'Beats' (2019) Movie Review

One-night-that-changes-everything is a familiar cinematic narrative, especially in the lives of young people. Not the most original set up, there are reasons filmmakers and storytellers keep coming back to this particular well. Many people who’ve survived adolescence have had this type of experience, a transformative moment where you make a choice, where you can go one way or another, and where, afterwards, nothing is ever quite the same. Maybe it’s not always as dramatic as movies portray it, but when you’ve lived on that precipice between childhood and adulthood, searching for some nebulous thing you can’t quite define, it’s easy to relate.

Slamdance 2019: 'Beats' (2019) Movie Review

One-night-that-changes-everything is a familiar cinematic narrative, especially in the lives of young people. Not the most original set up, there are reasons filmmakers and storytellers keep coming back to this particular well. Many people who’ve survived adolescence have had this type of experience, a transformative moment where you make a choice, where you can go one way or another, and where, afterwards, nothing is ever quite the same. Maybe it’s not always as dramatic as movies portray it, but when you’ve lived on that precipice between childhood and adulthood, searching for some nebulous thing you can’t quite define, it’s easy to relate.

10 Slamdance 2019 Films You Need To See

We’re somehow already deep into January 2019. I don’t know how that happened, but I do know that means the year in film festivals is about to kick off in earnest. Most well-known is obviously Sundance—it is, after all, the big daddy of indie film—which starts this week. But it’s not the only one. Also this weekend, and also in Park City, Utah, we’ve got Slamdance, the radical response to the over-corporatization and exclusivity of Sundance.