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 the parking lot of a drive-thru burger and shake joint. They order their food and then burst into song as the credits roll, Patterson freezing frames, slowing others down, and turning the camera into a player in the hoedown. McConaughey and his mates hoot and holler one of several original songs produced by T-Bone Burnett; it’s electric.
“The Rivals of Amziah King” is about communities: the people who 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 respond 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 will 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 becomes a sort of 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 some aspects of Babak Anvari’s harrowing “Hallow Road” connect it to the previous film. 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 dangers of the world keeps you up at night. This film is built 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 handling this difficult passage of life in which you want to support your child as they become an adult and give 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 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 André 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. 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 (where the entire play takes place). She’s scantily dressed and 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, engaging in its almost dreamlike theatricality.
“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. Then, everything flies apart in the final act when Gaines seeks to underline his message, 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. Still, Gaines never quite figures out how to mold this clay into something as effective as simply reading or watching the original.
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