SXSW Film Festival
SXSW Review: Richard Linklater Goes to the Moon, But Keeps Things Grounded in Apollo 10 1/2
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 SXSW Film Festival. The Pitch: Anyone and everyone who was alive in the summer of 1969 likely knows where they were when they saw the first men landing on the moon on their television screens. But for young Stan (Milo Coy), his experience was a li’l different. Turns out, months before the iconic trip, the suburban Houstonite was approached by a couple of NASA suits for a once-in-a-lifetime mission. You see, due to an engineering blunder, they’d built the lunar module juuust a bit too small for an adult astronaut. So they needed a kid. And Stan, of course, is the perfect candidate. Related Video This didn’t happen, of course; it’s the stuff of childhood reverie, and adult Stan (Jack Black), who narrates, establishes early that he was a “fabuli...
SXSW Review: Under the Influence Interrogates the Addictive Escalation of David Dobrik
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 SXSW Film Festival. The Pitch: Out of the great, grand entertainment experiment that is YouTube, David Dobrik is easily one of the platform’s greatest successes. Leveraging his devil-may-care attitude and penchant for increasingly ambitious or invasive stunts, Dobrik quickly became a multi-millionaire on a level most non-movie stars would never enjoy, with six-figure sponsorship deals, 18 million subscribers, and a cadre of fellow sex-and-booze-loving daredevils (colloquially known as the Vlog Squad) whose boats his rising tide would also lift. But the same sensationalism that fueled Dobrik’s success would also be his downfall (inasmuch as one of the richest kids on YouTube, with a cultish zoomer following, can fall). In 2021, he suffere...
SXSW Review: Tony Hawk Keeps His Distance in Skate Doc Until the Wheels Fall Off
The Pitch: The secret to Tony Hawk’s success is his willingness to fail. When we first see him in the opening minutes of Sam Jones’ doc Until the Wheels Fall Off, we see exactly why: The skateboarding titan, still the face of the sport even in his fifties, tries and tries again to pull a 900 — the borderline-impossible skate trick he miraculously pulled off at the 1999 X Games — only to eat shit on each attempt. His body slams into the wood with concussive force every time, occasionally hurting enough to make him scream in pain. And yet, he gets up and tries again. What fuels someone like Hawk to keep sacrificing his body for the chance at a twice-in-a-lifetime flip? Over the course of two hours, Jones interrogates this question, charting Hawk’s youth as a child skating prodigy, his d...
SXSW Review: Halo Feels Like A Reskinned Version of Sci-Fi Shows Past
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 SXSW Film Festival. The Pitch: In the mid-26th century, a sprawling human empire comes under attack from the mysterious Covenant, an alliance of alien races dedicated to a fanatical religion surrounding a race of ancient extraterrestrials and the artifacts they leave behind. To combat them (and, not coincidentally, the rough-and-tumble insurrectionists who resist humanity’s militaristic government, the UNSC), Dr. Catherine Halsey (Natascha McElhone) has created the Spartans — armored supersoldiers trained and tortured from birth to be the ultimate, emotionless killing machine. The biggest and most badass of them all is John-117, aka the Master Chief (Orange Is the New Black‘s Pablo Schreiber), who can dispatch a Covenant Elite and a colo...
SXSW Review: X Is Ti West’s Raucous TeXXXas Chain Saw Massacre By Way of Shyamalan’s Old
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 SXSW Film Festival. The Pitch: X has a lot on its mind, and the line between exploitation and empowerment is just one of many rich themes mined by Ti West in his first feature film since the 2016 John Travolta and Ethan Hawke-starring Western In A Valley of Violence. “So the camera changes things,” Lorraine (Jenna Ortega) says midway through the film, just before RJ, Lorraine’s boyfriend and the young starry-eyed director of the porno at the center of the film, storms out of the shoot, furious and uncomfortable with her sudden interest in appearing on-screen in their dirty picture. Lorraine, quiet as a church mouse, is the innocent boom mic operator, not like these other girls willing to debase themselves on-camera, or at least that’s how RJ ...
SXSW Review: Dolly Parton Doc Still Working 9 to 5 Chokes on Its Own Ambition
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 SXSW Film Festival. The Pitch: More than 40 years ago, 9 to 5 burst onto movie screens with a deceptively winning formula for 1980: Take three women at the top of their game — actress/producer/activist Jane Fonda, top-tier comedienne Lily Tomlin, and country music superstar Dolly Parton — and throw them together in the dreary workplaces of Carter-era America with a chauvinistic boss (Dabney Coleman) you’d just love to see tied up and tortured. It may have played like a lark, thanks in no small part to a whip-smart script from Patricia Resnick (3 Women) and fanciful direction from Colin Higgins (Harold and Maude), but it had feminist teeth underneath the laughs, which led it to box-office success and decades of appreciation. Decades ...
SXSW Review: DMZ Creates a Compelling New World, But Only Feels Like the Beginning of the Story
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 SXSW Film Festival. The Pitch: The timing of DMZ is maybe not the greatest, depending on whether or not you’re up for engaging with a story about urban warfare at a time when that sort of literal real-life horror is headline news. But the new HBO Max original series, based on the DC comics series and executive produced by Ava DuVernay, still stands out for its compelling premise and dynamic cast, despite a few issues largely stemming from its format. New World Order: When we first meet Alma Ortega (Rosario Dawson) in the not-too-distant future, she’s working as a medic in an intake facility for those who have tried illegally to enter the United States of America — not to be confused with the Free States of America, because seven years ago, a ...
