'I Will Make You Mine': Film Review | SXSW 2020

Producer-director Maria Finitzo’s feature documentary The Dilemma of Desire was robbed, like so many other works, by the coronavirus pandemic of its moment in the spotlight when its premiere at SXSW was cancelled in March. That fate seems extra cruel given that the movie is all about celebrating female sexual pleasure and especially the much-misunderstood clitoris in defiance of patriarchal efforts to silence, stifle and suppress female desire.

[Note: In the wake ofthe Tribeca festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select fest entries that elected to premiere digitally for critics.] The Brazilian government's efforts in the run-up to the 2016 Summer Olympics to clean up crime in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, a program dubbed "pacification," were part of a widely reported broader sweep to hide the city's poor from international visitors.

[Note: In the wake ofthe Tribeca festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select fest entries that elected to premiere digitally for critics.] Whether the Storage Wars crew would have recognized the value of a box of letters discovered in a Los Angeles storage unit in 2014 is open to debate. But it's a good thing that directors Michael Seligman and Jennifer Tiexiera did.

[Note: In the wake of the Tribeca festival's postponement this year, The Hollywood Reporter is reviewing select fest entries that elected to screen digitally for critics.] An uncompelling spinoff of the director's 2017 film about women sentenced to death row, Sabrina Van Tassel's The State of Texas vs. Melissa interviews the family and supporters of Melissa Lucio, a woman convicted of killing her 2-year-old daughter in 2007.

[Note: In the wake of the Tribeca festival's postponement this year, The Hollywood Reporter is reviewing select fest entries that elected to screen digitally for critics.] Joshua Leonard's 2011 feature debut, The Lie, explored a sort of identity crisis that resulted when a new parent (Leonard) used his baby as an excuse to ditch work. The crisis starts earlier in Fully Realized Humans, which again sees Leonard and Jess Weixler playing a couple who perhaps shouldn't be trusted with a baby.

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A native of the place strangers call Easter Island amplifies a call for self-rescue in Eating Up Easter, Sergio M. Rapu's eco-themed documentary.

[Note: In the wake ofthe Tribeca festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select entries that elected to premiere digitally.] For Dee's Tots Daycare in New Rochelle, New York, that last word in the mom-and-pop enterprise's name is a misnomer, or at least an understatement. The business of teaching, entertaining, feeding and straight-up loving a houseful of children who range from infants to tweens isn't limited to the daytime; it's a 24-hour operation.

[Note: In the wake ofthe Tribeca Film Festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select entries that elected to premiere digitally.] An alumna of the Cannes Cinéfondation Residence program who has earned attention with her short films, Israeli writer-director Ruthy Pribar makes an assured feature debut, balancing sobriety with emotional intensity in Asia.

Spike Jonze directs a film version of the Beastie Boys' 2019 stage-show memoir, in which Adam Horovitz and Mike Diamond prove themselves infectious raconteurs of their white-kid-turned-king-of-rock hip-hop saga.

[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.

[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.

[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.

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!).

[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.

[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.