Coleman Spilde

SXSWI’ve always said that there aren’t enough romantic comedies that depict how horrific most first dates are. I’ve been on enough casual meetups that have crashed and burned to know that these disasters occur far more often than not. Clicking with someone—in real life, mind you—enough to make a couple of hours (at least!) of consistent, enjoyable conversation is not a simple feat. Luckily, A Nice Indian Boy, which premiered at SXSW March 12, isn’t afraid to let its pair of lovebirds seem fundamentally mismatched, and for a good chunk of its runtime to boot.That’s not an oversight in the film’s casting; its leads have chemistry, albeit some that takes a decent amount of time to dig up. Rather, it’s a testament to the movie’s reluctance to make life seem as neat and tidy as formulaic rom-coms suggest it can be. Love is messy, and we often don’t understand the true, immense depth of it until we’re many months or years into it, long enough to let it fundamentally change who we are. While that might be a little intense for a film that’s by-and-large a conventional romance, A Nice Indian Boy is filled with enough novel truth to transcend its predictable elements, leaving viewers with a film that feels like a genuine love story, instead of an idealistic imitation.A Nice Indian Boy centers on Naveen (Karan Soni), a young, gay Indian man whose traditional parents are anxious to set him up with a—you guessed it—nice Indian boy. Given that Naveen is both a wildly busy doctor and an adorably bashful wallflower, dating isn’t something that necessarily comes easily to him. He’s content with his job, small handful of friends, and weekly dinners with his mother Megha (Zarna Garg), father Archit (Harish Patel), and older sister Arundhathi (Sunita Mani), where the conversation usually turns to Naveen’s love life. Seemingly by divine intervention, he sees Jay (Jonathan Groff) while praying at a local Hindu temple, and meets him again when Jay is hired to take the new ID badge photos at Naveen’s hospital.Read more at The Daily Beast.

SXSWNot to be a millennial about this, but millennial comedy (and I mean good millennial comedy) gets a bad rap. That sort of gung-ho, idealistic humor—shared by the last generation raised before babies came out of the womb holding phones in their tiny, wrinkly hands—typically feels out of date the second a punchline drops. Making ageless comedy is tough, especially when the way the entire world operates shifts so quickly during a few years of your lifespan.One of the all-time finest examples of millennial comedy remains Broad City, the brilliantly observational, deceptively tender tale of two New York besties that, aside from a few notable moments here and there, hasn’t aged a day. Half of that timelessness can be credited to its star, Ilana Glazer, who co-created and co-wrote Broad City alongside Abbi Jacobson. During the show’s run, Glazer proved herself a sharp wit when it came to skewering the experience of being a modern woman trying not to be spat out by the world.Now, Glazer is doing it again. But this time, she’s shirking Broad City’s signature messiness for a more refined stab at enduring millennial satire. In Babes, which premiered as part of the headlining slate at SXSW Film Festival, Glazer and co-writer Josh Rabinowitz craft a fiercely funny and affectionate take on the pitfalls of best friendships as those relationships age. While Babes doesn’t seek to reinvent the comedy wheel, Glazer once again excavates the bonds between women to find all of those hysterical intricacies that she is so adept at sending up. With co-star Michelle Buteau and director Pamela Adlon also lending their considerable talents to Glazer and Rabinowitz’s writing, Babes’ benevolent humor skims the great heights of a Nora Ephron film for a modern take on womanhood that feels close to classic on arrival.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Blue Finch Film ReleasingAs a man, I’m going to come out and say that I’m tired of exploring the concept of toxic masculinity in horror and thriller movies. Before the pitchforks pierce my spleen, let me step back from that with a brief caveat: It’s not that the perils of machismo aren’t real, and aren’t an ever-present threat in everyday life. I agree with that wholeheartedly. My complaint stems from filmmakers trying to dissect the minutiae of masculinity’s effects and having no unique vision or concise message to convey.Alex Garland and Ari Aster—listen up, boys. It’s no longer enough to use ostentatious visual style and needlessly shocking gore and violence to communicate the dangers of unrestrained male virility. While Garland’s Men and Aster’s Midsommar (and, arguably, elements of Beau is Afraid) were admirable efforts to anatomize masculinity, the directors ultimately blundered their theses by getting lost in the trappings of what audiences were expecting from them, based on their prior films. Viewers anticipated disturbing images, shocking scares, and menacing characters, and they got them at the expense of any truly original narrative.Jack Clark and Jim Weir, who co-directed the Australian thriller Birdeater—which had its North American premiere at the SXSW festival March 9—are unencumbered by the problems that Aster and Garland fell prey to. For starters, Birdeater is the pair’s feature film debut; the audience has yet to develop preconceived notions over what the movie might feel like. But regardless of its directors’ prior credits, Birdeater blows Men, Midsommar, and any other recent examination of masculinity out of the water. Weir and Clark have crafted an absurdly stylish film that is never content to rest on its ambitious visual scope, burrowing under your skin for an eerie glimpse at how men in their youth form bonds with one another that can slowly spin out of control as time passes.Read more at The Daily Beast.

SXSWAsk three different people what they think gentrification is, and you might get three different answers in return. The term, which refers to the economic development of a low-income area that ultimately displaces the neighborhood’s current residents, is culturally ubiquitous but rarely understood. Because of its prevalence, the more broad definition of gentrification has been reduced in people’s minds to “the emergence of new coffee shops,” or “white people moving in with their dogs.” While those aren’t exactly untrue results of this phenomenon, gentrification typically begins higher up, when urban planners, city officials, and bigwig developers with their fat pockets lined with shiny gold doubloons get together to revamp local infrastructure. They are the ones whose residential buildings and businesses drive the cost of living up, and force residents out of homes they’ve lived in for decades.It was this type of insidious, dictionary-definition gentrification that led eight artists in Providence, Rhode Island, to fight back. Just before the turn of the century in August 1999, construction was completed on the massive Providence Place Mall, which developers hoped would boost the city’s economy and revitalize its downtown area. The shopping center was not just an eyesore in the middle of the city; it was also a central attraction that pushed the value of the surrounding land sky-high. Cut to local artist Michael Townsend and his friends being kicked out of their home nearby so it could be torn down and turned into a grocery store. While trying to find a new place to stay, they hatched a plan: Take an empty, forgotten space inside of the gigantic mall, and turn it into an apartment as a middle finger to the man.Except this wasn’t just some punks playing a prank. The apartment turned into a home, one that housed a group of working artists on and off for four whole years before it was discovered.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Laura Radford / Prime VideoThe road to Road House has been a bumpy one. Prime Video’s reimagining of the 1989 classic starring Patrick Swayze has been dotted with precarious mile markers signifying that critics and viewers might want to turn back before it’s too late.First, there was the fact that the Road House reimagining has been languishing in production purgatory since it was first announced all the way back in 2013. Then, after finally securing a director and cast after Amazon promised to funnel a billion dollars into filmmaking with its purchase of MGM, the film hit another yield sign. Director Doug Liman wrote a scathing (and slightly pompous) editorial in Deadline complaining that Amazon did not honor its promise, and is hindering the film by sending it straight to Prime Video without any theatrical release. Finally, R. Lance Hill, who wrote the original film, filed a lawsuit alleging copyright infringement and the use of AI-generated actor voices to complete the film’s production during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike.With all of those obstacles scuttled about the road in front of Road House, it briefly looked as though audiences might never make it to the titular dive bar to see Dalton (Jake Gyllenhaal) clean up trouble with his mean right hook. But all the chaos surrounding its production only increased the audience’s excitement for the film’s world premiere, held March 8 at Austin’s SXSW Film Festival. The chatter among viewers was loud and excitable, and for good reason: Road House is a rollicking rage fest. Liman was correct to be so haughty—this bloody action flick really might be his best movie yet.Read more at The Daily Beast.

SXSWIn the opening moments of I Don’t Understand You, a laugh-a-minute comedy that premiered March 8 during this year’s SXSW, stars Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells ask themselves a deceptively complicated question: Would you do anything for your child? It’s a query that most parents have probably pondered at one point or another. One hopes the immediate answer is “yes,” but if you want to get wacky with the hypothetical circumstances surrounding the question, that response might not come easily. But prospective parents Dom (Kroll) and Cole (Rannells) brush off their wandering minds, continuing the video they’re recording for a mother-to-be (Amanda Seyfried) whose baby they hope to adopt. This well-to-do couple has it pretty easy. What’s the wildest thing that they could have to do for their child?Unsurprisingly, that fateful question colors the increasingly wacky events of I Don’t Understand You, which has all the makings of a classic screwball comedy, right down to its fairly simple premise. Dom and Cole are about to celebrate their 10th anniversary with a trip to Italy, which will hopefully be their last vacation before they welcome their first child. (As victims of adoption fraud, they’re trying to keep their hopes from getting too high this time around.) But when their getaway takes an unexpectedly morbid turn, the couple is forced to prove to themselves just how desperately they want to be fathers, and make it back to the United States unscathed.While the title of I Don’t Understand You directly refers to the language barrier that Cole and Dom experience on their Italian vacay, it’s also a wink to how couples are forced to work together in the most dire of situations. For all of the time the movie spends mining humor from linguistic obstacles, it’s a miracle that it doesn’t veer into questionably xenophobic territory. But the film, directed and co-written by husbands David Joseph Craig and Brian Crano, is far too smart to fall prey to that cringey trap. I Don’t Understand You stays one step ahead of its audience at every turn, armed and ready with unexpected gags and memorably biting dialogue that repeatedly quell suspicions about whether or not it can pull off its big narrative swings.Read more at The Daily Beast.

OWNWe all know by now that “reality TV” is a misnomer. Very little of what we see in our favorite modern reality shows is truly “real,” and what is genuine has been carefully selected by editors and filtered through several producers. So, when Lindsay Lohan agreed to star in her eponymous docuseries in 2014, there was an inherent question over how much of what would air would be the then-embattled star’s real life and what would be manufactured by producers at the OWN network to drive ratings—and therefore line Oprah Winfrey’s pockets. Furthermore, the series began airing seven months after Lohan finished a court-ordered rehab stint, and began filming just four days after the rehab was completed. One had to wonder if the show’s mere existence was stomping in the muddy waters of pure exploitation.When Lindsay premiered 10 years ago this week, on March 9, 2014, it was immediately clear that the series would be all of these things and none of them, depending on how its star was feeling at any one moment. The show was painfully real (something you could tell by how uneventful it often was), slightly synthetic, and frequently opportunistic. But given that Lohan has inarguably reclaimed her narrative—and on her own terms—over the last decade, Lindsay feels like essential viewing to examine her hard-won comeback. Lohan’s new film, Irish Wish, premieres March 15, just days after the docuseries’ anniversary, which seems like an almost cosmically timed coincidence. Looking back at it now, the docuseries is a critical chronicling of the perils of stardom, a portrait of an infectious personality with endless drive, and a darkly funny dying gasp from reality television as it once was: the wild fuckin’ west.I should preface what’s to come with a caveat: Lindsay is not easily accessible. It’s not streaming anywhere, nor is it available to purchase or rent on media conglomerates like Prime Video or Apple TV. Whether that’s because the powers that be yanked it from public consciousness to erase this historical item from us, or is just owing to the public’s waning investment in the project, I’m not sure. The series is, however, not too difficult to find online if you’ve got a bit of internet savvy, and there is a bevy of clips on YouTube and X to convey exactly the kind of chaos that this show was dishing out in hefty, lunch lady ladlefuls.Read more at The Daily Beast.