'Shithouse': Film Review | SXSW 2020

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

America's opioid crisis would seem too dire a subject to receive shallow cinematic treatment. So it's ironic, then, that Spencer T.

From What's New Pussycat? to Dressed to Kill, Silence of the Lambs to Basic Instinct, the big screen hasn't lacked for memorably twisted shrinks. Suffice it to say that the latest psycho psych, Dr.

A somber drama built on the idea that a small town is no place to try keeping secrets, Scott Teems' The Quarry pits a Texas police chief (Michael Shannon) against a newly arrived preacher (Shea Whigham) who isn't who he claims to be. Catalina Sandino Moreno and Bobby Soto round out a very fine cast; but sensitive performances only go so far toward generating sparks in the slow-moving film, which never becomes the crime-and-punishment nail-biter it might've been.

"He knows what he does, but he ain't got no clue who he is": The opening quote in Benjamin May's The Legend of Swee' Pea pretty well sums up the tone of a doc about a basketball player who let success slip away from him. Lloyd Daniels, who as a teen drew comparisons to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and other greats, was so attractive to college coaches that he wound up sneaking into a university without a high school degree.

An earnest, over-stuffed infomercial for the potential and benefits of practicing mindfulness.

This unfussy eco-doc benefits from the earnest commitment of Javier Bardem as he joins Greenpeace in an Antarctic conservation mission.

The credited adaptation source for Love Wedding Repeat might be a minor French comedy from 2012 called Plan de table, but the model for this strained opera buffa is two Brit hits from the 1990s: Sliding Doors and Four Weddings and a Funeral. From the first comes the idea of parallel realities, their varying permutations dictated by chance; from the second, well, it's right there in the new film's title.

Crazy Rich Asians may have been named after (a tiny minority of) Asians in Asia, but it likely became so widely embraced by Asian Americans because it acknowledged us as a group distinct from our ethnic counterparts on the other side of the Pacific. Director Jon M.

[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.

[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.