‘Kill It and Leave This Town’: Film Review

[Note: In the wake ofSXSW's cancellation this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select fest entries that elected to premiere digitally.] From its forbidden beginnings to its decades-long staying power, onstage and off, the love story of Johnny Cash and June Carter has had a mythic hold on the pop-culture imagination.

Best known for the unexpectedly soul-shattering San Francisco suicide doc “The Bridge,” indie filmmaker Eric Steel came out and came of age in 1980s New York at a moment just before AIDS devastated the city’s gay community. Such timing must have been surreal, to assume something so liberating about one’s own identity, only to watch in fear and uncertainty as this fraternity of newfound freedom collapsed around him.

Escaping human society is one thing, human nature quite another in “The Decline.” The Canadian thriller, available exclusively through Netflix, offers a modicum of timeliness for U.S. viewers who’ve coped with the coronavirus crisis by patronizing gun stores en masse: This fiction offers a sort of “how not to” in terms of locked ’n’ loaded response to civilization’s potential meltdown, as a group of survivalists discover they’ll be lucky to survive each other.

Time tugs strangely on the sleeve of “Sweet Thing,” a heartfelt, hopeful yet slightly hollow black-and-white coming-of-ager from American indie stalwart Alexandre Rockwell (“In the Soup,” “Pete Smalls Is Dead”). A lively, bittersweet meditation on an impoverished childhood that is still rich in innocence and imagination, it feels old-fashioned in a way that does not quite gel with its bid for contemporary grit.

A riveting and radical act of empathy, with actress Deragh Campbell’s unforgettably embodied portrayal of mental instability as the eye of its storm, Canadian director Kazik Radwanski’s astonishing third feature (after “How Heavy This Hammer” and “Tower”) is a brief, bracing burst of microbudget indie filmmaking at its most powerful.

You might think that someone raised deep within a barbecue dynasty would have his nose so tuned to smoke that he wouldn't have a palate for much beyond that. Not so in Uncorked, Prentice Penny's story of a son (Mamoudou Athie) whose passion for fine wine carries him away from the BBQ joint his father (Courtney B.

[Note: In the wake ofSXSW's cancellation this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select fest entries that elected to premiere digitally.] Just weeks after arriving in the United States, a 26-year-old visiting scholar from a small city in southern China disappeared from her Illinois campus. Two years later, in the summer of 2019, her suspected kidnapper went on trial.

Adam Lambert — Photo courtesy of Edge Publicity

Filmmaker Rob Beemer is smart enough to know that an esoteric subject demands the presence of celebrities to garner attention. Thus, his documentary chronicling the rise of mindfulness and meditation over the last few decades opens with footage of such familiar faces as Anderson Cooper, Oprah Winfrey and actor Patrick Dempsey.

Like the revelation that the dowdy French-cuisine evangelist Julia Child worked for American intelligence operations during World War II, there's something quaint and almost comic about the historical nugget upon which Jonathan Jakubowicz's Resistance is based: Before he became the most famous mime artist in history, Marcel Marceau worked in the French Resistance, forging passports and smuggling Jewish children across borders to save them from Nazi exterminators.

“Tape,” a guerrilla indie drama that confronts some of the ways sexual harassment has been embedded in the entertainment industry, begins with Rosa (Annarosa Mudd) getting ready to go undercover — but really, she’s dressing for battle. After rigging herself up with a hidden camera, she mutilates her body in homage to Lavinia in “Titus Andronicus,” piercing her own tongue and using a razor blade to carve a bracelet of blood around her wrist.

[Note: In the wake of SXSW's cancellation this year, The Hollywood Reporter is reviewing select fest entries that elected to premiere digitally.] Movies about boys in high school and college spill over with reckless partiers, nerdy loners and aggrieved misfits eager to show the world what they're made of.

There will likely be no shortage of movies dealing with #MeToo themes, but Deborah Kampmeir's indie feature scores points by being one of the earliest. A hard-hitting psychological drama about an actress who surreptitiously monitors her former assailant and his current prospective victim, Tape benefits from its well-executed thriller mechanics and terrific performances by its three leads.

Young Deragh Campbell is a hard actress to forget, even in offbeat roles like an obsessed researcher of family history in MS Slavic 7or its docudrama precursor Never Eat Alone, both by filmmaker Sofia Bohdanowicz. Kazik Radwanski’s Anne at 13,000 Ft.

Refreshing as a river dip on a hot day, but also mildly melancholic, as though perhaps it is the last swim of the summer, Guillaume Brac’s wise, witty “À l’abordage” is an optimistic portrait of gentle disappointment, the kind a youthful generation has to experience before growing up a little bit.

Red Heavenis timely in a way that the filmmakers could not have anticipated when they started making the documentary five years ago: It gazes head-on at isolation, confinement, boredom and stress — issues that nearly everyone is confronting in some combination or another as the world goes on coronavirus lockdown. But there's a lightness to the film as it explores weighty matters, along with a dash of reality show dynamics, framing cosmic questions in a familiar format.

Every time a new mental-health therapy arrives, it’s propelled by the ideology — and the testimonials — of a religion. Sigmund Freud’s descriptions of psychoanalysis all point to the miracle-cure mythology of the moment when a patient, at long last, touches the nerve of his or her suppressed trauma and is liberated from it.

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.

The famous quote from 13th century Sufi mystic Rumi about the place beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing provides the title of I'll Meet You There, writer-director Iram Parveen Bilal's domestic drama set in a Pakistani immigrant community in Chicago.

How many women drummers can most people name? Tomboy pointedly doesn't try to fill that sparse category. Instead, this enlightening but uneven documentary profiles four representative drummers from different generations and with a range of musical styles.