SXSW 2019: all the news, panels, and activations – The Verge

Girl on the Third Floor is a skin-crawling horror movie about home improvement

2019-03-24T13:00:00-04:00

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special-event releases. This review comes from the 2019 SXSW Interactive Festival.

It's hard finding new ways to haunt a house. And Girl on the Third Floor, a horror film that premiered at 2019's SXSW Interactive Festival, doesn't make a point of trying. It hits the classic beats of the genre, largely established by Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House: a protagonist with a troubled past moves into a grand but dilapidated old home with a dark secret, then finds a malevolent force dredging up his personal demons.

Instead of trying to push n …

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Jordan Peele’s Us turns a political statement into unnerving horror

2019-03-22T10:47:21-04:00

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special-event releases. This review comes from the 2019 SXSW Interactive Festival. It has been updated to coincide with the film's theatrical release.

When Jordan Peele's directorial debut Get Out hit screens in 2017, it was a revelation. Peele was known as an incisive comedian from his racially frank, wide-ranging sketch show Key and Peele, but nothing in his history suggested he had such a talent for crafting mesmerizing horror stories. Get Out is a startling, frightening film, but it's also meticulously crafted to make the audience politically a …

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Why the alien-occupation drama Captive State isn’t a Trump film

2019-03-14T15:07:21-04:00

2011's Rise of the Planet of the Apes was an intriguing surprise. At first blush, it looked like yet another tired franchise reboot, but it played out more like a personal drama than an ape-centric action movie, and it led up to a thrilling climax that set the scene for further enjoyable Apes films. It's difficult not to see Captive State, the latest feature from Rise director Rupert Wyatt, as closely related. It's also a surprisingly subdued insurrection movie, a science-fiction feature about revolution and resistance that defies genre expectations and focuses more on a personal story than on big action beats.

Ashton Sanders stars as Gabri …

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I See You is a beautifully crafted puzzle of a horror movie

2019-03-14T10:00:00-04:00

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special-event releases. This review comes from the 2019 SXSW Interactive Festival.

There's a striking tradition of kid-disappearance movies where a traumatized parent tries to convince authorities that something has happened to their child, but evidence suggests that there was never a child in the first place. A subset of the "Who's crazy here?" mystery, which plays with the audience's sense of reality and understanding of a situation, movies like Bunny Lake is Missing, Flightplan, and The Forgotten rely on the audience to empathize with a protagon …

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The interactive Syfy project Eleven Eleven will make you want to watch the same story six times

2019-03-13T17:19:30-04:00

When Netflix debuted Black Mirror: Bandersnatch late last year, it put a spotlight on interactive storytelling outside the traditional gaming industry. Bandersnatch's "choose your own adventure" format is one method of telling these interactive stories. For another flavor, you could try Syfy's Eleven Eleven: a virtual and augmented reality project that premiered at SXSW this week and will get a release in May.

Eleven Eleven is a series of six interlocking stories set during the last 11 minutes and 11 seconds of life on a planet called Kairos Linea, which is about to be bombed into oblivion while its corporate overlords escape to a space sta …

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Snatchers finds the horror and humor in teen pregnancy by adding a parasitic bug-monster

2019-03-13T14:38:53-04:00

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Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special-event releases. This review comes from the 2019 SXSW Interactive Festival.

There's an entire subgenre of horror cinema about the fundamentally terrifying nature of pregnancy. And countless films hinge on teenagers, especially teenage girls, inviting certain doom by having premarital sex. The horror-comedy Snatchers, which debuted at this year's SXSW, combines both tropes - then filters them through a high-school-comedy setting.

Snatchers is based on a short film and a later micro-series that premiered at Sundance in 2017, featuring the sam …

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New documentary Autonomy makes the convincing case that self-driving cars will change everything

2019-03-13T08:00:00-04:00

Autonomy, a new documentary on self-driving cars directed by Alex Horwitz and produced by Car and Driver magazine, gets its most grievous sin out of the way in the first 15 minutes. Executive producer and New Yorker writer and author Malcolm Gladwell discusses his vintage BMW, while a rotating cast of other talking heads wax poetic about the rise and fall of American car culture. As someone who doesn't own a car, or the book-deal advance to buy a vintage one, I had trouble relating.

Thankfully, the movie's nostalgic phase passes quickly. Even better, they are actually making a point. Autonomy, which had its world premiere here at SXSW in Au …

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Instagram founders say selling to Facebook didn’t reduce competition among social networks

2019-03-11T16:54:42-04:00

Talk of regulating Silicon Valley has dominated this year's SXSW festival in Austin, with Sen. Elizabeth Warren's (D-MA) pledge to break up Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook becoming a topic of conversation in almost every high-profile, tech-focused panel here.

A sit-down with Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger this afternoon was no exception. The entrepreneurs sold their company to Facebook, worked there for years, then abruptly left last September amid reported concerns over their autonomy and the future direction of the photo-sharing social network. Additionally, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg last week announced a new, …

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A cyclone of scooters has descended on Austin for SXSW, for better or worse

2019-03-11T13:41:09-04:00

Last Saturday night, for the first time in my four years of attending SXSW, I thought I was going to die. I crossed the road at the pedestrian crosswalk next to the Austin Convention Center, and four people - each traveling approximately 15 miles per hour on electric scooters - darted around me.

Not only did I not see or hear them coming - the mostly silent scooters have lights that automatically activate at night, but they can still be hard to spot in the dark - but I also had no idea what the best course of action was. I simply froze in place, standing in the middle of the street as the scooter riders whizzed by, having the time of their …

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HQ Trivia’s first live event was ruined by people who weren’t in the audience

2019-03-11T09:45:06-04:00

HQ Trivia made "quiz-tory" this week when it hosted its first live, in-person game with a $10,000 prize. Host Scott Rogowsky flew into Austin, Texas, to host the show (donned in a full HQ-branded suit) at Comcast NBCUniversal's SXSW pop-up. Prior to the start, HQ projected a one-time link to the live show on a screen, which audience members had to load in order to compete. I thought they'd bring contestants onstage to make it more of a live experience; instead, everyone played along on their phones as Rogowsky cued the questions from an iPad.

Naturally, people took photos of the stage (and the screen with the link) before the show began and …

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