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Great filmmakers come from everywhere. Austin Tolin is proof. With a Vimeo page that’s a delightful mixture of under-viewed alt gems, docu-shorts, and a surprisingly well-shot wedding video from what I’d assume was the front end of Tolin’s career, his work dispels any notion that the craft evaporates in the space between JFK and LAX. As an Austin-based creator, Tolin has championed the work of many local standouts, including the late, great Lashonda Lester (who appears in Detective Calzone). I was brought to Tolin’s page by way of a tweet asking me to have a look at the very silly Jamie’s Car featuring the multi-hyphenate creator’s muse, Byron Brown. Like much of Tolin’s work, Jamie’s Car is rooted in downplayed, straight-faced absurdity. I then discovered Lily’s Birthday, which launches from the same space and then flirts with a parody that skews more surreal. Finally, and unconsciously building toward Tolin’s magnum opus, I … [Read more...] about Embarrassingly, We Are Just Learning About

Well, Happy Black History Month to this. Barry Jenkins’s long-awaited adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Underground Railroad finally has a premiere date. In the official teaser trailer, Jenkins’s watchful lens focuses on Cora Randall (Thuso Mbedu), a young woman chasing freedom in the antebellum South on the near-mythical Underground Railroad. What she finds is “no mere metaphor, but an actual railroad full of engineers and conductors, and a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil,” a release explains. As she travels from state to state, Cora is relentlessly pursued by a bounty hunter (Joel Edgerton) who was never able to capture her mother when she left Cora behind years earlier. The ten-episode limited series also stars Chase W. Dillon, Aaron Pierre, William Jackson Harper, Sheila Atim, Amber Gray, Peter De Jersey, Chukwudi Iwuji, Damon Herriman, Lily Rabe, Irone Singleton, Mychal-Bella Bowman, Marcus “MJ” Gladney Jr., … [Read more...] about Teaser: All Aboard Barry Jenkins’s Long-Awaited Series