So, we know that there is some other film awards show going on this weekend that involves statues and crimson carpets and such, but how many nominees can claim Austin as their hometown? None that we can think of, which is what makes the Film Independent's Spirit Awards a bazillion times more interesting to us than the stodgy old Oscars!...

MovieMaker Magazine has just named Austin the "Number One City to Live, Work and Make Movies". This is the seventh year in a row that Austin has placed in the top three, and the second time we've been numero uno (unseating longtime fave New York City, which slipped all the way down to #4 this year)....

Are you tired of the same old narrative structure in todays Hollywood and/or Independent Films? Thirsty for the more challenging side of cinema? We're happy to tell you that your welcome glass of avant-garde respite is about to be served up by the good folks over at the Austin Film Society. In keeping with the more artistic nature of our fair city, AFS boldly bounds into the world of the other with their new bimonthly Avant Cinema series, with the first installment Going Nowhere Slow scheduled for next Wednesday, January 30th at the Austin Studios Screening Room....

With the faith of a thousand men, Pastor Richard Gazowsky set out ten years ago on a divine mission: to make the greatest film ever made. Nevermind that the first film he ever saw was The Lion King, at the tender age of 40. Nevermind that he had absolutely no background in directing, editing, or producing an epic so grand that it's concept was enthusiastically described as "The Ten Commandments meets Star Wars." Nevermind that his only solid source of funding was the generous tithes of his congregation at the Voice of Pentecost Church....

AFS Essentials: J’Entends Plus la GuitareTuesday, December 11thAlamo Drafthouse Downtown (320 E 6th Street)$4 / Free for AFS Members, 7pm[info]When we think of a muse, we don't typically imagine the corporeal, but rather a winged sprite, strumming a lyre, an apparition that is not of this earth and cannot be held in its confines. We also imagine that once you have found your muse, or that which turns on the flowing faucet of your......

AFS Essentials: Les Amants Réguliers Tuesday, November 27thAlamo Drafthouse Downtown (320 E 6th Street)6:15pm, $4 / Free for AFS members[info]Poor Philippe Garrel. He has made dozens of films over the last four decades, but has been mostly overlooked stateside because he didn't fit into the tidy (or not so tidy) box of French New Wave, thereby not enjoying the peripheral fame brought about by heavy hitters such as Godard, Truffaut, or Melville. In truth,......

Photo of Frantz Fanon courtesy of AFS website AFS Essentials: Black Is, Black Ain’t and Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White MaskTuesday, November 20thAlamo Drafthouse South Lamar (1120 S. Lamar)$4 / Free to AFS Members, 7PM[info] | [tickets]Most of the time it is easier to just blend in with everything around you, to not be different, to avoid rocking the proverbial boat, perhaps to the detriment of your true identity and eventually your soul. In the......

AFS Essentials Presents Black DjuTuesday, November 13thAlamo Drafthouse South Lamar (1120 S. Lamar)7pm, $4 / Free to AFS Members[info] | [tickets]It's bad enough being a stranger in a strange land, but when you need assistance from the local people to help solve the mysterious disappearance of your father, things can get downright maddening. Tonight, the Austin Film Society sends us on a suspenseful quest as they presents Black Dju, the fifth offering in the......

Boubacar Joseph Ndiaye & Youssou N’Dour at the Maison des Esclaves AFS Presents Return to GoréeTuesday, November 6thAlamo Drafthouse South Lamar (1120 S. Lamar)$4 / Free for AFS members, 7pm[info]The place where my fathers died, return to the land of Gorée, the place where my mothers cried, return to the land of Gorée. – Harmony Harmoneers We'll admit it: our jazz knowledge consists of a couple of Miles Davis and John Coltrane albums mixed with......

Sugar Cane Alley, the third offering of the current Austin Film Society series Torn From the Motherland: Films from the African Diaspora, introduces us to a young boy named Jose who has grown up in the shanty towns of Martinique. Life in his village has been poor in material possessions, but rich with lessons. He has learned about race relations through his friendship with a child of mixed ethnicity, the bastard son of the Creole......

Arthur Seaton (a young, bright Albert Finney) reminds us of ourselves--a hard working man that refuses to let the daytime sweat on his brow dictate his ability to personify something more grand in the twilight hours. (Granted our job doesn't necessarily make us "sweat" in the conventional definition, and we are actually of the female persuasion, but that's all semantics really.) He cares not what toll his rabble rousing may bring upon those around him,......

Ethan Hawke, Richard Linklater and Jesse Harris walk the red carpet at Austin Film Society's screening of "The Hottest State" Wednesday at the Paramount. Photos by Kristin B. If you can't view the Flash slideshow above, an alternate version appears after the jump.......

Fat Man and Little Boy seem like innocuous pejorative phrases, possibly used to tease other kids on the monkey bars, but when associated with a date, specifically August 6th and 9th, 1945, those words become something else altogether. No longer mere verbal darts, those words evoke images of pillars of fire and shredded skin, of a war certainly ended, but possibly not won. Wednesday night, Academy Award winning director Steven Okazaki will take you on......

One truly is the loneliest number. We prefer things in multiples: beers, potato chips, orgasms (was that taking it too far? Eh, fugetaboutit.) And we definitely enjoy the chance to experience two landmark films in one compact bundle. Tonight, the Austin Film Society presents not one, but two sensational films as part of their gritty Essential series Blokes 'n' Birds: British Realist Cinema (1958-1965). In the past several years, you may have noticed that a......

Tuesday night, the Austin Film Society presents Girl with Green Eyes, a tale of the naive-girl-in-the-big-city and the second offering in their Essential Cinema Series "Blokes 'n Birds: British Realist Cinema, 1958-1965." Rita Tushingham plays Kate, a quiet, wide-eyed rural Irish girl thrust into the hustle and bustle of metropolitan Dublin and into the bombastic presence of the worldly Baba, played by Lynn Redgrave. While Baba may have plenty of verve, she is brushed aside......

From his beginnings in youth flicks like Explorers and Dead Poets Society to his modern-day gigs with Rick Linklater and Sidney Lumet, Austin native Ethan Hawke has done his fair share of acting. Now he's jumped behind the camera to direct an adaptation of his novel The Hottest State, a story most believe is based on Hawke's 90's fling with singer Lisa Loeb. Regardless of the truth of that rumor, the story centers around......

Just a short time before George W. announced his intentions to run for King of Amurca, the New Haven-born hopeful bought a ranch in tiny Crawford, Texas. From this suitably folksy pulpit, he engineered that down-home, aw-shucks presidential campaign persona that captivated/divided the nation, and then there were those hanging chads and...well, you know the rest. Who Is Crawford Texas follows, through the eyes of the Crawford citizenry themselves, the crazy arc that accompanied two......

Go Texas Film! After a lengthy submission and selection process, the Austin Film Society has announced the recipients of the 2007 Texas Filmmakers' Production Fund. After receiving a whopping 218 applications (the most they've ever received), the AFS has awarded 21 Texas filmmakers $150,000 in cash and film stock (nearly double the amount of money awarded last year, and by far the most they've ever given away). The biggest individual grant went to June Lee,......

Next year's Olympic Games in Beijing won't be quite as explosive as Neo-Tokyo's futuristic Games. From the title character's astonishing powers to Tetsuo's astonishing rage, Akira represents a truly revolutionary advance in anime, not to mention some prescient observations about the unchecked ruthlessness of government. A ground-breaking anime film, Akira was one of the first displays of truly excellent animation. Adapted from Katsuhiro Otomo's manga series (also called Akira), the movie follows both delinquents and......

As part of their summer Global Minds, Other Worlds: Global Sci-Fi Cinema series, the Austin Film Society presents Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978). In this masterful remake of the '50s original, director Philip Kaufman confirms once and for all that soulless pod people are, truly, a mass-anxiety filmic allegory for the ages. The first Body Snatchers (1956) saw alien seeds drifting to a small California town, quietly killing off its inhabitants and hatching......

Austin, Texas: It's not exactly New England here. We don't have the Liberty Bell or historical plaques on every block explaining how the Pilgrims invented the Internet in some old tavern. But we do have history! You just have to look a little harder to find it. For instance, did you know that in Austin's oldest standing structure, the French Legation, some dude's pigs broke into the bedroom in 1841 and ate the papers and......

Slide, slide, slippity-slide, hittin' switches on the block in a '65... oh, sorry, wrong kind of voyage. Anyway, this Cosmic Voyage promises to be pretty much as rad as anything Coolio's ever done. Based on early space travel theorist Konstantin Eduardovitch Tsiolkovsky's novel Beyond the Earth, Cosmic Voyage (Kosmicheskiy reys: Fantasticheskaya novella) portrays humans in space 25 years before Yuri Gagarin's historical journey. It's presented as part of the Austin Film Society's Other Minds, Other......

Tonight, as the fifth installment in their Spaces Between Realities: the Films of Michael Haneke series, the Austin Film Society presents Code: Unknown – Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys, starring Juliette Binoche. Code: Unknown begins with a group of hearing impaired children playing a seemingly commonplace game of charades, and what is immediately apparent is that these bright young things cannot identify the emotional state that is being acted out in front of them; a......

Tonight, as part of their Spaces Between Realities: the Films of Michael Haneke series, the Austin Film Society presents Benny's Video, the chilling and controversial second installment in Haneke's "emotional glaciation" trilogy. The film follows Benny, a teenage boy whose obsession with a violent home-video ostensibly leads him to commit his own heinous act of violent destruction. But like many of Haneke's films, the most terrifying part isn't the violence itself (very little graphic violence......

Easily one of our favorite films at this year's SXSW Film Festival, indie documentary Fish Kill Flea is returning to Austin tomorrow as part of the Austin Film Society's Texas Documentary Tour series. Strange and funny and sad by turns, Fish Kill Flea is a candid, close-up portrait of a decaying mall in upstate New York that has become home to a popular flea market. But it's also a weighty, thoughtful meditation on the importance......

Okay, maybe we're not the kind of friend you'd invite to your wedding, or ask to hide a gun for you until the heat dies down. But we do try our best to keep you informed about awesome new films and film-related events—which is something your regular, non-blogger friends probably almost never do. Now that we think of it, why do you even hang out with them? Anyway, this Tuesday April 10th you'll get a......

With April 6th only a few short weeks away, we were starting to think that there would be no super-fancy Austin premiere for Grindhouse. We'd heard speculation that the film would debut at a surprise screening during South by Southwest Film, but obviously that didn't happen, so we prepared for the worst—seeing Grindhouse on its opening night in April just like the rest of the stupid non-Austin world. But in the end, Rodriguez and Tarantino......

Since moving to Austin in the early 90s to attend film school at UT, Bryan Poyser has become a fixture in the local film scene. A co-founder of the Cinematexas Film Festival, Bryan has also spent time as a producer at SXSW Film, and is currently Director of Artist Services for the Austin Film Society. And on top of all that, he makes movies. With two shorts and two features under his belt (one of......

Now in his fourth year as producer for the South By Southwest Film Festival, Matt Dentler might just be the busiest guy in the Austin film community. In addition to his year-round duties at SXSW Film, he's also a programmer for the mega-awesome Fantastic Fest, a curator for two national film distributors, an active blogger, television show host and occasional film festival panelist, judge and lecturer. And as if that weren't enough to keep him......

Tonight, as part of their Children of Abraham/Ibrahim: Films of North Africa and the Middle East series, the Austin Film Society presents Satin Rouge, Tunisian director Raja Amari’s warm, moving tale of personal triumph and reclaimed happiness. The film follows Lilia, a conservative, widowed mother struggling to come to terms with her husband’s death and frustrated by her increasingly rebellious daughter, Salma. After fainting at a belly-dancing cabaret late one night, Lilia is befriended by......