‘Human Nature’: Film Review

[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.

Marc Meyers' '80s psycho thriller about a trio of young metalhead vipers plays off the mythology of satanic heavy-metal murders and pulls the bloody rug out from under it too.

Butt Boy

The body count nearly matches the cast list in this bloody but inventive festival favorite from first-time Russian director Kirill Sokolov.

[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.

A documentary featuring Steven Greer, apostle of the alien-visitation disclosure movement, has tantalizing "sightings," but reveals that ET obsession is now the mother ship of conspiracy theory.

Movies about inner city schoolteachers attempting to connect with their unruly students have long been a cinematic staple, dating at least as far back as 1955's The Blackboard Jungle. But few have approached the subject with the impressive realism and naturalism as Hanan Harchol's semi-autobiographical feature directorial debut.

'Stranger Things' actor Noah Schnapp plays a young chef of mixed Israeli and Palestinian heritage looking for a fusion-food solution to his family troubles.

An experimental feature whose opening scenes will have many unprepared viewers searching for the exit, She's Allergic to Cats is not nearly as unfriendly as it initially seems.

It would seem we're in a moment of unusual openness to the idea that Earth-dwellers aren't alone in the universe. Mainstream news outlets reveal that some government entities take the idea seriously; tantalizing (and seemingly not-doctored) videos capture aerial phenomena that, while vaguely photographed, are hard to explain.

The makers of Same Boat clearly knew they had a nearly unclassifiable mashup on their hands. Hence their tagline on the film's advertising: "A Classic Cruise Ship Time Travel Assassination Love Story." The description well serves this entertaining microbudgeted feature that plays like an unlikely romantic comedy variation of The Terminator.

[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.

"You know who's sexy? Judd Nelson," Maddie Hasson observes randomly as the deliciously trashy Val, one of three badass young women headed to a heavy metal concert in middle-of-nowhere Indiana in We Summon the Darkness. Similar notes of tongue-in-cheek nostalgia and '80s slasher throwback fun help patch over some pacing issues in Marc Meyers' horror thriller.

The sequel to the 2016 glitter-pop animated hit is the first Hollywood movie of this moment to go directly to home viewing. For all its buzzy touches, it's rote enough to feel right at home...at home.

If Steven Spielberg had decided to follow up the blockbuster success of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial with an adaptation of Harriet the Spy starring Drew Barrymore, the result might have resembled Apple TV+'s new drama Home Before Dark.

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.

OneRepublic streamed into The Tonight Show: At Home Edition on Monday (March 30) to perform their latest single "Didn't I."Sequestered together in a massive studio space, lead singer Ryan Tedder stripped the track down for the performance, accompanied by his bandmates on just electric guitar and cello.

With the exception of Flipper from 1960s television, or maybe the talking Fa and Bea from Mike Nichols' 1973 movie The Day of the Dolphin, few cinematic dolphins have displayed quite as much personality as Echo, the main character in Dolphin Reef, Disneynature's new documentary premiering on Disney+, narrated by Natalie Portman.