By Siddhant Adlakha According To The variety Set almost entirely during an urgent car ride, Babak Anvari’s “Hallow Road” begins as an intensely performed, deftly minimalist family thriller about two parents driving to the scene of their daughter’s accident while keeping her on the phone. That’s all you need to know going in, and all you should really learn beforehand, given how this race-against-the-clock premise unfolds, before swerving in completely unpredictable ways. Few films have ever induced such immense tonal whiplash while exhibiting such tight formal control over their transformations. There’s a very clear boundary separating the kind of movie “Hallow Road” starts out as from what it eventually becomes, which all but cements its place as a fascinating artifact of this ...

By Emily Longeretta According To The variety Michael Bay‘s “We Are Storror” begins with a warning on screen: “Don’t attempt anything you see here.” It’s safe to say the audience at SXSW, the first to see the documentary on a big screen on March 8, was extremely impressed and a little bit scared, but definitely not jumping to attempt any of the wild stunts front and center in the documentary, which follows parkour team Storror. Instead of wires, green screens and editing tricks that Bay fans are used to, this time, it’s all real. Making his debut as a feature documentary director at the film and television festival, Bay received a loud applause — and audience members chanting his name — when introducing the movie. During the screening, the audience squirmed in their ...

By Siddhant Adlakha According To The variety Wellness culture takes sinister form in “The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick,” a horror-adjacent domestic drama that can’t quite sustain its tongue-in-cheek delights. Directed by Pete Ohs (“Jethica”), and co-written by Ohs and his four lead actors, the ultra-indie SXSW discovery’s wry tone is accompanied by strange characters and even stranger sound design, and yields a wildly enjoyable initial half. However, like its grieving lead character lost in her millennial malaise, it loses itself down a rabbit hole of metaphors.  After Yvonne (Zoë Chao) experiences a personal tragedy — the surprising details of which are hinted at over a phone call, before gradually coming to light — she drives to the isolated, woodl...