It’s easy to set a movie in a country or place. Yet as Ishana Night Shyamalan learned, it’s only when your boots are on the soil that you can really understand the location and its people.

The Austin film community – and the genre film community at large – is in shock and mourning with the news that Scott Wampler, former managing editor of Birth.Movies.Death. and cohost of The Kingcast, has suddenly died.

When most filmmakers make a revisionist Western, it’s still riddled with all the old tropes about masculinity, just seen from a different perspective. But that doesn’t interest Viggo Mortensen.

Who says there’s no such thing as nepotism in Hollywood? After all, there’s no way that Ethan Hawke would have got the gig directing Wildcat if he wasn’t the star's father.

The buzzy TV show premieres, the first looks at season finales, the starry cast reunions – those are probably the reasons most folks decide to attend ATX TV Festival, the long-running local monument to all things small screen.

The Wastelands of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga are basically Austin. It's absurdly hot, increasingly afflicted by climate change, and everyone's obsessed with guns and cars. And for one afternoon, Austin also had its own raiding party of War Boys.

In a blow to his fans and to the Austin film and TV industry, Jared Padalecki will be hanging up his signature white cowboy hat, with the news that the CW is canceling Walker.

There are filmmakers who make films, and filmmakers who show people how to make films. Jim Cummings is self-deprecatingly the latter. “To follow somebody’s footsteps – who is an idiot – is very helpful for people,” he said.

Happy birthday, Village cinema! The oldest continuously operating movie house in Austin celebrated its 50th year as the secret heart of the city's film scene last night with a special screening of another quinquagenarian Austin original, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.