SXSW Film Festival Showbiz and Celebrity Breaking News

In an SXSW littered with feature directorial debuts, the runway for new voices to emerge has never been wider. While the opportunity has been there, however, the results have been mixed, at best.

The rub in evaluating a film about sexism, abortion, poverty, or any serious personal (yet universal) subject is that a verdict of “poor” or “cheesy” runs the risk of carrying a barbed attack at those who find value in said film. It’s a factor in reviewing rape-revenge films such as “Promising Young Woman,” where a male-written review calling such a story “sick” raises hackles in sexual assault survivors who find catharsis in that (fictional) extra-judicial retribution.

Distilling down the complex logistics of designing and building a multi-billion dollar satellite into an informative and entertaining film, Nathaniel Kahn’s “The Hunt for Planet B” is a entertaining and insightful look at the creation of the James Webb Space Telescope, set to launch later this year, and the scientists and engineers who contributed to it.

A Fillipino-Canadian family prays at an array of ruby red candles. The son in this frame is Joshua (Rogelio Balagtas).

A teenage Vada (Jenna Ortega) arrives at her high school with her best friend Nick (Will Ropp). The coarse Vada isn’t part of the in-crowd.

The way technology has affected relationships, dating, and sex in the modern world is fairly commonplace today. Sci-fi obviously has lots of dystopian ways of commenting on this too (see the psychological submissive girl robot fetishization archetype in “Ex Machina”).

The relationship between any creative individual—musician, actor, director—and their fandom is complicated. The term “fandom” itself suggests a certain kind of enthusiast, someone who is so passionate in their devotion that they’re practically unswayable, and the nature of modern fame is that the celebrity on the receiving end of that loyalty is almost certainly hyper-aware of it, and of the protection it provides.

The simplest description of “The Spine of Night” is “a 1980s heavy metal album cover come to graphic life.” Barbarian shamans, petty despots, noble knight sages, craven knaves, megalomaniacal necromancers, blood, guts, and a parade of naked flesh are all given a spark of spontaneity by hand-rotoscoped animation to emphasize jaw-dropping over the top violence instead of blunting it.

One of the more noticeable subgenres of indie drama, over the past few years, is the Finally, A Lead movie – in which a beloved supporting player is, at long last, given a leading role to display the full range of their charms and gifts. Blythe Danner got hers with “I’ll See You In My Dreams,” Sam Elliot followed suit with “The Hero,” Harry Dean Stanton had “Lucky,” and now, in “Swan Song,” it’s Udo Kier’s turn.

Reviewing a TV series at a film festival is always a tricky bit of business, as it finds the film critic, used to appraising an entire work, engaging in a combination of critique and prediction – I think the rest of these will be good/bad, too! (One can argue, of course, that television critics do this all the time, and that’s accurate; it would follow that they’re very different skill sets.) It gets particularly difficult when you’re talking about something like “Them,” Amazon Prime’s new

You know that voice in your head? The one that calls you a freak, a failure, a baby, or a pig? You try to ignore it, yet it pushes you from a place of fear into making choices you regret. Then, it snarls at you not to look back.

For the uninitiated, while the late American rocker Tom Petty’s 1994 album Wildflowers may not necessarily be his best record—that’s usually reserved for Full Moon Fever or Damn The Torpedoes— it was his most personal, his most beloved, and a favorite among fans (in a 2013 Rolling Stone fan poll it was ranked #1 among fan favorites).

It’s already becoming a bit of cliché to say that a film (or book, or show, or album) is Actually About Grief and Trauma, and I’d imagine this will only get worse in the months and even years to come. But Stacey Gregg’s dramatic thriller “Here Before,” which is about a woman who comes to believe that the new neighbors’ daughter is the reincarnation of her own lost young one, is actually about grief and trauma, and handles those topics with delicacy and grace.

In the age of quarantine and pandemics, connection is desperately needed, loneliness is its own epidemic, and mental health and tragedy issues are all-too-relevant, sad byproducts of the COVID-19 era.

Selma Blair is funny, but not in a daffy way, like her memorable turns in “Legally Blonde” or “Cruel Intentions” might have you expect. Stripped of a script or the lurid lens of a fashion shoot, she’s funny in a way that’s dark, dry, and dangerous.

For the Haitian-American, West Palm Beach native, Edson Jean, “Ludi” is a personal story. Set in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood, the compact drama concerns a Haitian immigrant nurse, Ludi (Shein Mompremier), tirelessly working to supply her daughter’s American dream.

Back in 2018, former Disney star, now-chart-topping artist, Demi Lovato, produced a documentary about her “Tell Me You Love Me” world tour. The footage from the abandoned film projects a woman who is an emblem to substance abuse survivors and an advocate for mental health awareness.

The 2021 Sundance Film Festival is in the rear-view mirror, so that means, next up, the SXSW Film Festival that has unleashed its line-up today. Running March 16-20, 2021, SXSW announced the full program for the 28th edition of the SXSW Film Festival.

“Holler” is not the first film to chronicle the human toll of the flight of industry from the American Rust Belt to China and other countries abroad, but it might be the most direct. “Holler” makes the subtext text by focusing on an Ohio group of scrappers, crews illegally stripping abandoned old factories and institutional buildings for raw metal that can be sold to Asian buyers.

Another word for “Cargo,” a truly unique blend of Hindu mythology and mid-concept science fiction about a futuristic new process by which the recently deceased are beamed onto a spaceship far away in order to have their memories wiped and their souls cleansed for reincarnation, might be “baggage” — as in, dead people show up with their hands and pockets full of whatever preoccupied them on Earth, and it’s the crew’s job to calm them down and ease them through the transition.

Like any good science documentary, “Human Nature” starts with a hypothesis. The filmmakers posit that audiences are bored by the dry format of most science docs, but that there is a better strategy to present complex concepts about biology in such a way that both educates and entertains.

Dim echoes of David Lynch and early Roman Polanski abound throughout “The Carnivores,” a fitfully fascinating mix of teasing narrative opacity and stylized psycho-thriller atmospherics.

Those hungry for more of the East/West culture-clash terrain of “Crazy Rich Asians” and “The Farewell” may savor the slightly downsized pleasures of “Go Back to China,” which offers up some of the first film’s lifestyle glamour plus the second’s more earnest family drama.

At 34, Bridget doesn’t know what she wants, but she knows she doesn’t want a baby — not now, at least — and so she doesn’t hesitate to make the decision that might’ve served as the focal point of a different kind of film. In “Saint Frances,” getting an abortion is just one of the many things that happens to Bridget, and the casualness with which it’s presented will outrage some.

There’s intimacy. And then there’s claustrophobia.