'Tom Petty, Somewhere You Feel Free': 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.

Also Read: How 'Somewhere You Feel Free' Director Captured Tom Petty's 'Mid-Life Crisis'Mei Makino’s “Inbetween Girl” won the audience award in the Visions category, and Kier-La Janisse’s “Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror” won the Midnighters audience award.The SXSW Film Festival went virtual this year after being canceled in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The festival ran between March 16-20 and was available through a single ticket and online platform.

The 28th SXSW Film Festival revealed the Audience Award winners today with Tom Petty, Somewhere You Feel Free, The Fallout and Not Going Quietly among the list of honorees. The news comes after the online edition of the fest announced its jury awards.

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.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticIn the last few years, I’ve happily watched and reviewed documentaries about Lady Gaga and Billie Eilish, both of which were presented on major streaming services (“Gaga: Five Foot Two” on Netflix, the current “Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry” on Apple Plus) and made with the full cooperation of the artists in question. So it wouldn’t have been shocking if either of those films turned out to be a glorified promotional tool.

Also Read: How 'Somewhere You Feel Free' Director Captured Tom Petty's 'Mid-Life Crisis'Drawn largely from 16mm film shot in and around the studio in the early ’90s, it’s cinema verité in feel even though it mixes in contemporary interviews with Rubin, Petty’s musical compadres Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench and others.

For the uninitiated, while the late American rocker Tom Petty’s 1994 album Wildflowers may not necessarily be his best record—that’s usually reserved for Full Moon Fever or Damn The Torpedoes— it was his most personal, his most beloved, and a favorite among fans (in a 2013 Rolling Stone fan poll it was ranked #1 among fan favorites).

Also Read: From Billie Eilish to the Bee Gees: Why Music Documentaries Are Booming“Wildflowers” would turn out to be one of the late musician’s most successful and acclaimed albums. Behind tracks like “You Wreck Me” and “It’s Good to Be King,” “Wildflowers” went triple platinum and notched a No.

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.