Our Favorite Movies and TV Shows at SXSW 2024 – Beragampengetahuan

A project born out of necessity, Grand Theft Hamlet began as an experimental exercise, and literal game, for professional actors Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen. During the listless boredom of the pandemic, what if they used the interactive open-world of Grand Theft Auto Online to mount a production of Hamlet? Generally regarded as Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy, one that deals with the existential dread of mortality, Hamlet also has an incredibly large body count, and as Grand Theft Hamlet eventually proves, is a story ripe for the GTA treatment of wealth, excess, and execution.

Filmmaker Pinny Grylls documents Crane and Oosterveen as they assemble a cast of players, some professional actors and some who have never read a sonnet in their lives. She and co-director Crane also make the intriguing choice to never leave the game world of GTA. In lieu of talking heads, the gamers’ virtual reality during a global pandemic becomes the only one viewers will know. Like the ensemble, you’re asked to get lost in a sandbox of performance and shifting identity. And you learn that the play really is the thing. – David Crow

Monkey Man

Below is an excerpt from our review of Dev Patel’s long forthcoming directorial debut, Monkey Man. You can read the full critique here.

There is a scene late in Dev Patel’s directorial debut, the ferocious and ferociously entertaining Monkey Man, where the filmmaker, star, and co-writer rips a guy’s throat out. In the realm of action cinema, that is of course nothing new. However, the way it occurs here is. When Patel’s Kid finds his hands otherwise occupied, the feral protagonist improvises by catching a switchblade between his teeth and slowly unfurling its knife. He then drags its nasty end from ear to ear across the neck of a man he is wrapped around. The moment is intimate, drawn out, and very, very red. For its mastermind, it also must play like vindication. – David Crow

My Dead Friend Zoe

There are more than 16 million veterans living in the United States today. That roughly amounts to one in 20 Americans. And yet, the stories of those who came back from Iraq or Afghanistan in this century remain silent on the big screen. These conflicts are instead largely relegated to either action spectacles or simplistic, inarticulate hagiographies. Actual Iraq War veteran Kyle Hausmann-Stokes has changed this with his feature debut and one of the great discoveries of this year’s festival, My Dead Friend Zoe. Revealing a sweet, funny, and deeply human portrait of veteran culture (as well as the pain and PTSD that is also pervasive there), My Dead Friend Zoe reconfigures a story of trauma into a generational conflict about service, sacrifice, and regret.

Among the participants are Merit (Sonequa Martin-Green), a recent college graduate who served her country in Afghanistan in the 2010s, and Dale (Ed Harris), her laconic Vietnam era granddad who both inspired her service and now resents her inability to process it, especially after losing her best friend from over there, Zoe (Natalie Morales). Not that Zoe ever left Merit. Morales even steals much of the movie as a veritable trauma-ghost who materializes before Merit’s eyes like an invisible BFF bunny. She might be a manifestation of Merit’s own past regrets and unresolved survivor’s guilt, but that doesn’t mean the ghost cannot have jokes.