Jimmie Fails and Joe Talbot, the creative team behind The Last Black Man in San Francisco, have the kind of backstory that’s the stuff of publicists’ dreams, a compact anecdote that grounds their feature debut. Both are native San Franciscans and met around age 10: Talbot had gotten into a fistfight, and Fails came onto the street just in time to help. The two became lifelong friends, a relationship that mutates into new form in their film. Fails (who cowrote the film’s story with director Talbot; the script’s cowriter is Rob Richert) stars as a version of himself: a lifelong […]

Opening in theaters today from Amazon Studios and Magnolia Pictures is Creative Control, Benjamin Dickinson’s wickedly intelligent social satire set in a near-future advertising world enamored with the latest thing: augmented reality. The New York-based writer/director’s second feature, following 2012’s lo-fi apocalyptic drama, First Winter, Creative Control is an impressive leap forward. Realized on a modest budget, the film won a special jury award at last year’s SXSW for “visual excellence,” and, indeed, Dickinson and his collaborators incisively riff on the very plausible possibilities of augmented reality rigs like Google Glass and Magic Leap to imagine a world where avatars, […]