A narrator makes all the difference in the world. One can easily imagine the story of French volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft, who died together while observing the eruption of Mount Unzen, told with withering nihilistic disbelief by Werner Herzog. Or their matching red knit caps as the centerpiece of the production design for a twee fictionalized version of molten melancholy by Wes Anderson, perhaps the Life Volcanic. Instead, in her compilation of the couple’s own photos and films, Sara Dosa has enlisted the talents of Miranda July, who conveys the story of their lives together with boundless wonder and aching romance.

SXSW ended a week ago, but Jenn’s been brewing up this coverage of the virtual offerings from the festival’s iconic horror/WTF section and just finished it up…better late than never, right? Right??

Omoiyari is a Japanese word that means to have sympathy and compassion towards another person. This is not only the title of Japanese-American musician Kaoru Ishibashi’s (known professionally as Kishi Bashi) film, but the very soul and purpose of it. We travel with Ishibashi around the United States as he embarks on a path of discovery both of his roots and the two worlds he’s torn between: culture and country. Those two aspects are not in opposition, but his entire life he’s kept them separate and at times hidden; now he’s finding a way to bring them together.

Destroyed as a child through the violent fits, paranoia and hallucinations of a mother unable to care of herself or her family Will does everything in his power to forget and move forward with a normal life. He’s managed to find a loving partner, a decent career (even if he is bullied by an overprivileged white woman with no talent other than berating her employees) and a calm happy life. Things start to go sideways when his mother makes contact, first through odd boxes of cult-related reading materials followed by unwelcome and traumatizing visits. Soon his life is thrown into chaos and we start to wonder if it’s his mind playing tricks on him or has the world gone completely mad?

Three kids on the fringe of adulthood from North London at the turn of the millenium have their sights set on fame and fortune. Ready to kick off the new century and rest of their lives with a crazy New Years Eve together, they’ll do anything to get tickets to the best party in town. As aspiring djs with a pirate radio station at their fingertips and a growing fanbase (or at least they hope) this party is their ticket to making it out of their hometown and into the limelight, but their friend and manager drops a bomb on them that threatens the future they’ve planned.

When I was young, The Kids In The Hall sketch comedy show felt like some kind of underground secret. Something that none of my friends or schoolmates knew about whose ridiculousness I could quote on queue like some big shot. Little did I know they’d been around in the Canadian comedy scene creating weird wonderful sketches for years before landing on my little television set. The Kids In The Hall: Comedy Punks brought all of that sassy schoolyard fun back but adds in the back stage frustrations, heartbreaks and growing pains of that amazing quintet of goons.

“Thank you for the words, the music, the grounding sanity that your words bring to me in times of strife. I’m curious, behind it all: the music, the words, the suits, the grief, the tenderness, and shame, and guilt, and joy, who are you?”

This quote is from just one of a dozen fan letters, notes and emails that Nick Cave is sifting through on a given day in his new documentary/music video/love fest This Much I Know To Be True. It attempts to answer just that, even if only a small portion of what makes up this mystical creature. We’re taken for a stroll through the life and times of Cave during the pandemic and treated to an extended concert of sorts from his upcoming release with Warren Ellis, CARNAGE.

My most striking reaction while watching the crisply-packaged incredible true story of that time when an army of Reddit-affiliated retail traders rallied to cause seemingly worthless GameStop stock price to rocket to the moon was that all of this happened just a little over a year ago. I suppose that time flows differently in a pandemic. The burst of trading pitting little internet “apes” against over-leveraged hedge funds captivated the media somewhere between the insurrection on the Capitol and the rollout of the first vaccines, before hot vax summer and the revenge of the omicron. So, something like a million years ago, yet a remarkably quick turnaround to get some of the key players on film and telling their stories of how amateur stock trading during a shutdown transformed their lives.

A great way to feel ancient is to watch a very thorough documentary about someone who is incredibly famous whose existence you were nevertheless unaware. In this case, it was Casey Neistat’s account of the the rise and fall and rise of an incredibly popular YouTube personality called David Dobrik. Having himself achieved a high degree of notoriety through his own marathon presence on the social networking service, Neistat’s familiarity with the platform, fame, and Dobrik himself ideally positioned Neistat to get an insider’s view of a young star’s stratospheric ascent. When he began filming interviews with him in 2018, neither had any idea what was yet to come.

“The following actually happened. My dad asked me to tell you it didn’t.” These are the first words that we see as James Morosini opens his autobiographical film. It’s one that he writes, directs, and has cast himself in the lead role, and as the story unfurls in ever-excruciating waves of cringe-inducing parental behavior, audiences will likely cling to this disclaimer in escalating disbelief about the veracity of these claims. As I squirmed through the hour and a half, I frequently found myself wondering about the therapeutic value of a thirty-year-old portraying himself at age seventeen to relive a terrible chapter in his own life. For his sake, I also hoped that the opening lines were themselves untrue.