‘Dungeons And Dragons’, ‘Flamin’ Hot’ – Deadline

The SXSW Film & TV Festival has returned to Austin, and Deadline’s reviewers are watching all the key films. Here is a compilation of our reviews from the fest, which last year was the launchpad for newly-minted Oscar winner Everything Everywhere All at Once. The Daniels’ wild sci-fi action comedy is the first pic to debut at SXSW and go on to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

Check back often as we add more reviews.

Section: Headliners
Director: Emma Seligman
Screenwriters: Emma Seligman, Rachel Sennott
Cast: Rachel Sennott, Ayo Edebiri, Ruby Cruz, Havana Rose Liu, Kaia Gerber, Nicholas Galitzine, Miles Fowler, Marshawn Lynch, Dagmara Dominiczyk, Punkie Johnson
Deadline’s takeaway: Bottoms is fun, but with some slight tweaks this could have an epic exploration of the gray areas of queerness and what it means to stand in the center of that as an adolescent. It’s definitely an ambitious second outing for a director who still has room to grow.

Section: Headliners
Directors: Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley
Screenwriters: Jonathan Goldstein & John Francis Daley and Michael Gilio
Cast: Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Hugh Grant, Regé-Jean Page, Justice Smith, Sophia Lillis, Chloe Coleman, Daisy Head
Deadline’s takeaway: With renewed interest in the fantasy genre, it’s good to see something outside LOTR and Game of Thrones getting it right and having a good time. Dungeons and Dragon is also one of the better adaptations due to all of its elements coming together: a strong cast, a decent story, dynamic direction and pleasing special effects.

Section: Headliners
Director-Screenwriter: Lee Cronin
Cast: Lily Sullivan, Alyssa Sutherland, Morgan Davies, Gabrielle Echols, Nell Fisher
Deadline’s takeaway: The Deadites are one of the most comedic and charismatic of horror canon, and despite the usual annoying horror tropes, it’s a funny, absurd, gory and bleak return to for that will keep viewers on edge. Just how fans like it.

Section: Headliners
Director: Eva Longoria
Screenwriters: Lewis Colick and Linda Yvette Chavez
Cast: Jesse Garcia, Annie Gonzalez, Emilio Rivera, Dennis Haysbert, Tony Shalhoub, Matt Walsh, Bobby Soto, Pepe Serna
Deadline’s takeaway: The film’s lighthearted narration by the main character plays with the idea that not everything presented here is a documentary. That is a smart move, because this crowd-pleasing and highly entertaining movie should not be penalized for possibly playing with some of the facts.

RELATED: SXSW Film & TV Festival 2023: Premieres, Parties, Film & TV Awards Ceremony Photo Gallery

Section: Narrative Spotlight
Director-screenwriter: Billy Luther
Cast: Kier Tallman, Charley Hogan, Martin Sensmeier
Deadline’s takeaway: Using his authentic experience as a rough map rather than a beat sheet, Billy Luther hits on something very special here, exploring universal themes of childhood and family in ways that transcend the specificity of its setting.

Section: Narrative Spotlight
Director: Robert Rodriguez
Screenwriters: Robert Rodriguez & Max Borenstein
Cast: Ben Affleck, Alice Braga, JD Pardo, Hala Finley, Dayo Okeniyi, Jeff Fahey, Jackie Earle Haley, William Fichtner
Deadline’s takeaway: Robert Rodriguez revealed at the premiere screening that his film is a work in progress — and it still needs work in order to progress. It’s never boring and has a solid concept that is solid enough to get behind, but it’s all over the place and in desperate need of heavy tweaking.

Section: Narrative Spotlight
Director: Kristian Mercado
Screenwriter: Angela Bourassa
Cast: Anthony Mackie, Zoë Chao, Natalie Morales
Deadline’s takeaway: The curious thing is that Kristian Mercado’s film seems to pass quicker when it’s languishing in the doldrums of the cosmos than it does when it arrives in the real world: why such a simple story takes so long to get to just 92 minutes is one of the many mysteries of the universe.

Section: Special Event
Director: Chad Stahelski
Screenwriters: Shay Hatten, Michael Finch
Cast: Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Ian McShane, Lance Reddick, Donnie Yen, Bill Skarsgard, Hiroyuki Sanada, Shamier Anderson, Rina Sawayama, Scott Adkins, Clancy Brown
Deadline’s takeaway: The John Wicks are getting longer and a little more bloated since the original. And though John Wick: Chapter 4 has grown by nearly 40 minutes over the last one, for the most part it never slows down, and remains a feast for fans of Keanu Reeves’ command of the martial arts/gun fu/car fu genre.

Section: Narrative Feature Competition
Director: Lisa Steen
Screenwriter: Anna Greenfield
Cast: Karen Gillan, Margaret Sophie Stein, Jermaine Fowler
Deadline’s takeaway: Lisa Steen’s debut feature is an intimate, defiantly female-fronted indie, showcasing an engaging and refreshingly vanity-free performance from Karen Gillan, a talented Scottish actress whose career to date is still something of a work in progress.

Section: Midnighters
Director-screenwriters: Colin and Cameron Cairnes
Cast: David Dastmalchian, Georgina Haig, Faysal Bazzi
Deadline’s takeaway: That Late Night With the Devil is one for the myriad genre festivals that abound internationally is a no-brainer, but the Cairnes brothers deserve a bit more consideration than that for their film’s wry engagement with U.S. history and pop culture.

Section: Narrative Spotlight
Director: Luke Gilford
Screenwriters: David Largman Murray, Kevin Best, Luke Gilford
Cast: Charlie Plummer, Rene Rosado, Eve Lindley
Deadline’s takeaway: Perhaps more by coincidence than design, National Anthem arrives at a time when everything it celebrates is under attack, and such a low-key affirmation of personal growth and freedom might actually be what we really need right now.

Section: Documentary Spotlight
Director-screenwriter: Ondi Timoner
Deadline’s takeaway: After last year’s Last Flight Home, an emotionally intense but beautifully calibrated meditation on her father’s right to medically assisted death, Timoner returns to her forte, which is an uncanny ability to intuit the vicissitudes of pop culture while embedding herself in it while it’s happening.

Section: Headliners
Director-screenwriter: Julio Torres
Cast: Julio Torres, Tilda Swinton, RZA, Isabella Rossellini, Larry Owens, Catalina Saavedra, Greta Le
Deadline’s takeaway: Problemista, a comedic, surrealist fantasy that serves as a critique of capitalism, is about authenticity and learning to be confident enough to take up space. Especially as a person of color who often feel invisible, or feel they must shrink themselves in order to fit in.

Section: Narrative Feature Competition
Director-screenwriter: Leah McKendrick
Cast: Leah McKendrick, Ego Nwodim, Andrew Santino
Deadline’s takeaway: It’s a good set-up for a comedy, with its girl-power sentiments about single-parenting and putting one’s emotional affairs in order. But the setup is really all there is, with no distinctive game plan other than to see Leah McKendrick’s Nellie get to the finish line with her treatment.

Section: Narrative Spotlight
Director-screenwriter: Jake Johnson
Cast: Jake Johnson, Anna Kendrick, Andy Samberg, Natalie Morales, Christopher Lloyd, Wayne Brady, GaTa, Emily Hampshire, Mary Holland, Boban Marjanović
Deadline’s takeaway: Self-Reliance is never dull, but the story isn’t as well structured; that third act is an erratic mess. The other issue is at the conclusion, Tommy doesn’t undergo a complete 180-degree change, so he’s still a douche by the end.

Section: Narrative Feature Competition
Director: Aristotle Torres
Screenwriter: Bonsu Thompson, Aristotle Torres
Cast: Asante Blackk, Luis Guzmán, Alex Hibbert, Melvin Gregg, Coral Peña, Cassandra Freeman, Hassan Johnson
Deadline takeaway: Naming a young Black man’s story after a transport stop gives off strong Fruitvale vibes, but Aristotle Torres’ feature debut reaches back further to the hip-hop morality tales of the early ’90s, like Boaz Yakin’s Fresh or Ernest Dickerson’s Juice.

Section: Headliners
Director: Jon S. Baird
Screenwriter: Noah Pink
Cast: Taron Egerton, Nikita Efremov, Sofia Lebedeva, Anthony Boyle, Ben Miles, Ken Yamamura, Igor Grabuzov, Oleg Shtefanko, Ayane Nagabuchi, Rick Yune
Deadline takeaway: Tetris is simply riveting, playing more like a Cold War-era international spy thriller than a manual for acquiring rights to a Russian video game. Yes, that latter sentence is what makes up the bones of this story, but I guarantee you will be on the edge of your seat, and remarkably it is all true.

Section: Narrative Spotlight
Director: Emma Westenberg
Screenwriter: Ruby Caster
Cast: Clara McGregor, Ewan McGregor, Vera Bulder
Deadline’s takeaway: In terms of subject matter, it’s gritty, dealing with issues of addiction and self-harm, but the treatment is surprisingly light and almost spectral. Like Eliza Hittman’s 2020 Sundance hit Never Rarely Sometimes Always, this is a road movie that passes like a fever dream.