Yay, film festivals and awesome BFFs that invite you to the experience!
That schedule looks unwieldy at first glance, but seems to be blessed with a robust filter function! Since you are just going to be there for three days, that narrow things down quite a bit. I poked around a bit, and looks like the helpful thing to do is to go to the "Film Calendar" page, which lets you filter films by dates, length, genre, etc.: [link]
So I would go to to that page and click on each day you are there, then filter the resulting page to "feature" under length (the last tab) if you want to exclude short films or industry conferences. That leaves you with a reasonable number for films per day to shift through. A lot of the films are documentaries -- if you'd rather watch fiction, not documentaries, then you could filter under "genre" to drama, comedy, horror, animation, etc. BTW, you want to look at dramas first then look at films under other genre, hit "all" again (which repopulate the films on the grid), then hit "comedy" or "thriller" next.
As for specific films, I haven't heard of most of the films playing on your dates, I'm afraid. A few films that look interesting:
- "Hot Summer Nights" playing on 5/18 has Timothee Chalamet from "Call Me By Your Name" fame. It's distributed by A24 and received good reviews from South by Southwest last year -- I saw a trailer just yesterday that looked quite good: [link]
- "Dark River" on 5/18 has Ruth Wilson, whom I love, if you are in a mood for a dour drama about family dysfunction set in a Yorkshire sheep farm. :)
- "1985" on 5/17: a B&W movie about AIDS in the 80's, which per this review, it is an intimate tearjerker: [link]
- "Salvation" on 5/17 looks interesting if you feel like a genre fare. It's a Spanish vampire film set in a hospital, but with teenagers, so kinda like "Let the Right One In"?
These are just a few I picked at the first glance, but poke around, look at descriptions of other films, google for reviews if anything looks interesting, etc. Doing that is half of the fun!
Vonnie, thank you! That's a huge help. I think I do want to concentrate on fiction, because I just finished volunteering at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival here in Durham, and I got to see five movies for free for doing that. I saw:
"RBG": All about Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Loved it! Will be released in theaters May 4.
"Owned: A Tale of Two Americas": Really good doc about housing in America, from the housing crisis to redlining and a lot of other stuff.
"Studio 54": About the NYC disco in its heyday. I didn't realize that it only lasted for 33 months! Lots of great photos and 16mm footage.
"Personal Truth": Weird little short about a British guy who becomes fascinated by the guy who shot up the Comet pizzeria in DC because of the Pizzagate conspiracy, because he realizes he himself has a taste for conspiracy theories.
"Our New President": The 2016 election cycle told entirely from the perspective of Russian news footage/propaganda. Illuminating, but pretty depressing.
I gave away my ticket to "Boom For Real: The Late Teenage Years on Jean-Michel Basquiat" because it was playing at 10:10 PM, after a long volunteer shift. I wish I had had the energy to see it!
Movies I wish I had seen: "Of Fathers and Sons", "America", and especially "Minding the Gap", which won two awards, and made my friend cry, but it's coming to POV on PBS (at some point), so I'll get my chance eventually. It's actually playing at the Nashville Film Festival, though not on the days I'm there, I don't think.
amyth, I saw that news from BFF! SO EXCITE FOR HIM!!!
"RBG": All about Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Loved it! Will be released in theaters May 4.
I saw a trailer for that during my "Isle of Dogs" viewing. It looked great! I had an ear-to-ear grin during the entire trailer. Can't wait. :)
RBG is having a moment, 'cause I know there is also a biopic of her covering her early days in the works, with Felicity Jones playing the young RBG. It's called "On the Basis of Sex", with Armie Hammer playing her husband. Looks like it's already in post production: [link]
OMG, just saw the final trailer for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom! Gleeble! Goldblum!
I always think "What about Dr. Sattler?" when people get so stoked about Ian Malcolm reappearing in the franchise, but then remember that Ellie probably has too much common sense to ever come within 500 miles of Isla Nublar again.
That would be a great credits scene. "Dr. Sattler, what about if we raised the grant amount--" "Stop calling me!"
Vonnie, I liked both Yojimbo (it was the inspiration for one of Clint Eastwood's westerns) and Cronos ... I'll have to check that out!
I came across this music video from Deadpool 2 ... hee!
