'For Madmen Only': Film Review | SXSW 2020

Almost a century before the recent, wildly popular Hilma af Klint retrospective at New York's Guggenheim, the Swedish artist imagined a spiraling white temple, not unlike that Manhattan landmark, as the home for her paintings. Most of what she envisioned for her art was denied her during her lifetime, but af Klint, ever prescient and prolific, understood her work's power and importance and, planning for posterity, she managed, in a way, to have the last laugh.

[Note: In the wake ofthe Tribeca festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select entries that elected to premiere digitally.] Israeli director Eytan Fox, who landed on the map with his 2002 gay military romance, Yossi & Jagger, brings sensitivity, restraint and slow-burn sensuality to a story of cross-generational emotional awakening in Sublet.

Shea Whigham plays a man with no name — but with plenty of overly diagrammed sin — in a small-town West Texas drama that's like a reductive bone-dry version of 'The Apostle.'

[Note: In the wake ofthe Tribeca festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select entries that elected to premiere digitally.] It's fitting that Wake Up on Mars opens in winter. The frozen Swedish landscape is an apt backdrop for this real-life tale of suspended animation: Two teenage sisters, in side-by-side beds, lie in a coma-like condition that's variously known as uppgivenhetssyndrom, apatisk (apathy) syndrome and resignation syndrome.

[Note: In the wake ofthe Tribeca Film Festival's cancellation this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select entries that elected to premiere digitally.] With his chameleonic capacity for self-reinvention, his eclectic musical palette and elegant extraterrestrial freakdom, David Bowie would seem ideal subject matter for the kind of freewheeling, stylistically fragmented biopic treatment Todd Haynes gave Bob Dylan in I'm Not There.

A one-joke, bad-taste concept is pulled off with some deadpan panache in this indie comedy "thriller."

[Note: In the wake ofthe Tribeca festival's cancellation this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select entries that elected to premiere digitally.] There are close-ups, and then there are close-ups — frame-filling, heart-stopping glimpses of a soul. In the brief but stirring Stray, those glimpsed souls belong to dogs who live on the streets of a major city.

A biopic about the young David Bowie (but without any Bowie songs) captures him on a 1971 road trip across America, when he was still putting together the insinuating image puzzle that would become Ziggy Stardust.

Mirrors have long exerted a dark fascination, from the Bloody Mary game you may have played in childhood to its use in numerous horror films including Candyman, Oculus and, of course, Mirrors.

Real-estate chicanery leads to the high life — and eventually the jail cell — in Netflix's flashy but familiar criminal caper.

So-called reparative therapy designed to change a person's sexual orientation or gender identity, using religious indoctrination and bogus psychology, has been dealt with in both dramatic features (Boy Erased, The Miseducation of Cameron Post) and comedies (But I'm a Cheerleader, Saved!).

Uruguayan newcomer Lucia Garibaldi's coming-of-age drama has humid promise, but circles around its darkest psychological questions.

[Note: In the wake of SXSW's cancellation this year, The Hollywood Reporter is reviewing select fest entries that elected to screen digitally for critics.] S.R. Bindler's 1997 documentary Hands on a Hard Body —about a Texas endurance contest in which the last contestant awake with a hand touching a new truck would win it —was an unexpected sensation, attracting attention long before today's doc boom and inspiring spinoffs including a Broadway musical.

Butt Boy

[Note: In the wake of SXSW's cancellation this year, The Hollywood Reporter is reviewing select fest entries that elected to screen digitally for critics.] Few SXSW attendees in 2011 would have expected that Dave Boyle's likably shambling Surrogate Valentine would ever get the sequel treatment.

[Note: In the wake of SXSW's cancellation this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select fest entries that elected to premiere digitally.] Shiva Babykicks off with an unpersuasive orgasm. "Yeah, Daddy," Danielle (Rachel Sennott) intones, the lack of conviction in her voice telegraphing the transactional nature of the coupling.

[Note: In the wake of SXSW's cancellation this year, The Hollywood Reporter is reviewing select fest entries that elected to premiere digitally.] The winner of this year's Documentary Feature award at the virtual version of SXSW, Katrine Philp's An Elephant in the Room spends time with participants in a New Jersey program called Good Grief, whose probably inadvertent invocation of Charlie Brown hints at its focus: The Morristown group is built around children who have lost parents, placing them

[Note: In the wake of SXSW's cancellation this year, The Hollywood Reporter is reviewing select fest entries that elected to premiere digitally.] A narrative feature debut informed by its maker's previous documentaries about the oil industry, Noah Hutton's Lapsis takes a sci-fi look at another kind of resource-extraction boom and the workers being exploited in it.

Krisha Fairchild's second lead role in a feature is no less perfect for her than the first. As in 2015's Krisha (which put the retired, little-known performer on the indie map at age 65), she inhabits the central character of Freeland with a riveting emotional power.

Out of the vast universe of nature documentaries, I don’t think I’m alone in finding films about life under the sea to occupy a special place. The very fact that they exist, of course, is amazing — though when you watch one, part of the wonder is that you’re not thinking about how aquamarine filmmakers actually hovered in the ocean depths to shoot this stuff.