of Cups, set in a glowing, static Los Angeles, was reminiscent of the summation of my father’s arguments against me going to college there — there’s just no there, there. Rick (Christian Bale), a peaking screenwriter, wondering how he arrived exactly where he wanted to be, wanders the city and the nearby desert, passing through condos and mansions and decadent fêtes. This metaphorical prince — he is such because the narration at the beginning of the movie tells us so —

Berlinale 2015: A Q&A With The Filmmakers & Star of Koza

A bleak, beautiful entry from Slovakia in the year’s Berlinale, Koza starts off slow and static and stays that way, even as worlds heap themselves on the titular main character. An uncommon blend of reality and fiction, the film stars the real life Koza, birth name Peter Baláž, more or less as himself. The Roma boxer competed in the 1996 Atlanta Olympic games for Slovakia, returned home, and over the ensuing years, slipped back into the chronic poverty that’s typical of what many Roma face across Europe.

Berlinale 2015: Werner Herzog’s Queen of the Desert

Werner Herzog’s portrait of Gertrude Bell (Nicole Kidman), the early 20th century British adventurer who was instrumental in creating the boundaries of much of the modern Middle East in Queen of the Desert , omits her real-life role as a clandestine intelligence agent for the British Empire to explore her interior life, as Herzog put it. In Herzog’s version of events, Kidman’s luminous, head-scarf wearing Bell swears up and down to trusting sheiks that she is not a spy —

Berlinale 2015: Jack Pettibone Riccobono’s Phenomenal The Seventh Fire

The first time the director Jack Pettibone Riccobono filmed the Ojibwe tribe at northern Minnesota’s White Earth Indian Reservation, it was to document the tribe’s efforts to preserve their local wild rice, considered sacred for centuries. Riccobono returned to the reservation in 2010 to show the short documentary about their efforts, The Sacred Food, but also to find someone to talk to him about a different, quietly growing problem at the reservation.

Berlinale 2015: Isabel Coixet’s Nobody Wants the Night

The 65th Berlinale opening film is a female-led, stressful adventure movie, set around a snowy, ill-fated journey loosely based on the memoirs of Josephine Peary, wife to Robert Peary, who aggressively, inaccurately claimed to be the first man to reach the North Pole in 1909. Director Isabel Coixet’s Nadie Quiere La Noche/Nobody Wants the Night is a tribute to Josephine’s singleminded journey through godforsaken northern hinterlands to be as close as possible to her husband as he (thinks he) achieves his incredible goal.

A Q&A With Writer, Director & Actress Desiree Akhavan, New Girls Cast Member

Since her feature film debut, Appropriate Behavior, premiered at Sundance in 2014, Desiree Akhavan — the film's 30-year-old writer, director, and star — has been garnering buzz as the "Next Lena Dunham." It's a click-bait headline that grabs eyeballs, for sure, but it's also a lazy person's way of saying that she's an intelligent, funny, moral and sexual boundary-pushing, talented filmmaker who also happens to be a young woman who writes, directs and stars in her own stuff.