Scanialara You won't be disappointed!

Lucybespro It is a performances centric movie

Doomtomylo a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

FirstWitch A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

niall rose Director Peter Maitling delivered us this bright and full of hope piece, instead of the expected dark and serial killer centred documentary we get to know the ones who really matter, the heroes, the ones who survived and helped the injured ones to survive putting their own life in real danger.Social media and news broadcasters should learn something with this way to deliver a message or to do things. when this terrible things happen the message should carry not the gore in it but the good that came out of it. Beautiful. '8'

Red_Identity This film is really an extraordinary achievement, in both the animation genre and the documentary genre. This could have been just like many other documentaries where talking heads are intercut with archival footage. By using animation, the film is able to create re- enactments that play around with memory and affective experience in a way that wouldn't be able to be done without animation. It's able to be a clear documentary while still telling a cohesive, linear narrative with many main characters and different perspectives at its core. This deserves to be seen and widely acclaimed, its achievement in not just how much of an emotional impact it has but also in various aspects of filmmaking are enough to recommend this to fans of quality cinema.

Lilcount WARNING! Major spoilers ahead.In 1968, Peter Bogdanovich based his film "Targets" on the mass shooting at the University of Texas-Austin on August 1, 1966. Bogdanovich focused on the shooter. Now, nearly half a century later, director Keith Maitland looks at the incident from the viewpoint of the victims in "Tower."After the MOMA screening on Nov. 26, 2016, the director answered questions about his film. The main purpose of this review is to preserve some of his responses.A big question was why "Clair de Lune" was the background music to the shooting of the sniper, Charles Whitman, by Austin police officer Ray Martinez. Maitland told the audience that a few weeks before the shootings, Whitman, a student at UT-Austin, had paid a late night visit to one of his professors. Whitman was clearly agitated. He said he was depressed, he had many issues in his personal life, and he needed an extension of time for his term project. Suddenly, the professor said, Whitman noticed the professor's piano and asked if he could play it. The professor agreed, and Whitman proceeded to play, according to the professor, "the most beautiful rendition of Clair de Lune he had ever heard." When Whitman was finished, all the anger had drained from him. As he left, Whitman said, "That's what I needed."Maitland explained that by using the piece just before Whitman's death, it was his way of acknowledging the humanity of the shooter. As his life ended, he was finally at peace.Of the eight people whose stories are told in this film, the most prominent is Claire Wilson, the first person shot, who lay next to her dead fiancé on concrete in 100 degree weather for nearly an hour before a couple of brave souls carried her to safety. Wilson, who also lost her unborn son, said at the end of the film that she had forgiven Whitman. The only depiction of the shooter in the entire film is a photograph of him as a child in a magazine article. Whitman is seen at age 3 standing between two rifles.Claire Wilson became a schoolteacher for thirty years and an adoptive mother. A lifelong activist, she dropped out of school at age 13 to volunteer to register voters in the deep South. She had received special dispensation to attend UT-Austin without a high school diploma.The film itself is superb. The rotoscopy is first rate, and the actors who play the subjects for most of the film are uniformly excellent. Highly recommended.

Turfseer Keith Maitland's "Tower" is the fascinating and powerful new documentary about the mass shooting which occurred on the University of Texas campus in the city of Austin on August 1, 1966. While such shootings today are commonplace, the University of Texas shooting was perhaps the first mass murder to be covered by the media in real time. Although the story of the "Tower shootings" has been told before on a number of occasions on television, Maitland's take is completely different and original. In addition to utilizing the extensive film footage that was taken at a distance as the events unfolded on that tragic day, Maitland employs rotoscopic animation to illustrate the experience of survivors of the massacre as well law enforcement responders, in an up-close, personal way. Maitland employs actors to play the parts of the participants and paints over their images with his software, which enables him to capture a reasonable reenactment of what went on that day. Interviews of victims and responders in the present day are interspersed with their fictional counterparts, which gives us a more emotional, complete picture of what happened as opposed to a simple, "dry" documentary.The main protagonist here is Claire Wilson, an 18 year old student, who, along with her boyfriend, were the first to be shot by the diabolical shooter, Charles Whitman, who ended up killing 16 people and wounding approximately 30 others, from his perch on top of the University of Texas tower. Wilson's boyfriend was killed instantly and she also lost her unborn child, as she was five months pregnant at the time.The story hardly ends there. For an agonizing hour and half, Wilson was lying on the pavement in 100 degree weather, bleeding from a bullet to her abdomen. Remarkably, another student braved the sniper and joined Wilson in order to comfort her—all the while playing dead as Whitman had her in his sights. Finally, additional heroes--a group of students-- ran out in front of the tower entrance, and dragged Wilson to safety.The shooting is told from the perspective of a number of key eyewitnesses including a TV reporter who drives around in his news car, reporting the events as they transpire. We also follow two police officers and a civilian as they bravely climb up the tower, and eventually take out the gunman, who Maitland wisely hardly mentions.During a recent Q&A with a lead producer, I learned that the University of Texas did not want to talk about the massacre after it happened. In fact, it was only last year that a true and lasting memorial was erected there to commemorate the terrible event. Tower becomes a welcome opportunity for the survivors to express emotions that have been in some cases, bottled up inside them for years.Tower is successful due to its effective use of documentary film footage and modern-day interviews, coupled with the rotoscopic animation which gives it a dream-like quality. Tower is a gripping tale which will leave you speechless after you leave the movie theater.