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 […]

Sacramento-born Brie Larson has been acting since the age of 6 and already has a lengthy list of credits including television (United States of Tara), studio films (21 Jump Street, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World) and independent dramas (Rampart, Greenberg). This summer she appears in three of the best-reviewed independent films of the 2013 festival circuit — James Ponsoldt’s The Spectacular Now, Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Don Jon, and in the lead role that will break her to critics and a wider audience, Destin Daniel Cretton’s Short Term 12. Larson plays a tough yet compassionate supervisor at a facility for at-risk teens, […]

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 […]