'The Lost Sons': Film Review | SXSW 2021

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.

In the fall of 2015, a 16-year-old girl named Shakara was removed from her math class by school officer Ben Fields with such force that footage of the incident went viral. “Are you gonna come with me, or am I gonna make you?” asks Fields in a video, before flipping over Shakara’s desk with her in it, landing the teenager on her back with the desk overturned above her.

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.

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.

A familiar tale about learning to embrace life again is revitalized by cultural specificity in Islands, Martin Edralin’s first film. Vying in SXSW’s narrative feature competition this year, the bilingual drama opens with a Filipino-Canadian family of three kneeling in church in front of a row of red votive candles.

Like the blistering blues song by Janis Joplin that gives the movie its title, Lissette Feliciano's Women Is Losers has attitude to spare. Beginning in 1967 and concluding on the 1973 day when the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Roe v.

Not long into I'm Your Man, Dan Stevens' character, a genial android named Tom, arranges a perfectly contrived combination of romantic clichés for his would-be partner, Alma. The rose petals are "artfully" strewn, the candles flicker, and flutes of bubbly are ready for sipping beside the bubble-filled tub.

There’s a brief shot early on in Georgian filmmaker Alexandre Koberidze’s wondrous romance and Berlinale competition entry What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (Ras vkhedavt, rodesac cas vukurebt?) that might seem to illustrate something quite mundane. The male protagonist’s soccer practice session has ended.

There's sardonic self-deprecation in the part Daniel Brühl has chosen for himself in his first feature as director, that of a European movie star sweating over an audition for a Hollywood superhero film that stands to push his fame — and his bank account — to the next level. But celebrity entitlement is only one part of the package.

Adding another strong voice to the chorus of anti-capital-punishment films coming out of Iran is Ballad of a White Cow (Ghasideyeh gave sefid), a drama almost entirely centered on the wife of a condemned man who is wrongfully executed for murder in the opening scene.

Japanese writer-director Ryusuke Hamaguchi won wide acclaim and festival prizes with his 2015 breakthrough feature, the bittersweet ensemble drama Happy Hour. But the nuanced, novelistic eye behind that delicately observed five-hour epic seemed to desert Hamaguchi on his 2018 anti-romance Asako I & II, which premiered to lukewarm reviews in Cannes.

In Dasha Nekrasova’s feature directorial debut, The Scary of Sixty-First, New York City is a desolate place. The sky is a muddy beige with no indication of sun.

There's a gorgeous scene early in Petite Maman that epitomizes the unfussy economy and emotional perceptiveness of Céline Sciamma's films. Watching intently from the back seat of the family car as her mother climbs in, stifling tears, and they head off to begin packing up the home of the maternal grandmother who has recently died, the film's 8-year-old protagonist asks permission to break out the snacks.

Despite its simple title, Mexican filmmaker Alonso Ruizpalacios’ latest feature is far from a simple shoot-'em-up cop movie. It’s more like a cop movie written by Jacques Derrida, directed with nods to Wes Anderson and Jean-Luc Godard and then remixed by Abbas Kiarostami in its efforts to tear down the fourth wall.