In case you’re wondering about the title of the new feature comedy receiving its world premiere at SXSW, be advised that The Dress Up Gang is an alt-comedy troupe that has attracted a following for their videos and television series. They’ve now parlayed their popularity into their first feature film directed, written by and starring its members. The result is Plantman & Blondie: A Dress Up Gang Film, which is about as wacky as its moniker suggests.

Full disclosure: I was previously unaware of the troupe, although several of its members — such as Frankie Quinones, Cory Loykasek and Kirk Fox — are familiar from such television shows as What We Do in the Shadows, Physical and Jury Duty, respectively. What I do know is that this sort of offbeat comic material, best suited for short videos and sketches, can be very difficult to pull off in a feature-length film, as the recent The Napa Boys proved. Humor is of course subjective, but what this effort mostly seems to indicate is that the Dress Up Gang’s brand of comedy is an acquired taste.

The shaggy dog story involves the main characters of Cory (Loykasek), a work-at-home employee for a small-time parking lot company in Los Angeles, and Donny (Donny Divanian), a cyclist who chides him for leaving the wan fiddle leaf plant he’s just purchased in his car during a heat spell. Their nicknames stem from the fact that Cory is, well, blonde, and Donny is a neighborhood vigilante obsessed with protecting neglected houseplants. 

Their paths cross again when Cory accidentally hits Donny’s bicycle with his car and, as penance, agrees to drive him around town for a week to do errands. In the process, Cory becomes aware of his passenger’s extracurricular activities, which include breaking into people’s homes and rescuing plants he deems at risk.

Listen, comedy films have been constructed around flimsier premises. But those premises are usually, you know, funny, which this one really isn’t. Nor is the supporting character of Fox, played by Kirk Fox (making up original names doesn’t seem to be in the troupe’s wheelhouse), Cory’s ex-con friend who brags, “I used to teach tennis to Pablo Escobar,” and whose frequent words of advice always include film references. “I don’t like it,” Fox says about Cory serving as Donny’s chauffeur for a week. “You saw Collateral?”

Nor is the running gag of people constantly complimenting Cory on his gecko t-shirt. Nor is the scene in which Cory trips on mushrooms on Hollywood Boulevard (which is probably true of half the people walking there). Nor is the sight of Donny wielding a Super Soaker as a weapon. Nor is the subplot in which Donny’s victims, one of whom makes his living as a “water sommelier” (and yes, I know they exist), band together as the “Next Door Boys” to get to the bottom of the neighborhood’s plant thefts. 

Featuring so many plugs for Chick-fil-A that one hopes the producers got a good product-placement fee or at least free catering for the film shoot, Plantman & Blondie might have been amusing enough as a brief sketch, although frankly even that’s doubtful. Stretched out to feature length, it drags unmercifully, with its laughs-per-minute ratio in negative numbers.

The performers, who also include such non-Dress Up Gang members as Kevin Nealon and Kate Berlant, are clearly talented. But their film has the feel of an improv exercise badly in need of further development.

Big Girls Don’t Cry is notable for two impressive debuts: It’s writer-director Paloma Schneideman’s first feature, and its star, Ani Palmer, has never before acted onscreen. Together, they illuminate a messy, searching vibrancy in the story of Sid, a sex-curious small-town 14-year-old who wants more than anything to be cool. The movie — the first produced feature from A Wave in the Ocean, a filmmaking course led by Jane Campion — is alive to the ways that girls, eager for acceptance, can pretend to be tougher and more experienced than they are, and adds the complicating element of queer attraction to the emotional confusion.

Schneideman’s keenly observed drama could have been more concise on its way to its culminating New Year’s Eve party, but this story of the summer holiday break in rural New Zealand pulses with a powerful sense of place and terrifically charged scenes of chaotic intimacy, its exceptional performances led by Palmer, Rain Spencer and Noah Taylor.

The movie is set in in 2006, when cellphones aren’t yet smart and the stuttering screeches and hisses of the dial-up internet form a kind of soundtrack to the teen social scene. Sid lives in a remote coastal corner of New Zealand’s North Island, in a rambling house she shares with her distracted, short-tempered father, Leo (Noah Taylor), a frustrated painter who makes a living doing lawn maintenance, and whose wife left not just him but the country.

Sid, who has been checking out sex chat rooms, embarks on a mission of sorts as her summer break begins — a pursuit that quickly means leaving her level-headed best friend, Tia (the excellent Ngātaitangirua Hita), in the dust. With gifts of alcohol from her father’s stash, she toadies up to older girls Lana (Beatrix Wolfe) and Stevie (Sophia Kirkwood-Smith), and though it’s only a matter of time before alpha meanie Lana turns on her, something like friendship develops. (Karen Inderbitzen Waller’s costumes are fully in sync with the notion of youthful investment in the number-one priority of looking cool.)

In the nearby beach town Ōmaha, the three girls are drawn into the party scene led by rich kid Kyle (Ian Blackburn). One of the many out-of-towners who arrive for the summer, he holds court in a spacious waterfront house where his parents are never home — and where Leo does the yard, as revealed in a scene of excruciating mortification for Sid.

As she tries to navigate and climb the teenage social hierarchy, Sid inflicts no small amount of damage on herself and others, beginning with an impulsive self-piercing. Her transparent lies become more pathetic as she tries to convince herself as well as her frenemies that she’s knowledgeable and experienced when it comes to sex.

It’s not just Lana’s popularity that draws Sid; she has a crush on her, though she doesn’t yet have a language for her attraction to girls. Using the computer at Tia’s house, she logs into the instant messenger account of Diggy (Poroaki Merritt McDonald), Tia’s brother, and flirts with Lana, going so far as to ask her for racy photos. But as she continues to ingratiate herself to Kyle and his crude, immature buddies while evading their expectations, someone even more compelling than Lana grabs her attention. Her sister, Adele (Tara Canton), home from college for the holidays, has brought a classmate with her, American exchange student Freya. Rain Spencer (The Summer I Turned Pretty) imbues the role with a sensual aura and self-confidence reminiscent of Léa Seydoux.

Dispensing offhand worldliness and wisdom through a steady stream of pot smoke, Freya ignites something in Sid. Her kindness, too, is no small thing for a girl whose mother is far away and who’s in constant conflict with her father and sister; Schneideman and her cast grasp the ways families gripe and snipe at one another.

Freya ignites something in Leo, too, who prepares a fancy dinner the night of her arrival and later presents her with a Dylan Thomas book. In Taylor’s superb performance, Leo is both comically cantankerous and utterly heartbreaking. The friction between Sid and Leo, with its awful explosions and exquisite rapprochement, is the most satisfying thread of the narrative.

With the fine contributions of production designer Sarah Cooper and cinematographer Maria Ines Manchego, Schneideman captures the pristine beauty of the setting and the exultation of bodies in water, as well as the unvarnished patina of lived-in spaces. Through the eyes of an ambitious girl who, in the way of teenagers immemorial, is using borrowed language as she fumbles toward her own, Big Girls Don’t Cry is a strong portrait of a memorable season in the sun.

Razor blades and pointe shoes prove pretty lethal in Vicky Jewson’s bloody and blistered ballet thriller, which finds a dysfunctional ballerina troupe fighting for survival after a run-in with a deadly Hungarian mob. Streaming on Prime Video later this month, “Pretty Lethal” couldn’t have come at a better time, given all the drama and discourse surrounding Timothée Chalamet’s controversial remarks on the cultural value of ballet and opera relative to mainstream art forms, which earned pointed responses from both worlds.

While the film, written by former ballerina Kate Freund, is far from a critique on the material decline of the live arts, it clearly gestures towards a shrewd observation Chalamet and his particular brand of sleaze might easily dismiss: the body, and therefore ballet, as a vessel of cinematic storytelling — a visceral physical language turning into an audiovisual one. For hardcore fans of the genre and ballet alike, it’s basically a treasure trove, regardless of whether it cannot reference other ballets past “The Nutcracker,” regardless of whether all the hijinks miss a beat or stop short of depth.

The five Los Angeles-based prima ballerinas — played by Maddie Ziegler, Lana Condor, Avantika, Millicent Simmonds, and Iris Apatow — have been preparing all their lives to debut at the National Theatre in Budapest, which could change the course of their careers. Especially for those who aren’t as lucky to have a head start in life, like the left-out Bones (Ziegler), who wouldn’t be able to compete without the sponsorship of the mother of spoiled brat and bully Princess (Condor). “Ballet is a rich bitch sport,” as Bones puts it, perhaps the same point the “Marty Supreme” star is trying to make, albeit conceitedly.

After landing in Hungary, a day before the grand showcase, the group’s bus breaks down in the middle of nowhere. Fretting over the dance of their lives, they have to steel themselves for something far worse. Opting to keep out of the forest, they take shelter in a dingy roadside inn run by Uma Thurman’s Devora Kasimer, a fallen ballet prodigy, and her henchmen. It doesn’t take long for the danger to make itself known, with the young women’s mentor (Lydia Leonard) as the first casualty. As the ballerinas hatch a plan to come out of their predicament alive, bodies begin to drop dead.

“Pretty Lethal” is fundamentally a movement movie, featuring a C+C Music Factory needle drop early on — one that is deeply attuned to swapping men for women in the realm of action cinema. At times, the film is tolerably grotesque body horror or an acid trip movie filled with Bible verse reciting, as Avantika plays the moral, religious North Star; at others, it’s an outright revenge tale, particularly as the sparse plot pivots to Devora, who is out to settle an old score with Michael Culkin’s Lothar Marcovic, a cruel crime lord. A vindictive pursuit that ends rather predictably, as we scan the routine, but are never allowed to behold the dance in its full glory. 

The “Kill Bill” star is exciting to watch, but not compelling enough to make up for the shortcomings of the uninspired script, which displays an annoying knack for stating the obvious via clichéd dialogue, that indeed the ballerinas have to band together to survive, paired with pretty lethargic pacing. Ziegler, meanwhile, is already fantastic as the only character with survival instinct, at least initially, at which point I thought it would tip “Pretty Lethal” into a final girl movie. It’s hard to ask more of Ziegler, given she really doesn’t have much to work with.

The camerawork is adequate, but never lifts the movie to a greater aesthetic delight. Close-ups on framed photographs depicting Devora’s younger, more graceful self offer less a sense of history than ambient suspense. If anything, backstories here are neatly left to the imagination. Likewise, the dreary inn, through Zsuzsa Kismarty-Lechner and Charlotte Pearson’s production design, is emblematic of Devora’s faded dream — a space where “The Nutcracker” somehow never ends. The centerpiece is, of course, the melee/dance-off between the ensemble in white tutus and the violent thugs, toe blade and all. Choreographed to stunning and outrageous effect, this might just be the most death-dealing dress rehearsal you’ll ever come across. That the goons didn’t just instantly shoot at the ballerinas also makes it all the more silly.

Despite the contrivance, Jewson makes fascinating theater out of this, flipping the archetypal image of the ballerina, and therefore femininity, on its head and rendering it as a kind of weapon, forged by years of putting up with enormous pain, against a world beset by patriarchal violence. The quintet spins, stretches, and slits throats, combining grace and discipline in what one might call “ballet-fu,” perhaps a new genre to invest in. They cram their bodies into kitchen cabinets, as does a doll in a window box. They move as a single, cohesive unit. Yet, while most of that seems top-tier entertainment, where the actors are clearly having all the fun working together, testing out new stunts, all the bone-breaking can only keep you on the edge of your seat for so long.

Framing ballet as a source of high-octane action is incredibly inventive, but “Pretty Lethal” remains a standard suspense thriller, a work that is ultimately kneecapped by a writing that renders the deeper textures of the characters largely gestural, only meant to drive the proceedings onward with sheer force. The more it generates spectacle, the more you notice how the screenplay fails to keep in step. Glimpses into past lives, including that of Bones, are hardly given any attention past suggestive pathos or plainly stating them up top that before the final dance graces us to hammer home the film’s feminist message, “Pretty Lethal” has already, totally, worn us down. No plié to absorb all the shock. In this way, Jewson’s vision is quite fatal.

Grade: B-

“Pretty Lethal” premiered at the 2026 SXSW Film and TV Festival. It streams on Prime Video globally on March 25.

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