Remember last week when we said that It Follows was being planned for a slow build in theaters and a Video On-Demand release on 3/27? Well, when you open to the second highest per screen average of the year, plans can change. The unsettling horror film expanded to 32 screens this past weekend, and now according to Slashfilm, distributor Radius-TWC will quickly expand to around 1,000 theaters. The downside is that the VOD release has been postponed, perhaps until the film leaves the big chain theaters it now will be seen in. Truthfully, this is a good trade-off, as It Follows is best seen in a dark room, surrounded by strangers. Here’s what you may have missed from last week’s entertainment news:

SXSW 2015 Wraps, Krisha Wins Top Prize

After premieres of 100 films including first looks at hotly anticipated films Furious 7 and Trainwreck, this year’s SXSW Film Festival was bigger and better than ever. Trey Edward Shults’s family drama Krisha became the first film to win both the Narrative Feature and Audience Award at the the SXSW Film Festival since Natural Selection in 2011. Peace Officer took home the top prize for feature documentary. You can find the complete list of jury winners here. And don’t forget to check out our coverage directly from the fest.

Criterion Collection June Titles Headlined by André and Wallace

The landmark 1981 indie My Dinner with André (Criterion #479) is getting a Blu-ray upgrade, being packaged with already enshrined Vanya on 42nd Street (#599) and new release Jonathan Demme’s A Master Builder for a new boxset focused on the collaboration between theater director André Gregory and actor Wallace Shawn. Other films being released in the June 2015 haul are Bernhard Wicki’s antiwar film The Bridge, Gilliam-Bridges-Williams masterwork The Fisher King, Czech cult film Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, and a standalone release of Jack Nicholson’s iconic performance in Five Easy Pieces (the film was original released as part of the BBS boxset).

Amirpour Follow-Up Casts Carrey, Keanu, Momoa

Ana Lily Amirpour’s debut A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night was a striking, original entry in vampire cinema, standing out as one of last year’s best indie films. For her follow-up, she’s turning to cannibalism, a horror subgenre that isn’t as popular but could use a fresh re-imagining. According to Deadline, The Bad Batch won’t be an uncovered gem with the recent casting of Jim Carrey, Keanu Reeves and Aquaman himself, Jason Momoa. The trio will join leads Diego Luna and Suki Waterhouse in this dystopian love story set in the heart of Texas. Production is set to begin in April.

Errol Morris Making True-Crime Series for Netflix

Fresh off the mind-blowing conclusion to HBO’s series The Jinx, documentary legend Errol Morris told the Business Insider that his upcoming project with Netflix “has an element of true crime in it.” It was impossible not to connect recent cultural dynamos Serial and The Jinx to The Thin Blue Line, the landmark in pulpy true crime docs, so it is exciting to the see the originator is back in the game. If you haven’t seen The Thin Blue Line, it is being released by the Criterion Collection tomorrow.

Mondo Takes on Malick

Mondo, the fine purveyors of awesome original posters, recently announced an upcoming series on the work of film master Terrence Malick. The first, for his debut Badlands, was released on Thursday and promptly sold out, as is usually the case for their work. If you want to get your hands on the limited prints for Days of Heaven or The Tree of Life, you’re going to have to act fast. The Badlands print was sold at $45 (275 quantity), with 125 variant editions being sold at $65. The beautiful work and exclusivity are definitely worth the price if you can manage to be one of the lucky few.

Trailer of the Week: Sunshine Superman

Base jumping is one of the most dangerous and awe-inspiring extreme sports. Marah Stauch’s profile of Carl Boenish, who is credited as the movement’s innovator, features incredible footage from his life and many daring escapades. Sunshine Superman premiered at the 2014 TIFF and will open in limited release on May 22. Check out the heart-pounding trailer below!

Tonight, plenty of big names and stars in independent film gathered together for the Gotham Independent Film Awards in New York. Earlier today everyone was talking about the New York Film Critics Circle winners, but tonight was one of the first “true” award shows of Oscar season (sorry Hollywood Film Awards, you don’t count). And like the Independent Spirit Awards, Gotham spreads the love to the year’s best independent films. All in all, it was a nice way to sit back and see some genuinely great talent get rewarded.

Boyhood surprisingly lost the night’s main award, losing Best Picture to Birdman. Comparing the two films, Boyhood seems like the easier bet for an indie-based award show like this, but the award jury (including the likes of Jon Hamm and Jane Fonda) preferred Alejandro González Iñárritu’s visually crazy satire. We raved about the film back when it closed the New York Film Festival, so it’s sure to earn plenty of other trophies for its mantle in the coming months.

There were unsurprising wins, though: Best Documentary went to Citizenfour, Michael Keaton won Best Actor for Birdman (he’s already trying out material for if he wins the Oscar, based on his speech), and Julianne Moore won Best Actress for Still Alice. They’re all the current frontrunners in their respective categories, so it didn’t come as a shock to see them end up winning.

One of the night’s more pleasant surprises came when Ana Lily Amirpour, director of our Must See Indie pick A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, won the Bingham Ray Breakthrough Director Award. It’s one of the year’s most accomplished debut features, and the fact alone that it beat out Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler says quite a lot. Also great: Tessa Thompson winning Breakthrough Performance for Dear White People, beating out Ellar Coltrane in Boyhood. Thompson was the best part of Dear White People by far, so it’s a deserved win.

Special awards were given to Steve Carrell, Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo for their work in Foxcatcher, as well as Tilda Swinton, Foxcatcher director Bennett Miller and Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos. Read the full list of winners below, and let us know what you think deserved to win or got robbed.

Gotham Independent Film Awards Winners

Best Feature: Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
Best Actress: Julianne Moore in Still Alice
Best Actor: Michael Keaton in Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
Best Documentary: Citizenfour
Breakthrough Actor: Tessa Thompson in Dear White People
Bingham Ray Breakthrough Director Award: Ana Lily Amirpour for A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
Gotham Independent Film Audience Award: Boyhood

With their late night social lives, sensual eating habits, and lonely existences, vampires are already among the most romantic and mysterious of mythical beings. They’ve been used in plenty of different settings, but Ana Lily Amirpour‘s A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night may be the first to harness the ripeness of young love with a vampire, crossed with a black and white western, with a dash of Frank Miller’s nighttime crime scenery. More amazing is that this genre mix is executed in a way that is both artfully quiet and amazingly hip.

Here’s the premise: in the mythical Iranian scum town of Bad City the people fear the local thugs, either working for them or feeding their drug addictions as clientele. In such a town, James Dean-esque Arash (Arash Marandi) is a rare good guy, caring for his junkie father and working hard to afford his gorgeous vintage Thunderbird. At night a girl (Sheila Vand), her eyes rimmed black in eyeliner, covered from head to toe in a hijab, walks in the darkness, following men. One night she encounters Saeed (Dominic Rains), a self-absorbed and dangerous drug dealer who earlier that day took Arash’s beloved car as payment owed by his father for drugs. With nary a word Saeed is seduced by the girl’s dark eyes and lips. He takes her to his extravagant apartment, letting her look around while he indulges in some of his drugs, music pumping, eventually giving her a pathetic sexy dance. And when she does finally come near to him, placing his finger in her mouth seductively, she counters his intentions by cleanly biting off his finger before draining him completely. It’s horrifying, hilarious, and, somehow, heroic.

This is the gritty texture of Amirpour’s film. Shot in crisp black and white, the film’s setting is distinctly more California dust bowl than Iran, which makes sense since it was shot near Bakersfield. Oil pumps grind up and down, sucking black oil out of the ground while the girl drains the city slowly in her own way. And though she speaks quite rarely, the girl appears to be in all other respects aside from her late night diet, a typical, albeit lonely, young woman. She lives alone in an apartment where band posters paper her walls, a disco ball turns overhead, she wears skinny jeans and an oversized french-style striped shirt, and she plays the latest new wave music, dancing by herself in the fashion of a vampire girl yearning for more. At night she has a distinct taste: men, preferably the bad sort. In an especially frightening scene a young street urchin (Milad Eghbali) is stopped by the girl and she threatens him into always being a “good boy,” then takes his skateboard with her.

Thus, one night as she skateboards down a street in Bad City, hijab flowing behind her, the girl encounters Arash for the first time. He’s dejected and high after a bad party. His innocence intrigues her (and those big brown eyes as well) and she takes him home. The romance between the girl and Arash is entirely atmospheric. Amirpour takes her time, allowing the mood, strobing light, and dance-y music of Arash and the girl’s first moment of attraction to wash over viewers. It’s beautiful, and sexy as hell. Marandi is the good-boy-with-an-edge every girl—or vampire girl—dreams of, and he plays Arash with no sense of irony. Vand is an absolute delight, giving off a sweet and vulnerable school girl appeal that changes swiftly with a whiff of fresh blood. But she’s no animalistic vampire, she’s a woman in charge of her desires, as overpowering as they can sometimes be.

Between Arash’s old-fashioned principles, and the girl’s progressive (especially by Iranian ideals) position of power—exemplified by her murder of a man who had just before his death exploited a prostitute before leaving her in the dust penniless—the cultural censure is clear. Amirpour is transparent with her reversals, self-aware even, poking fun by dressing Arash in a Dracula costume when he first meets the girl, assuring her she has nothing to fear.

Lyle Vincent’s cinematography is as wide as any screen comes, capturing minute details in every two-tone high-contrast frame. Produced by Elijah Wood among others (well, he is a DJ and the soundtrack is phenomenal, maybe indie-music insiders really do all know each other), the film is written by Amirpour and one of the few things I might criticize her for is leaning a bit heavily on her visuals. Luckily, said visuals are so impressive they distract from any realizations that not only is dialogue between our romantic leads sparse, it’s almost non-existent, which makes the film’s ending seem slightly drastic, albeit not unsatisfying. My other complaint is a lack of backstory on this elusive and nameless “girl,” but ask and ye shall receive. Amirpour has written a comic book chronicling life in Bad City before the events of A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night to be simultaneously released with the film.

With all the charm of Amélie, all the horror of Nosferatu, all the youthful self-awareness of La Nouvelle Vague, and all the atmosphere of a black and white spaghetti western, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night manages to be a strong entry into any of the 6 or 7 genres and sub-genres it fits into. Captivating at every turn, watching the film is like seeing the birth of a trend come into style. Amirpour harnesses the essence of indie filmmaking in her début, showcasing an adroit and enticing talent the likes of which we don’t see every day.