A film finally hit this year’s relatively down SXSW like a bolt of lightning, producing multiple in-film applause breaks and a standing ovation at the end. Andrew Patterson’s “The Rivals of Amziah King” is a crowd-pleasing wonder, a new classic of the American South that hums with earnest adoration for the people of this region, what they do, and how they celebrate life. Patterson’s “The Vast of Night” was a debut that seemed hard to top, a film that could be a gateway to a sophomore slump, but he proves with this venture that he is a passionate talent with a unique cinematic language. “Amziah King” is not what you expect, a film that floats in and out of music and storytelling like a great country album. Star Matthew McConaughey, doing his first non-animated film work in six years, introduced the film by saying it was “for film lovers and farmers,” and it’s not just a line. This is something that could really break out for the right studio. They’ll play it before every Longhorns game.
“The Rivals of Amziah King” opens by setting a joyous template. Amziah (a fantastic McConaughey, leaning into his Southern charm in ways that make him impossible to dislike) has gathered his friends for a performance in a parking lot of a drive-thru burger and shake joint. They order their food and then they burst into song as the credits roll, Patterson freezing frames, slowing others down, and turning the camera into a player in the hoedown. It is electric as McConaughey and his mates hoot and holler one of several original songs produced by T-Bone Burnett. “The Rivals of Amziah King” is about communities in which people are gonna answer the call when you ask them to pop by with a banjo and play a song you’ve been working on just as easily as they’ll answer when you need real help in a life-or-death situation. The music here reflects the culture and the vibe with original tunes by The Avett Brothers and Ben Hardesty, who is also in the film as one of King clan. The music absolutely rules in a way that most original musicals have not in recent years.
King is a beekeeper, a more profitable and dangerous industry than you may have imagined. James Montague’s script is very purposefully episodic, like a folk album shifting from song to song but maintaining a tone throughout, until the second half when it gains more narrative focus.
Despite the stellar performance that carries that B-side to this recording, I preferred the loose rhythm of the first, one that connects stories like King tells in an incredible scene around a potluck, a staple of Southern culture. A young woman he once fostered named Kateri (the phenomenal Angelina LookingGlass, who is going to be a star) has suddenly dropped back into his life, and he’s telling her stories about the families behind the dishes on the table. It’s a funny, clever scene that leans into the film’s themes of storytelling and community.
King’s empire is being threatened by rival beekeepers who are threatening to steal hives that he refuses to sell. Working with Kateri and a group of great character actors that includes Rob Morgan and Cole Sprouse, King tries to maintain high ground, but “Rivals” goes places you wouldn’t expect. It sort of becomes a Western, a tale of vengeance under a new Sheriff in town.
Some will find elements like the material that directly compares the soldiers in King’s crew to bees hokey, but we accept hokey in folk and country music all the time. These are fables told around a campfire with a jar of moonshine in your hand and music in the air, stories that may not be about us but that we can see ourselves in, tales that make us reconsider the people we value in our lives and how far we’d go for them.
They couldn’t be more tonally different, but there are aspects of Babak Anvari’s harrowing “Hallow Road” that connect the films. They’re both culturally specific, showcases for great performances, and assertions of their director’s copious talents. Anvari has struggled a bit since his excellent “Under the Shadow,” but this one is nearly as good, a two-hander about a parental nightmare that doesn’t underline or highlight its themes as much as allow viewers to take from it what they choose. It’s a terrifying journey into the night, a bit of folk horror about parents losing their grip on their daughter, and it’s easily one of the best of SXSW 2025.
It could be because of my stage experience, but I’m kind of a sucker for single-setting two-handers, and “Hallow Road” takes place almost entirely in a car on a lonely road in the middle of the night. That’s where we find Maggie (Rosamund Pike) and Frank (Matthew Rhys) after a panicked phone call from their daughter Alice (Megan McDonnell). We don’t know much but signs of an outburst around the flat and snippets of dialogue make it clear that Alice drove off in the middle of the night after a fight with one or both of her parents. And she’s calling because she’s deep in a forest on the edge of the city and, well, someone ran into the road. She hit them and she has no idea what to do.
As Frank and Maggie race to the scene to help, Maggie, a paramedic, first tries to walk Alice through CPR on the phone. It doesn’t go well. And then things get really weird. Why is it taking so long to get there? And should they call the authorities? Frank wants to get there and devise a story that he was driving instead. Maggie does not. As Rhys and Pike debate the right course of action, a creeping dread sneaks into the film, a sense that neither of these well-intentioned people can save their daughter from what’s coming. As a parent, I can affirm that the idea that you won’t be able to protect your child from the danger of the world keeps you up at night. This film is build on that fear in truly memorable ways.
Parental dread in the confined space of a car would be an acting challenge for anyone but Pike and Rhys nail the rhythms of these characters without the tics and overacting that other performers would have leaned on like a crutch. These two have clearly disagreed at times about how to handle this difficult passage of life in which you want to support your child as they become an adult and giving her the freedom to make her own decisions. Pike has a startling immediacy—we believe her concern, but she also imbues the character with the instincts of a paramedic, someone trained to respond with urgency. Rhys gets a more panicked, protective temperature, trying to fix a situation that mom knows is getting increasingly unfixable.
Without spoiling, “Hallow Road” goes some surreal places, and lands on a twist that’s only revealed in the credits (don’t jump up when it ends) that allows for even further interpretations. Some may find that kind of ending frustrating, but I love films like this that don’t spoon-feed their audience answers. Nightmares often have vague endings that force us to rethink what they were actually about in the light of day.
There’s also a surreal aspect to much of Andre Gaines’ “The Dutchman,” a metatextual adaptation of Amiri Baraka’s 1964 play of the same name, but one that loses much of the thrust of the original by being so self-aware of its many messages without ever finding a way to cohere them into a single vision. It’s an ambitious misfire, a big swing with a lot of ideas, but it’s so airless and stuffy that those ideas are never given any room to breathe.
Baraka’s Obie Award-winning play was a shocking revelation in 1964. The one-act is only half an hour, and it came about as Baraka’s response to both the rise of the Black Power Movement and his divorce from Hettie Jones. It’s a case of a playwright interrogating not just the world around him but his place in it as a Black man. It’s not a coincidence that it was the last play that Baraka published under the name LeRoi Jones.
Rather than just adapt The Dutchman again, which happened in 1967 already, Gaines, uses the text as a jumping off point for a modern examination of Black masculinity. The always-good Andre Holland plays Clay, who is struggling in his marriage to Kaya (Zazie Beetz). Their therapist (the wonderful Stephen McKinley Henderson, who was actually friends with Baraka) gives Clay a physical copy of The Dutchman, and the film of the same name spins off into a long journey over the course of the evening, not unlike how seeing his wife as a sexual being sent Tom Cruise spiraling through “Eyes Wide Shut.”
Clay meets a seductress named Lula (Kate Mara) on the train (which is where the entire play took place). She’s scantily dressed, heavily made-up, and literally carries a red apple with her like she’s ready to tempt Clay from the Garden of Eden. The first encounter on the train uses some of Baraka’s dialogue, and it’s engaging in its theatricality, almost dreamlike.
“The Dutchman” falters when Clay and Lula leave the train, and Gaines takes over the narrative. Giving a character who is largely a symbol like Lula so much screen time in more realistic settings like the party that Clay was headed to in the first place creates a conflict of tones that drags down the midsection. And then everything flies apart in the final act when Gaines seeks to underline his messaging, eschewing any potential subtlety for repetition. The effort to bring a seminal text from the ‘60s into an era when Black masculinity is still threatened and commodified is a noble one, but Gaines never quite figures out how to mold this clay into something that’s as effective as simply reading or watching the original.
Since its first season debuted in 2021, Prime Video’s “The Wheel of Time” has suffered from bloated storytelling and worldbuilding that has confused even the most fervent fantasy consumers. Despite reports that it is one of the streamer’s most popular series, it hasn’t fully garnered the attention of general audiences and the respect of devoted Robert Jordan fans. In a post-“Game of Thrones” landscape, it’s hard to craft a genre show that can withstand those that have come before it.
The season two finale of “The Wheel of Time” finally brought all of its characters back together during a heated battle in the city of Falme. When the battle was won, Rand al’Thor (Josha Stradowski) was declared the powerful Dragon Reborn. With one of the show’s biggest mysteries finally being put to bed, the series felt forced to hang in limbo. Thankfully, with its third season, it seems like showrunner Rafe Judkins is finally being given the space to make the show he initially set out to create. But in a culture that chews series up and spits them out, is it enough?
Season three begins immediately where the previous season left off, featuring a confrontation between the Aes Sedai, as their leader Siuan Sanche (Sophie Okonedo), confronts Liandran Guirale (Kate Fleetwood), who has been revealed to be a Darkfriend. Although she appears to be an outlier, it is quickly revealed that she’s not alone, and an all-out battle between heroes and villains occurs. The magical battle is full of bloody carnage and stunning choreography, something that “The Wheel of Time” has been lacking compared to its fantasy television peers.
While this spectacle is a fantastic change of pace, the rest of the season is far different. With the White Tower divided beyond repair, and enemies returning to the Two Rivers, it seems like the forces of the dark being in pursuit of the Dragon are the least of The Emond’s Field Five’s worries. They once again split up to take on varying tasks, but the characters who are paired with one another work in each other’s favor. The standout from this season, who previously felt like a duller version of “Dune”’s Paul Atreides, is Rand, whose newfound power begins to fracture his relationships with those he cares for most.
“The more he channels, the more the darkness will take him,” Moiraine Damodred (Rosamund Pike) tells of Rand’s growing power. The mysterious identity of the Dragon Reborn has plagued the series to a fault. Still, season three is finally allowed to deconstruct the “chosen one” trope, allowing Stradowski to showcase the best performance the show has had to offer so far. As his newfound powers entice and confuse him, his allegiance to the life he had before this journey begins to waver. It makes for some enticing drama with his love interest Egwene al’Vere (Madeleine Madden), who watches closely as her lover begins to change.
She herself is going through a transformation, one which, after breaking out of her enslavement in season two, leaves her haunted beyond repair. Along with her, the show finally takes time for all its characters to reckon with the trauma they’ve faced since leaving the Two Rivers, allowing them to understand themselves further and giving the series an emotional core for its audience to latch on to. It’s something this show has been lacking for too long, but finally, its characters are given a chance to shine in a story that previously was far too bloated to take interest in all of them.
Kae Alexander (Min), Dónal Finn (Mat Cauthon)
It’s when one of the groups–featuring Rand, Moiraine, Egwene, al’Lan Mandragoran (Daniel Henney), and others– journey to the desert land of Aiel that each aspect of the show intertwines to create one of the best episodes of the series. Reaching the city of Rhuidean, our characters are forced into a clouded oblivion, making for a mesmerizing visual feast that this series’ peers don’t come close to matching. In it, Moiranie sees visions of lives she and Rand could have lived, together and apart. However, Rand sees visions of where his powers could have taken him had he embarked on a different journey. These dreams build different worlds from each of their memories, fracturing their hopes and fears to force each of them to contemplate the path they are currently on.
With season three, it finally feels like “The Wheel of Time” can become the show it was always meant to be. But, in a fantasy television landscape that grows each year, you can’t help but wonder if it may be too late. Though it slowly progresses into a fascinating examination of the prophecies that have plagued fantasy heroes and villains, the journey to get to this season has been nothing short of grueling. Hopefully, from here, the show can continue to grow, and the fans who have denounced the previous seasons are willing to give this much stronger venture a shot.
Entire season screened for review. Airs Thursdays on Prime.
The Oscar-nominated live-action short “A Lien,” directed by David and Sam Cutler-Kreutz, is a cry for help. Not just from the characters. Not just from the filmmakers. It represents a truth about our immigration system that leaves many innocent people feeling helpless, afraid and separated from anyone who can lend a hand in the situation. By the film’s end, we have been experiencing a story that is built like a thriller, but has its roots in a systemic failure by all authorities involved.
In the film, a married couple, Sofia (Victoria Ratermanis) and Oscar Gomez (William Martinez), arrive at an immigration office with their young daughter, Nina (Karolyn Rivera), in tow. Oscar is there to be interviewed for his green card. He has all the paperwork, all the forms signed and is ready for a stressful, but hopeful, day that has been a long time coming. He brings Nina to the interview with him and Sofia stays behind in the waiting room where there are other hopeful citizens who will be going through the same process.
What happens to these people might not surprise you, but the coda at the film’s end might drive the point home in a way you might not expect.
I have seen two films by the Cutler-Kreutzes (I programmed their latest short film “Trapped” at last year’s Chicago Critics Film Festival), and I have great admiration for how they manage to craft these tight thrillers and make you feel like you’re in the throes of an impossible situation. “Trapped” centers on an overnight high school janitor being forced to deal with upper-class seniors trying to orchestrate a dangerous prank. “A Lien” is a more political film with a subject that everyone has an opinion about and has often been a leading headline. Both films feel immediate and tense and are acted to perfection.
As I wrote in my Oscars shorts piece last month, “A Lien” bears some similarity to another short film I wrote about a year ago called “I Have No Tears And I Must Cry,” by Luis Fernando Puente. Both films deal with the stress of being interviewed for a green card by someone who seems intent on making the process more difficult than it needs to be. The films have different approaches, conflicts, and outcomes, but both put us in the room with these people. Their personal lives, dreams, and good, purposeful intentions are on the line as someone–or something–could intervene at any moment and change their trajectories forever. And it’s all in a day’s work for the people with all the power.
Warning: Spoilers ahead.
Q&A with Sam Cutler-Kreutz
How did this come about?
We stumbled across the marriage entrapment process in 2018 and immediately felt that we had to do something. The idea that this twisting of immigration rules happens right now, in states across the US, massively damaging the lives of families, sparked our desire to advocate against this practice. As filmmakers we feel the most impactful thing we can do is call attention to this insane process and intertwine it with a story that shows the real impact it has.
We strongly believe that art is political in nature. For us it’s about trying to engage with the cultural themes around us, finding ways as directors to soak up the zeitgeist, crystalize it, and give it back to the viewer in a form they can engage with. Oftentimes that comes down to trying to bring large and convoluted themes down to the individual level – looking at the impact on families or single people. Strangely the most hyper specific is often the most universal.
The film has a leanness to it that feels like it has been edited down to its barest essentials. Did you try other versions that were longer and maybe less tight?
I think there is an element of exploration in every writing process, and with this film, we definitely spent time figuring out where to start and end the film. The circular nature of the car-to-car seemed to work well, and once we hit on the idea of bringing the hair braiding back, the whole thing just clicked. Something about Nina’s basic desire to have her hair braided and its reminder about the micro needs of the moment, even as the macro is falling apart around the characters, helped drive home the film’s themes and remind us that immigration is about humans at its core.
There are so many ways this film could have ended, both thematically and stylistically, but you went with the daughter wanting her hair braided by her mother, which can be interpreted many different ways. Was it a struggle to figure out a way to end the film (before the coda)?
We try hard in every film to remove as much fat as possible. Especially when you’re making a short, there’s very little time to waste. We feel that the stripped-down documentary feeling of the film really grounds the viewer in the reality of the situation. As we are editing, we will often enlarge every scene to make them work and then cut down each scene proportionality until the run time of the film seems right.
There is a lot that the actors/characters have to go through in this fifteen-minute short that has to come off very convincingly, and it seems like it’s a delicate process to make it convincing. How did you work with the actors to get them in that space for a short period of time (for a short film production) to pull this off?
For us, it was about giving the actors a sense of their entire lives up until this moment, where they were born, went to high school, who their parents and siblings are, how they met each other, everything from the mundane to the dramatic. We wrote out an entire timeline of each of the characters’ lives, and then the actors fleshed it out more themselves once they got the roles. We spent time together creating family photos and trying to gather all the evidence the government requires for an actual green card marriage interview. There is a myth that short film pre-production and production is also short. We did pre-production for about a year before we shot, which is longer than many features. In the good cheap-fast-triangle, it’s gotta be cheap and good, so for us, it’s never going to be fast.
The audience will rightfully feel angry, frustrated and, perhaps, helpless after watching this. How would you want the viewer to direct those feelings into positive or helpful action?
We hope the film will help push for urgently needed comprehensive immigration reform. Not only do we think the practice of entrapping immigrants at their green card marriage interview is immoral, we think a hard look at the complex bureaucracy and enforcement incentives in our immigration system are desperately needed.
We hope the film will help humanize the green card and immigrant process, while galvanizing Americans to push for a more compassionate and straightforward immigration system.
We’ve partnered with the ACLU—they are an incredible resource both for immigrant families and for Americans looking to get involved.
What’s next for you?
We are working on writing our debut feature, which we hope will be our next project.
Last month, I released my third book, “The Black Book: An Anthony Mann Reader.” (You can order your copy here.)
To celebrate a month of Mann madness, here’s a very special unloved on “A Dandy in Aspic,” the great director’s final film, the last of the Anthony Mann B movies, and a beautiful haunting object it is. Enjoy this look at a true final film, a spy caper in which the central identity crisis comes to reflect the death of its maker.
Developer Hazelight Studios has made a name for itself by strictly making co-op games, a genre where two people have to play simultaneously. The studio won the coveted Game of the Year category at The Game Awards 2021 for “It Takes Two.” Now, Hazelight is back with its newest co-op outing, “Split Fiction.” While its level design and gameplay hooks are top-notch, the levels tend to overstay their welcome. Still, “Split Fiction” is one of the best co-op games in recent memory.
“Split Fiction” follows two girls, Mio and Zoe, as they try to get their stories published by a multimillion-dollar company, Rader Corporation. When asked to get into a mysterious machine, Mio fights back and accidentally enters the same pod Zoe is in, causing the machine to go haywire. It turns out the machine just wants to extract the authors’ ideas, and Rader plans to steal them.
As such, Mio’s sci-fi stories and Zoe’s fantasy stories become mixed up as they try to escape the machine’s simulation and put a stop to the CEO’s plans. It’s an enticing set up, with each level telling bits and pieces of Mio and Zoe’s backstories. Mio’s revolves around capitalism destroying her family life, while Zoe’s is about a personal tragedy. There are also humorous moments that offer a sense of reprieve from the heavier scenes, such as how a giant robot chasing the pair ends up just representing how much Mio hates parking tickets.
Throughout “Split Fiction,” both players controlling either Mio or Zoe have to solve increasingly complex puzzles together, such as the girls becoming a single centipede and having to navigate over lava fields or Mio becoming a pinball machine while Zoe is the pinball herself. There’s so much creativity within each level and a new gameplay hook to keep every single moment of the game fresh.
There’s something exhilarating about playing a game in 2025 that doesn’t overly rely on complicated systems like leveling up or managing equipment like you would in an RPG. “Split Fiction” throws that all out of the window to deliver a constant stream of fun gameplay mechanics and platforming.
In each of its main levels, there are separate side stories that Zoe and Mio can tackle. Genre-wise, they’re the opposite of whichever setting the pair is currently in. If the current level is sci-fi, the side story is fantasy, and vice versa. The side stories are much shorter mini-games focusing on a singular mechanic or concept.
For example, there’s a snowboarding level inspired by “SSX,” where Mio and Zoe compete to see who can reach the finish line. Another sees the pair turn into pigs before being turned into hotdogs at the end. These side stories serve as fun distractions to the overly long primary levels.
The biggest issue with “Split Fiction” is its drawn-out pacing. The main levels can sometimes take hours to beat, making for an exhausting experience at points. When you think you’ve beaten what seemingly felt like the last boss of a particular level, you’re presented with even more platforming and puzzles. There are plenty of checkpoints so you and your co-op partner can pick back up whenever you want, but the subpar level pacing also impacts how the story flows.
As a result of the levels being so long, there’s too much time between story reveals, lessening the emotional impact of those scenes. The relationship between Zoe and Mio also doesn’t feel as organic as the pairings from Hazelight’s previous games. “It Takes Two” depicted touching marriage struggles between a couple while “A Way Out” was a thrilling drama about betrayal. Zoe and Mio seemingly end as best friends, yet their relationship feels shallow and undeserved.
However, “Split Fiction” has an incredibly exciting endgame where its mechanics and dual settings coalesce into one final showdown against the Rader Corporation. Despite the pacing issues in “Split Fiction,” the ending sequence is well worth checking out.
“Split Fiction” is one of those games where it’s easy to overlook the flaws due to its sheer creativity. It’s not easy taking risks in an era where so many other developers and publishers are trying to push out live services with microtransactions and open-world games to maximize engagement and cash flow. Even with the story’s stumbling pacing, Hazelight knows what it does best and has crafted some of its most compelling co-op gameplay hooks yet.
The publisher provided a review copy of this title. It is now available.
The doc program at SXSW reflects the left-of-center tone of both the festival and the city of Austin. Where else would you find documentaries about The Butthole Surfers and Carl Lewis in the same program? With such a relatively short festival, it can be hard to get to the non-fiction selections. Still, I was lucky enough to check out a trio that premiered on opening weekend, and they’re all testaments to human resilience, profiles of people who survived impossible conditions to become the people they are today.
The best of the trio is Rodney Ascher’s “Ghost Boy,” the story of Martin Pistorius, a man who overcame an impossible nightmare. Ascher’s films (“Room 237,” “The Nightmare,” “A Glitch in the Matrix”) often spiral in on themselves as they tell stories of introverted obsession. I have often found Ascher’s work a little relentless, but that approach perfectly fits the story here as Ascher isn’t just profiling people whose life choices or beliefs have made them a bit unusual but someone who was locked in his own body through no choice of his own. Pistorius is a forthcoming interview subject, telling his life story as Ascher cuts to fascinatingly staged recreations. They’re not traditional true-crime versions of what we’re hearing over narration—they’re sequences filmed very clearly on stages, complete with cameras and crew people visible in shots. This approach to “cinematic autobiography” adds another layer of complex non-fiction storytelling to a movie that tells a story you won’t soon forget.
When he was 12, Martin Pistorius developed a neurological condition that trapped him in his own body, unable to move. He could still think, feel, and dream, but he was in a vegetative state from which most people around him presumed he would never emerge. For years, he was fed and cared for by people who would go about their lives around him with little awareness of what was happening in Martin’s mind. Ascher uses new interviews with Martin and passages from his memoir to convey his impossible condition, but he admits he doesn’t have vibrant memories of a lot of this time and nothing before he descended into his nightmare. He’s had to piece together a lot from other reports, and one feels a sense of collaboration between Pistorius and Ascher to tell this story as accurately and emotionally as possible.
Because it’s a hell of a story. One of Martin’s caretakers became convinced that more was going on behind Martin’s eyes than anyone believed. She spoke to him and sensed a response. Needless to say, she’s a true hero, someone who helped Martin express himself by using his eyes to look at words and communicate with the outside world for the first time in years. From there, Martin trained himself back to reality. Today, he can type his responses to questions for the film and even has a family of his own. One of Ascher’s best decisions is not to cut away from Pistorius when he types out an answer to a question, often taking many seconds to tap out a response before we hear it. It’s a reminder of how difficult it is for Martin to communicate.
And yet he does. Often through his eyes and his smile. Ascher loves Martin’s face, lingering on it as we hear his answer over his visage or a passage from his book. Some of the recreations feel a bit overdone, especially a forced feeding one that plays out like a horror film. Still, Ascher consistently comes back to present-day Pistorius every time the construct of the film threatens to get away from him. It’s all there in that unforgettable face. As it always was, even when everyone had given up on him, it’s in those eyes.
Another uncommon story of human resilience unfolds in Grace Hughes-Hallett’s “The Secret of Me,” a timely film in an era when our administration is staging an all-out war on everyone that doesn’t fit into their neat boxes of men and women. And yet its subject, Jim Ambrose, makes clear that this is not a traditional trans story. It’s about the complex spectrum of gender and how attempts to simplify that complexity have led to unimaginable pain and trauma.
Jim Ambrose grew up as Kristi, always uncomfortable in her body in a way that made her parents uneasy. In her teens, Kristi learned the truth—she was born intersex, and an inexperienced doctor named Richard Carter assigned her female at birth, conducting an operation that may have altered a physical being but didn’t “fix” what was inside. The consistent message of “The Secret of Me” is an important one in 2025: No one should decide the gender presentation of someone else. Ever. Especially not a rookie doctor with no experience in the field.
Hughes-Hallett spends most of her time with the brave and moving Ambrose, but she also effectively profiles some other key figures in the intersex movement, including Tiger Devore and Bo Laurent, along with the Rolling Stone journalist who broke one of the biggest stories in this timeline in 1997 when he wrote about David Reimer, someone who was destroyed by the false reporting of a doctor named John Money. The Reimer story is truly tragic, evidence of how dangerous it is for people like Money to profit off uninformed beliefs.
Hughes-Hallett sometimes falls victims to tropes of the genre like over-use of re-creations—we don’t need to see an actor playing a villainous Money in his office, for example. Her greatest asset is her deep empathy for people like Jim. That’s what we all need to find right now for those under attack. “The Secret of Me” could help.
Another timely documentary from SXSW this year centers the increased number of international arrests and the people trying to help loved ones bring their family members home. The world heard the story of Brittney Griner, but she was far from alone as governments like those in Russia and Venezuela often imprison high-profile subjects as a means to an end, using them as pawns in a political game while they subject these innocent people to torture.
“Take No Prisoners” profiles Roger Carstens, the top U.S. hostage negotiator, as he works to obtain the release of Eyvin Hernandez, an L.A. public defender being held in a notoriously brutal Venezuelan prison. Carstens explains how they have shifted to a mindset that elevates the families of hostages, visiting with them, keeping them informed, and hearing their concerns. Some of the Carstens & Hernandez family material feels a little forced here—Carstens often plays to the camera—and directors Adam Ciralsky and Subrata De sometimes feel like they’re interested in but scared of one of their most fascinating ideas: How Carstens has become relatively famous via the pain of others. There’s a riveting sequence wherein Carstens is being feted by a lot of people in high-priced suits while Eyvin’s relatives question how much is really being done to bring him home. No one goes as far as to suggest that Carstens isn’t doing everything he can—it’s a hero profile film, for sure—but the dichotomy of a man who travels in the highest, richest circles of government fighting to release another man who’s not even being fed could have been dug into a bit deeper.
The key to the success of “Take No Prisoners” is the access granted Ciralsky & De, and how they use it. Going behind the scenes of international negotiations has an immediacy that we haven’t often seen. I’m not sure the film succeeds on a big-picture level regarding how regimes are using people for political capital, but it definitely works as a profile piece for both Carstens and the people who prayed for Eyvin Hernandez every day.
Pushing all its political avoidances aside, the thing I’ll remember most about “Take No Prisoners” is the unflagging hope of Eyvin’s father. He woke up every day confident that it was the one in which he’d see his son again. Next time a person like Eyvin Hernandez is being held prisoner, I’ll think about his father. And if more people in power do the same, “Take No Prisoners” will have done some good too.
“Steak ‘n Shake has gone Nazi” isn’t a sentence I ever expected to see, much less type. But here we are.
On Friday, the social media account of the fast-food chain Steak ‘n Shake published a series of fascist-pandering posts on X (formerly Twitter), then deleted them after public admonishment by everyone who wasn’t a Nazi. X is owned by Tesla and Space X mogul Elon Musk, who is currently the world’s richest man, the unelected co-president of the United States of America, and one of the primary drivers of the executive branch’s aggressive attempts to roll back American history and re-segregate the population.
It’s generally a bad idea to guess what this site’s founder, Roger Ebert, would have had to say about an event that occurred after his death. The exercise tends to end up inventing a fantasy version of Roger who agrees with whatever the person happens to be saying. But this is a case where the evidence speaks for itself.
Roger is on record calling Steak ‘n Shake his favorite fast-food chain. (“If I were on Death Row, my last meal would be from Steak ‘n Shake,” he wrote in 2012.) He was about as politically progressive a movie critic as you’d ever find in the mainstream press: anti-racist, anti-fascist, pro-gun control, and pro-government healthcare. He wrote that post 9/11 foreign policy was, per Paul Wolfowitz, “about oil,” that “in some sense, we are subsidizing our enemies,” and that the “Fox News ideology” boils down to “profits are good and must be defended against those who question corporate methods and outcomes.”
The Steak ‘n Shake posts fawned over Musk, President Donald Trump, and newly installed Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, who is using his position to advance scientifically unsound and unhealthy beliefs, a complete list of which can be found here. Among them: the belief that beef tallow is a healthier cooking oil than vegetable derivatives (generally speaking, this is not true).
Steak ‘n Shake is not alone in its bootlicking behavior—a list of corporations going Vichy for Trump can be found here—but it’s among the more surreal examples of “pick me!” cravenness by U.S. companies during Trump II.
The sight of Roger’s favorite fast-food chain adding neofascism to its menu would have appalled him. It appalled the editors of RogerEbert.com, of which I am one.
One of the chain’s posts read, “Steak ‘n Shake is proud to support MAHA [ed: this is Kennedy’s branding acronym “Make America Healthy Again”] and Secretary Kennedy! Your days are numbered seed oil. We want to lead the way and make a difference!”
There was also a seemingly Gen AI-created image of Kennedy behind the driver’s seat of a car, from the vantage point of a Steak ‘n Shake drive-thru employee, with the caption “Did this man just pull up in our drive-thru?” (See image at top of page.)
And there were a couple of posts sucking up to Musk. One shared a post by a Steak ‘n Shake account follower: a Leni Riefenstahl-esque black-and-white image of a Tesla cybertruck in a desert, parked on the cusp of a verdant land lit by heavenly sunbeams cutting through clouds. “I’d travel through rain, shine and mountains for those tasty burgers and TALLOW fries!” it said. The caption on Steak ‘n Shake’s repost was topped with a quote from Fredrick Nietzsche (the German philosopher who, it should be noted, was not himself pro-Nazi, but whose work was hijacked after his death and distorted into an endorsement of Nazism by his sister): “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”
Any doubt about how Roger would’ve felt about all this is answered by one of his own Tweets, posted in 2012 after the right wing-leaning fast food chicken restaurant chain Chick-fil-a got tangled up in a weird, self-contradicting controversy over whether it supported or opposed same-sex marriage. Opponents of same-sex marriage ate at the restaurant to demonstrate their solidarity. “Somehow it’s appropriate that people opposed to gay marriage would rally at a fast-food chicken chain,” Roger teased.
There was also a strange exchange wherein the Steak ‘n Shake account suggested Musk offer charging stations for Teslas at the restaurant, only to learn that Tesla already did that at six locations and had “another 20 in review.” (Tesla has charging stations at other fast-food joints as well.)
The Supreme Court notoriously decided in 2010 that in certain circumstances, corporations should be considered people. If that’s true, Steak ‘n Shake wears a brown shirt and swastika armband.
One of Roger’s favorite dramas about fascism was 2008’s “The Reader,” which had many detractors. Roger defended the movie as a plainspoken and accessible explanation of how evil happens on a society-wide scale.
“There are enormous pressures in all human societies to go along,” Roger wrote. “Many figures involved in the recent Wall Street meltdown have used the excuse, ‘I was only doing my job. I didn’t know what was going on.’ President Bush led us into war on mistaken premises, and now says he was betrayed by faulty intelligence. U.S. military personnel became torturers because they were ordered to. Detroit says it was only giving us the cars we wanted. The Soviet Union functioned for years because people went along. China still does.”
He concluded, “I believe the movie may be demonstrating a fact of human nature: Most people, most of the time, all over the world, choose to go along.”
It seems that Hollywood is going to be very busy with its 2021 movies coming to theaters. With an ungodly amount of comic book movies from Marvel and DC alike to the new Fast and Furious movie, the next calendar year is jam-packed with some of the most anticipated releases to ever be announced. That is due, in part, to the fact that many of these films were originally scheduled for a sooner release, or should have been out months ago.
The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic led to a great deal of rescheduling and reevaluating primary methods of distribution, with some studios taking the straight-to-streaming route. The ones who chose to uphold the tradition of going to the theater either postponed a release to later in the year, or went as far as pushing it right into the 2021 calendar, which is why you may recognize some of the titles below as films you hoped to see in 2020.
The following is a one-stop location for all the movies to look forward to in 2021 and when to expect them. Of course, as we all should be used to by now, dates are subject to change, so be sure check back for shifts in the schedule. Enjoy!
January 2021 Movie Releases
Be sure to pay attention to The Little Things if spending One Night in Miami this January 2021.
Friday January 8th
Herself – Amazon Prime Release – Rated R – Clare Dunne, Molly McCann
February 2021 sounds like a perfect for Barb and Star to go to Vista Del Mar, and to look out for the many other anticipated movie releases scheduled for that month.
Friday February 5th
Bliss – Amazon Prime Release – Rated R – Owen Wilson, Salma Hayek
Falling – Rated R – Viggo Mortensen, Lance Henriksen
Little Fish – Not Rated – Olivia Cooke, Jack O’Connell
We know these film are coming out in 2021, we are just not sure when exactly. Some were set for a specific date in 2021, but have been pushed to the following year, or even later.
7 Prisoners – Theatrical and Netflix Release – Rodrigo Santoro, Christian Malheiros
Fantastic Beasts III – Rating TBD – Eddie Redmayne, Jude Law (Moved to July 15, 2022)
Black Adam – Rating TBD – Dwayne Johnson, Noah Centineo (Moved to July 29, 2022)
Mission: Impossible 7 – Rating TBD – Tom Cruise, Rebecca Ferguson (Moved to September 30, 2022)
Babylon – Rating TBD – Brad Pitt (Moved to January 6, 2023)
Which of these 2021 movies are you most excited to see and which ones do you think should have been cancelled instead of just postponed (if that was the case)? Be sure to check back for additional information and updates on the most anticipated movies coming to theaters, as well as what you should keep an eye out for on streaming, here on CinemaBlend.
Your favorite directors. The movie stars you love. Whenever it is that you feel comfortable returning to movie theaters, something great will be there to welcome you back.
