Winner of the 2013 SXSW Narrative Grand Jury Prize, Destin Cretton’s Short Term 12 is the entirely successful feature expansion of the writer/director’s excellent 2009 short about counselors and youth at a residential facility for at-risk teens. Flipping the gender of his protagonist from the short to the feature, Short Term 12 stars Brie Larson (a recent Actor winner at the Locarno Film Festival) as a savvy counselor whose spirit hasn’t yet been crushed by the bureaucrats above her. Of course, she’s challenged, not just by troubled teenagers but also by life changes and self-worth issues, the latter stemming from […]

Jeremiah Zagar, the prolific documentary filmmaker behind 2008’s In a Dream is back with Heart Stop Beating: A Body Without A Pulse, a new short screening before Escape Fire this week at Sundance. Heart Stop Beating is a brief, fascinating look at Billy Cohn & Bud Frazier, two doctors who successfully replaced a dying man’s heart with a mechanical device this past March, proving that human physiology can be supported without a pulse. Over its four minute run-time, the documentary features glimpses into the operating room, as well as interviews with Cohn and Frazer. Watch it above. Also available to […]