'Spring Valley': Film Review | SXSW 2021

Haley Bosselman editorThe Sun Valley Film Festival has announced its film slate and honorees, who will include Ethan Hawke, Shaka King and Gal Gadot.As SVFF Vision Award Recipients, Hawke and Gadot are recognized for their contributions to the art of cinema.

Irresistibly likable musical Best Summer Ever offers the wholesome tale of Sage and Tony, two teenagers in love, winningly played by Shannon DeVido and Ricky Wilson Jr. respectively.

“America has demonstrated its greatness time and time and time again,” proclaims ACLU attorney Jeffery Robinson from a stage early in the new documentary Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America, “and America is one of the most racist countries on the face of this earth.” When he continues, “those two things are not mutually exclusive,” the audience erupts in applause.

When we began lockdown a year ago, a popular meme went around informing people that William Shakespeare wrote King Lear while isolating amid the bubonic plague. As weeks and months went by, the meme was repurposed to compare writing King Lear to learning to bake bread orto putting on pants in the morning.

The way profound grief can become a path leading to belief in reincarnation and other supernatural phenomena forms the thematic tarmac for SXSW competitor Here Before. This wintery, unsettling drama, flecked with horror tropes in the tradition of Don't Look Now, Birth and other British-made meditations on loss, marks a distinctive and impressive debut for writer-director Stacey Gregg, who has worked mostly in British and Irish theater as well as writing episodes for TV shows such as Riviera.

In a memorable episode of Seinfeld, George Costanza decides to change his life by doing the opposite of what he usually does in his daily decision-making. That same existential experiment drives Violet, although without the intended laughs.

Like swapping out your old Nokia flip-phone for a Huawei P40 with 5G capabilities, NASA will soon be sending a telescope into space that will make the Hubble, which has been in service since 1990, look like a remnant from a more primitive time.

Henry Lawson's 1892 short story The Drover's Wife is a beloved classic from Australia's pioneering past. But like most colonial literature, it marginalizes the people of the First Nations, generally depicted as scoundrels or savages.

In a screen-acting career spanning countless cult films and trash classics over more than half a century, Udo Kier has created no shortage of memorably campy moments.

Prolific Welsh TV director Lee Haven Jones makes a confident move into features with The Feast, a slow-burn morality tale in which a smug politician and his family get an unforgiving lesson on the consequences of turning their backs on pastoral tradition in favor of greed. Solemn to a fault, right down to the baroque religiosity of Vivaldi during both the prelude and aftermath of carnage, this is a glowering mood piece that could have had a little more fun with its thinly drawn characters.

That the documentary United States vs. Reality Winner achieves its primary goals makes it a fairly successful film.

Walking viewers through one of the most unlikely careers in recent movie history, Clerk finds one of Kevin Smith's longtime collaborators interviewing practically everyone in the writer/director/podcaster/raconteur/etc's orbit. It's a beat-by-beat chronology in which even shameful entries on the filmography (Cop Out, Yoga Hosers) get at least a mention, and where others are remembered perhaps too fondly.

With his second solo album, Tom Petty wanted to step away from the Heartbreakers, his band of musical brothers for almost 20 years at the time. The beautiful paradox is that, player by player, the people with whom he chose to record Wildflowers turned out to be those very same musicians (the exception being a new drummer, Steve Ferrone, who would go on to become a full-fledged Heartbreaker of long standing).

It's a horrendous sign of the times that the school shooting is already a well-traveled movie trope. Many films, among them Elephant, And Then I Go and We Need to Talk About Kevin, have explored the (male) killers' alienation from family and peers, and the lead-up to their attacks.

Hollywood likes shades of gray mostly in very black-and-white terms. The virulent racist who becomes a civil rights supporter.

A stirring tale of activism shaped by personal suffering, Nicholas Bruckman's Not Going Quietly follows a health care-advocacy campaign whose leader, Ady Barkan, knew he might be spending his final days of life as he knew it for the cause. Known to many for videos in which the ALS patient put lawmakers on the spot — asking them not to cut the benefits that could keep him alive —Barkan proves a highly engaging man, impassioned but funnier than a terminally ill man should be.

Midway through Jeremy Workman's SXSW-premiering documentary Lily Topples the World, there's a scene of premature topplation unlikely to be supplanted among the year's most tragic cinematic moments. It doesn't matter that I've warned you to expect it, because in the world of professional domino toppling, the line between a meticulously constructed piece of art waiting for a perfectly timed nudge and that same piece of art rushing toward its inevitable doom ahead of schedule can be razor-thin.

A twisty true-crime story loses much of its appeal in Ursula Macfarlane's The Lost Sons, a "who am I?" doc whose subject is more fascinated with that question than most viewers will be. Paul Fronczak was ten years old when he learned he had been the victim of a foiled newborn abduction; only decades later did he realize his story was even more convoluted.

Actor Selma Blair first appears in the new documentary about her struggles with multiple sclerosis (MS) dressed as Norma Desmond, the reclusive, washed-up silent-film star played by Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. In a sparkly turban, a floor-length leopard-print dress and her cane by her side, Blair displays a jokey self-awareness about her public image, especially since announcing her diagnosis in October 2018.

Some films provide such obvious American remake fodder that you just want to draw a protective circle around them to ensure that people experience the unassuming charms of the original. Norwegian director Yngvild Sve Flikke's raucous, rude and ultimately poignant pregnancy comedy is an excellent example.