Two-sentence SXSW movie reviews

I spent the week living at my favorite film festival and have gospel to spread

Mo Stark stars in director Ben Jacobson’s “Bunny,” which made its world premiere at South by Southwest on March 8.

After a South by Southwest screening on Friday, one of the actors asked me how long I’d been working with the film festival. I explained my whole deal as a freelancer, that contracting as an associate programmer is just one of my gigs. Don’t worry, I quickly added: “But this is really what I love do. I want it to be everything I do.”

The 2025 fest ended on Saturday, which feels nuts after all those screeners and all that work with all those great people. Over the course of nine days, I introduced and/or moderated Q&As for 22-count-’em-22 films. In between, I drank 50 Cokes Zero, snuck into a few Getty Images, and caught up with friends old and new.

Like last year, this was a clarifying week of living in an Alamo Drafthouse. It’s nice when doing something you always dreamed of doing feels natural.

Anyway, here are some two-sentence reviews from my travels, for your Letterboxd watchlisting pleasure. I actually caught a lot of stuff I hadn’t seen yet!

“Good Boy”: Haunted house jump scare vehicle from the POV of a very sweet dog named Indy. He is the Marlon Brando of dogs, and he should teach at Juilliard. (On Letterboxd)

“She’s the He”: A rare tropical bird of a movie that remixes teen gender-bender comedies — your “She’s the Man,” your “Just One of the Guys,” things of that nature — with a predominantly transgender cast. A riotous, punk cackle with the soul of a zine and the heart of a champion. (On Letterboxd)

“Fucktoys”: Color-saturated, 16mm reverie/tragicomedy about love, curses, and trash that Gregg Araki would goon over. Grateful that writer/director/executive producer/star Annapurna Sriram’s vision included Big Freedia as a swamp-dwelling psychic. (On Letterboxd)

“The Baltimorons”: A lovable but melancholy goof plumbs the depths of his soul with a crab trap, over the course of a madcap holiday spent with a prickly divorcée dentist. Clear a space on the “modern Christmas classics” shelf next to “The Holdovers.” (On Letterboxd)

“Bunny”: An East Village hustler, the pillar of his community, scrambles to hide some dead bodies on his birthday — but really, it’s about the power of friendship. A one-bad-day movie that makes such a thing seem like a sweet hang. (On Letterboxd)

“Clown in a Cornfield”: Gleefully cornball slasher that transcends its Shudder logo screen with self-aware smarts in all the right places. Also, gay teens. (On Letterboxd)

“Redux Redux”: A woman-led multiverse thriller that impels me to say to you, “OK, but don’t get hung up on the multiverse thing.” Thick with action sequences, Western-style grit, and tasty world-building. (On Letterboxd)

“The Infinite Husk”: “Under the Skin” (complete with the visual flair) by way of your freshman Intro the Philosophy class. Extraterrestrial and existential. (On Letterboxd)

“ASCO: Without Permission”: A chronicle of the lives and legacies of cool-as-hell Chicano art collective Asco, paired with filmic interpretations of their work by young artists. The kind of documentary that makes you mad you hadn’t heard of the subject before. (On Letterboxd)

“The Home”: Swedish horror about aging and abuse with a couple dynamite performances at the center. The lead actor is giving “hunky David Dastmalchian;” no offense meant to actual David Dastmalchian. (On Letterboxd)

One rad thing

Friend of the ’stack Francesca sent me a clip of this Strawberry Switchblade cover of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene,” and I immediately imprinted upon it like a baby bird.

You can’t swing a slutty bank teller without finding someone’s rendition of this song, but the Scottish new wave band’s 1985 version is a rare gem yet. It’s neither slavishly devoted to Parton’s 1973 original, nor misguidedly far afield. The relative lack of time that elapsed between “Jolene” 1.0 and this cover also makes ya think. It would be a little like Magdalena Bay covering a Miranda Lambert song from the 2010s. Or something.

Perhaps related: Strawberry Switchblade sounds like a really fun Appalachian insult.

Outbox

Amanda Petrusich’s new profile of Lucy Dacus for The New Yorker is predictably lovely. I’m a sucker for quotes from artistic collaborators in these kinds of things; imagine if a major magazine called you up and asked you to say something nice about one of your friends. That’s cute, c’mon. Here’s Hozier on Lucy:

“‘Her work has the gift of being able to fall upon the inanimate or the mundane, and pull from it the startlingly intimate,’ the singer Hozier, who provides guest vocals on ‘Bullseye,’ a new song, told me. ‘I’ve always loved the eye through which her lyrical voice finds the world.’”

Lucy also drops this heater, all casual-like: “Whenever you love anything a lot, you’re booked for grief.”

Read the profile here.

…

Wake up, babe; new live music review by Amanda O’Donnell just dropped for Texas Monthly. This sublime dispatch from Willie Nelson’s Luck Reunion captures the vibe like how a draw of smoke catches in your throat. The bits of scene-setting color pop, like this observation after Nelson’s son, Micah, detailed the inspiration for a song:

“Some onlookers in cowboy hats watching from outside the festival grounds laughed at the explanation and passed a lit joint through the chain-link fence to a couple inside.”

Read the story here.