'My Darling Vivian': Film Review | SXSW 2020

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.

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.

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.

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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.

[Note: In the wake of SXSW's cancellation this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select fest entries that elected to premiere digitally.] One of the timeliest stories of 2020, it turns out, is how the Cambodian refugee community took over the Southern California donut industry from the 1980s on.

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.

[Note: In the wake of SXSW's cancellation this year, The Hollywood Reporter is reviewing select fest entries that elected to premiere digitally.] A few years ago, SXSW presented a film called Thank You Del, which introduced newbies to the tremendously influential improv teacher Del Close via an annual tribute hosted by the Upright Citizens Brigade.

[Note: In the wake of SXSW's cancellation this year, The Hollywood Reporter is reviewing select fest entries that elected to premiere digitally.] Hearing the term "Wakaliwood," most cinephiles will think of Bollywood, Nollywood and other portmanteaus used to designate a large region of cinematic production — often one viewed with some condescension (if seen at all) by the more entrenched parts of the film industry.