When you think New Zealand comedy horror, you think side-splitting crudity and stomach-churning mutilation. Deathgasm provides both, with a totally brutal metal soundtrack.

Metal and punk recognize no age boundaries, as Austinites know (hey, Residual Kid!). Almost anywhere else though, an African-American metal band too young to get behind the wheel of a car is a major story. And Breaking a Monster is that story.

Ava DuVernay strolled into the land of LBJ like she owned the place, and by the end of her keynote at the SXSW Film Conference, she might as well have.

It all comes back to Raul’s, the tiny nightclub on Guadalupe, where Austin’s punk scene ignited with a kiss. The kiss in question was planted on the lips of a policeman by Huns frontman Phil Tolstead on Sept. 19, 1978.

The Ceremony is a jewel-box of a film – lush and articulate in its evocation of the world and relationships of French author and dominatrix Catherine Robbe-Grillet. It purrs and thrums.

Ted Geoghegan is a very familiar name to people who write about film, and a regular at SXSW, but not because he’s a noted actor, or a famous filmmaker. Geoghegan is a film publicist, one of those long-suffering souls who tracks down AWOL actors and takes no for an answer from harried journalists.

When everything from your refrigerator to your DNA can be hacked, how do you protect yourself? In his SXSW Interactive panel Future Crimes From the Digital Underworld, security expert Marc Goodman didn't claim to have all the answers, his goal was to get people to start asking more questions.

”The hardest thing to achieve in a movie is tone,” said fantastic film imagineer Guillermo Del Toro to some first-time feature filmmaker by the name of Gosling. (Irony: not dead yet.) “And I think [your] movie is tonally, completely of a piece.”

Drew Davidson’s thesis is hardly new — that “video games are a complex medium that merits careful interpretation and insightful analysis” piggy-backs on work by fellow academics and game designers such as Janet Murray and Jesper Juul. Novel, though, was the means by which Davidson sought to affirm that notion.