'Best Summer Ever': Film Review | SXSW 2021

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critically-acclaimed film opens the 13th Annual ReelAbilities Film Festival running virtually through May 5 - according to THR. The 43-year-old Oscar nominee and the 50-year-old Golden Globe nominee portray a TV reporter and her cameraman in Best Summer Ever.

The ReelAbilities Film Festival is set to open with Michael Parks Randa and Lauren Smitelli’s inclusive musical romancer Best Summer Ever, executive produced by Maggie Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ted Danson, Amy Brenneman, and Mary Steenburgen. Gyllenhaal, Sarsgaard and Benjamin Bratt have cameo roles in the feature shot with a fully integrated cast and crew of people with and without disabilities and which bowed at SXSW.

“Together Together” seems like a film you could easily put in the rom-com genre, based on its premise alone. But as seen in the trailer, this film is much different than you would initially think.

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle EditorThis year’s Outfest Fusion QTBIPOC Film Festival will include 10 feature and 41 short films.Among the feature titles are “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” “Caught,” “Crystal Diaries,” “Chosen Fam,” “Forgotten Roads,” “Kapana,” “Ma Belle, My Beauty,” “Nowhere,” “See You Then,” “Summertime” and “Unapologetic.”The shorts include “Mariam,” about a young Arab American amateur drag queen, and “God’s Daughter Dances,” the story of a trans woman in South

“America has demonstrated its greatness time and time and time again,” proclaims ACLU attorney Jeffery Robinson from a stage early in the new documentary Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America, “and America is one of the most racist countries on the face of this earth.” When he continues, “those two things are not mutually exclusive,” the audience erupts in applause.

In the fall of 2015, a 16-year-old girl named Shakara was removed from her math class by school officer Ben Fields with such force that footage of the incident went viral. “Are you gonna come with me, or am I gonna make you?” asks Fields in a video, before flipping over Shakara’s desk with her in it, landing the teenager on her back with the desk overturned above her.

When we began lockdown a year ago, a popular meme went around informing people that William Shakespeare wrote King Lear while isolating amid the bubonic plague. As weeks and months went by, the meme was repurposed to compare writing King Lear to learning to bake bread orto putting on pants in the morning.

The way profound grief can become a path leading to belief in reincarnation and other supernatural phenomena forms the thematic tarmac for SXSW competitor Here Before. This wintery, unsettling drama, flecked with horror tropes in the tradition of Don't Look Now, Birth and other British-made meditations on loss, marks a distinctive and impressive debut for writer-director Stacey Gregg, who has worked mostly in British and Irish theater as well as writing episodes for TV shows such as Riviera.

Freestyle Digital Media has acquired North American rights to Michael Parks Randa and Lauren Smitelli’s inclusive musical romanceBest Summer Ever after a SXSW festival premiere. Maggie Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard and Benjamin Bratt have cameo roles in the feature shot with a fully integrated cast and crew of people with and without disabilities.

In a memorable episode of Seinfeld, George Costanza decides to change his life by doing the opposite of what he usually does in his daily decision-making. That same existential experiment drives Violet, although without the intended laughs.

Like swapping out your old Nokia flip-phone for a Huawei P40 with 5G capabilities, NASA will soon be sending a telescope into space that will make the Hubble, which has been in service since 1990, look like a remnant from a more primitive time.

Henry Lawson's 1892 short story The Drover's Wife is a beloved classic from Australia's pioneering past. But like most colonial literature, it marginalizes the people of the First Nations, generally depicted as scoundrels or savages.

In a screen-acting career spanning countless cult films and trash classics over more than half a century, Udo Kier has created no shortage of memorably campy moments.

Prolific Welsh TV director Lee Haven Jones makes a confident move into features with The Feast, a slow-burn morality tale in which a smug politician and his family get an unforgiving lesson on the consequences of turning their backs on pastoral tradition in favor of greed. Solemn to a fault, right down to the baroque religiosity of Vivaldi during both the prelude and aftermath of carnage, this is a glowering mood piece that could have had a little more fun with its thinly drawn characters.

That the documentary United States vs. Reality Winner achieves its primary goals makes it a fairly successful film.

Walking viewers through one of the most unlikely careers in recent movie history, Clerk finds one of Kevin Smith's longtime collaborators interviewing practically everyone in the writer/director/podcaster/raconteur/etc's orbit. It's a beat-by-beat chronology in which even shameful entries on the filmography (Cop Out, Yoga Hosers) get at least a mention, and where others are remembered perhaps too fondly.

With his second solo album, Tom Petty wanted to step away from the Heartbreakers, his band of musical brothers for almost 20 years at the time. The beautiful paradox is that, player by player, the people with whom he chose to record Wildflowers turned out to be those very same musicians (the exception being a new drummer, Steve Ferrone, who would go on to become a full-fledged Heartbreaker of long standing).

It's a horrendous sign of the times that the school shooting is already a well-traveled movie trope. Many films, among them Elephant, And Then I Go and We Need to Talk About Kevin, have explored the (male) killers' alienation from family and peers, and the lead-up to their attacks.