SXSW 2018: news, films, panels, and activations from Austin, Texas’ multimedia festival – The Verge

What Keeps You Alive shows the importance of art in horror films

2018-08-24T13:20:18-04:00

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review was originally posted after the film's world premiere at the 2018 SXSW Interactive Festival. It has been updated for the film's release.

It's often better to go into films completely blind, without watching trailers, reading lead-up features, or engaging in the internet's seemingly bottomless appetite for baseless speculation. Letting a movie exist on its own terms, rather than the terms anticipation and spoilers have set up for it, is usually the best way to experience it. But the one exception to the rule …

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Elizabeth Harvest is a high-tech, twist-packed take on the Bluebeard myth

2018-08-21T14:32:44-04:00

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review was originally published from the 2018 SXSW Interactive Festival. It has been updated for the film's wide release.

Anybody who knows their folklore is going to be pretty clear on what's going on in the first act of Sebastian Gutierrez's Elizabeth Harvest. Henry (Ciarán Hinds), a wealthy, successful Nobel-winner, has just married wide-eyed, naïve young Elizabeth (Abbey Lee). Taking her on a tour of his luxurious home, he tells her there's just one room she must never enter. Shortly thereafter, while he's awa …

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Unfriended: Dark Web is clever, dour, and punishing

2018-07-21T21:35:34-04:00

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review was originally posted after the film's premiere at the 2018 SXSW Film Festival. It has been updated to reflect the film's HBO release.

The midnight premiere of an Unfriended: Dark Web at SXSW was somewhat of a botched surprise reveal. At the time, it was still an untitled feature being promoted by Jason Blum, founder of the Blumhouse studio, and producer of the Oscar winner Get Out and essentially every lauded horror movie of the last five years. But many horror fans had already guessed on Twitter that the …

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A Quiet Place is a creepy horror film set in an oppressively silent world

2018-04-05T12:45:18-04:00

After the premiere of A Quiet Place at SXSW, the film's director, John Krasinski, explained that he picked up the script after a simple pitch: "What if it's a family, and they can't make noise, and you have to figure out why?" This explanation goes a long way toward illustrating A Quiet Place's goals. The film hits all the necessary beats for a straightforward horror film in an eerie post-apocalyptic setting. But it's more effective as a portrait of a family that's constructed a deceptively peaceful life under the constant, inescapable threat of death.

A Quiet Place is open about its premise, but sparing with the details. In the very near f …

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Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One improves immensely on the book

2018-03-30T12:36:31-04:00

Fans tend to either love or hate Ernest Cline's bestselling 2011 novel Ready Player One. There are legitimate reasons for both reactions. On the love side: it's a light, airy pop confection, crammed with familiar cultural references, which Cline recontextualizes in surprising ways. On the hate side: the prose can be extremely clumsy, as it is in this paragraph where teenage protagonist Wade Watts describes the virtual car he constructed for himself in the vast online world where he spends most of his waking hours:

The DeLorean came outfitted with a (nonfunctioning) flux capacitor, but I'd made several additions to its equipment and appearan …

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How a creative think tank in Austin is developing a new generation of interactive storytellers

2018-03-28T14:31:22-04:00

In the world of immersive entertainment, high-end activations like HBO's sprawling, real-world re-creation of Westworld or Disney's upcoming Star Wars expansion lands get most of the attention. But at this year's South by Southwest, one of the most exciting and forward-thinking pieces of immersive work wasn't there to promote a movie or TV show. It was an interactive story experience called OpenMind, which played out in hotel rooms, office buildings, and public locations across Austin, Texas, over a period of four days.

OpenMind told the story of a protagonist - in this case, me - leaping between two parallel dimensions, tasked with stoppin …

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A day in real-life Westworld from a host’s perspective

2018-03-26T15:45:19-04:00

At 2018's South By Southwest Conference, HBO and the marketing agency Giant Spoon created an epic promotion for Westworld, HBO's series about a far-future Old West theme park where the rich elite play out their fantasies of heroism and villainy. Giant Spoon significantly rebuilt Texas' existing J. Lorraine Ghost Town as a two-acre, real-life version of Sweetwater, a small Westworld town packed with plot hooks for visitors. They populated it with more than 60 costumed actors playing "hosts," realistic humanoid robots that play a significant part in the Westworld story. Our SXSW culture team visited Sweetwater, and in these three linked articl …

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I ruined my trip to Westworld by treating it like a video game

2018-03-26T15:44:46-04:00

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The best part of real-life Westworld was learning what people want from Westworld

2018-03-26T15:42:09-04:00

At 2018's South By Southwest Conference, HBO and the marketing agency Giant Spoon created an epic promotion for Westworld, HBO's series about a far-future Old West theme park where the rich elite play out their fantasies of heroism and villainy. Giant Spoon significantly rebuilt Texas' existing J. Lorraine Ghost Town as a two-acre, real-life version of Sweetwater, a small Westworld town packed with plot hooks for visitors. They populated it with more than 60 costumed actors playing "hosts," realistic humanoid robots that play a significant part in the Westworld story. Our SXSW culture team visited Sweetwater, and in these three linked articl …

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This year’s SXSW was all about blockchain dreamers, cryptocurrency scammers, and everything in between

2018-03-16T15:22:16-04:00

Arriving roughly one hour into a full-day blockchain-themed event called "Initial Taco Offering," I'm greeted by a sight familiar to many attendees of Austin's South By Southwest Interactive Festival. There is a throng of badge-wearing, drink-craving conference goers - and there are free tacos.

The event, a play on the initial coin offerings that have turned digital currencies into some of the buzziest and most fraught investment opportunities on the planet, is being held at a steakhouse on Lavaca Avenue in downtown Austin. The organizers, a group called the Founders Organization, lured attendees away from more traditional sessions in the c …

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