It’s South-By-Southwest time, everybody! Once again we’re attending the film component of this year’s festival, which runs from March 9 to 17, to cover the films both big -- including studio fare like John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place and the John Cena-starring butt-chugging comedy Blockers -- and small, like short films made by Texas high school students, that will be gracing the screens down there in Austin. There are a great deal of features showing down there, and it’d be a waste of time to cover them all, so we’ve selected five movies that we’re pumped to see at this year’s festival.
A Prayer Before Dawn
Based on a true story, A Prayer Before Dawn tells the tale of Billy Moore (Joe Cole), a young Englishman who is caught up in the wrong scene in Thailand, and who pays dearly for it when he’s sent to one of the country’s most notorious prisons. There, he learns that the wardens hold Muay Thai tournaments, and that he could potentially fight his way back onto the streets. It sounds like the plot of your typical Van Damme movie, but director Jean-Stephane Sauvaire’s sparse approach transforms it into something totally new. It looks to be quite extreme (and most definitely not for the faint-of-heart), but it’s notable that uber distributor A24 snatched this film up for release after it premiered at Cannes. So if you’re the kind of person swayed by that knowledge, it passed their quality test.
