If you were ever a giddy kid who spent summers hanging out with friends, making crazy pop videos, goofy short films, and composing off-key songs you were convinced were going to make you stars, then Summer 2000: The X-Cetra Story is the exact film you should watch, enjoy — and then have a bit of a cry after, mourning the happy, creative child you once were before you turned into whatever you are now.

Precisely distilling that tangy mix of nostalgia, joy and regret, this delightful SXSW-premiering documentary tells the story of X-Cetra, an all-girl garage band that three 11-year-olds and one 9-year-old in Santa Rosa, California, formed in the year 2000. With help from two of the girls’ mother, herself a home-studio musician-producer, they made one album on a set of CD-Rs that became, two decades later, a viral phenomenon among fans of outsider art, generating tributes from prominent music publications including Rolling Stone.

As it turns out, one of the members of X-Cetra is Los Angeles-based actor Ayden Mayeri (I Love That for You). Drawing from her experience as a filmmaker, Mayeri documents X-Cetra’s reformation both as an onscreen participant and this film’s director and co-writer. (Fellow performer Barry Rothbart takes credits here as the film’s co-writer, producer and cinematographer.)

Like the scrappy, unvarnished but sort of brilliant music the band made back when they were kids, the film itself is a little all over the place and arguably would benefit from some editorial tightening up, but it’s clearly made with love. Best of all, that generosity of feeling and affection applies not just to what the X-Cetra members feel for each other, both back in the day and in the present even after having drifted apart over the years, but what they feel for their young selves. In the end, it becomes a celebration of girlhood genius and the fearlessness of youth, festooned with glitter and fiercely crop-topped.

Also, given that we’re in a cultural moment when we’re being bombarded, mostly for righteous reasons, with grainy, slightly unfocused images of nubile young women who were abused by the likes of Jeffrey Epstein and others, it’s refreshing to see Mayeri and her friends’ snapshots and know that, for the most part, these were relatively happy kids.

That said, the film does touch on some of the darker feelings lurking under the surface — especially for sisters Janet and Mary Washburn, who left their father back east after he and their mom, Robin O’Brien, got divorced and Robin took the kids west to live in the Bay Area. The film also carefully explores how younger sister Mary felt abandoned by her friends when they all went up to high school and stopped bringing her along to parties where the older three — Mayeri, her best friend Jessica Hall, and big sister Janet (now Janet Kariuki) — started to explore their teenage sexuality, an environment inappropriate for still prepubescent Mary. Later, the film softly probes sore spots like how the older threesome also drifted apart over the years, and how Ayden and Jessica’s bond was especially tested by Jessica’s relationship with a psychologically abusive boyfriend.

Those dark passages add shade that balances the very sunshine-y material that makes up the vast majority of the film. Frenetically cut, perhaps intentionally in the fragmentary style of an early aughts pop video, the work flicks back and forth constantly between footage of the four women today and their younger selves, who made full use of early digital technology of the time to record their antics.

With all this fizzy activity, it’s not clear when Mayeri and Rothbart decided to start making this film — in other words whether it was before or after X-Cetra’s first and only album, then called Stardust, was uploaded to a specialist music site from whence its viral career was launched. Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter, but the sequence where they find out first that the The Guardian in the U.K. and then Rolling Stone are interested in interviews with them feels a little disingenuously presented so as to buttress the fairy-tale success story the film is selling.

But just as a mini highlight reel of Mayeri’s best bits as an actor illustrates, she has great natural comic timing and that serves her well here as a director. She also coaxes her friends well in the interviews — these women who are clearly not as at ease in front of a camera as she is — so that they feel secure enough to open up. Gradually, they fill out as “characters” in their own right in the comedy-drama of the doc, all of them enduringly regular but also individuals with complex inner lives. That fine line between banality and brilliance is one the film navigates throughout with grace.

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: March 17th, 2026 / 10:20 PM

Rating: R
Stars: Nina Kiri, Adam DiMarco, Michèle Duquet, Keana Lyn Basidas, Jeff Yung
Writer: Ian Tuason
Director: Ian Tuason
Distributor: A24
Release Date: March 13, 2026

Viewers may not want to play classic lullabies backwards – or maybe even forwards – after watching UNDERTONE. This low-budget indie uses sound and suggestion, along with disturbing subtext, to create a cumulatively unnerving experience.

Evie (Nina Kiri) is the caretaker for her extremely religious, bedridden and dying mother (Michèle Duquet). By the look of it, Evie is doing a good job, in that her mother is clean and comfortable. Evie stays home, seldom leaving their two-story house that is adorned everywhere with Catholic statues and imagery.

But Mother hasn’t eaten or spoken in the past two days as UNDERTONE opens, and Evie is preparing for the end. One of Evie’s few pleasures is the exploring-odd-phenomena podcast “Undertone” she does with her friend Justin (Adam DiMarco). The two haven’t seen each other in years and he lives in another country now, but they have an easy rapport with each other.

For the “Undertone” podcast, Evie plays the skeptic and Justin the believer, exaggerations of their real-life stances. When Justin receives ten audio files from an unknown sender, Evie’s first reaction is that he should delete them, as they probably contain viruses. This may well be the case, although the virus isn’t the kind that wrecks computers.

The files present to us a couple, Jessa (Keana Lyn Basidas) and Mike (Jeff Yung). Mike has taken to recording Jessa to prove to her that she is not just talking but in fact singing children’s songs in her sleep. By what seems to be coincidence, Evie has been singing “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” around the house.

Research enthusiast Justin gets to the roots of these lullabies and others. The results are alarming. They’re worse when played in reverse. Sometimes all of us – that’s Evie, Justin, and the audience – can hear the words; sometimes it’s a mixture of who can and who can’t.

Writer/director Ian Tuason demonstrates great comprehension of the alarming power of sounds and sights that we can’t fully grasp. It’s like walking downstairs and missing a step by an inch. We’re straining to make sense of input that we’re still processing when some other eerie development surfaces.

Tuason bases his horror in ancient folklore. We don’t need to be religious ourselves to understand why this is happening in this household. Even some of Mom’s little knick-knacks are illustrative of what we’re being told.

There’s also a carefully-threaded theme running through UNDERTONE about certain unspoken terrors that almost everyone has to face, albeit usually not so quite drastically as in this film.

Evie has her secrets, but she’s not an unreliable narrator. As the audience sees things that she does not, we aren’t dependent on her perspective. It’s more that she’s so run down by circumstances when we meet her that we fear she doesn’t have the strength to fight for herself.

Kiri has a charismatic presence that makes her an unassuming but natural focal point. DiMarco supplies ready comradely cheer.

Such is the immersive quality of UNDERTONE that only when it’s done do we step back and appreciate the skill (and financial/temporal restraint) with which it has been made. It leaves us agitated and jumpy, which is a hallmark of well-crafted horror.

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An acclaimed author and historian of the libertarian movement fell to his death last week, his employer confirmed.

The body of Brian Doherty, 57, senior editor of the libertarian magazine Reason, was found Thursday “after a fall” in the Battery Yates park portion of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, the publication wrote.

The National Parks Service’s law enforcement agency confirmed it responded to an incident at Battery Yates on Thursday “involving a male visitor who reportedly fell from the cliffside into the water.”

“The individual was recovered and pronounced dead,” said Scott Carr, parks service spokesperson, in an email. “We do not have any further information to share at this time.”

Doherty was the author of several books, with Reason saying his most notable work was the 2007 study “Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement.”

“Doherty has rescued libertarianism from its own obscurity,” the Wall Street Journal wrote of the work, “eloquently capturing the appeal of the ‘pure idea.’”

Libertarianism’s role in gun control and the courts was the subject of his works, and Doherty had no shortage of admirers.

Loren Dean, chair of the Libertarian Party of California, said it was Doherty’s work at Reason that brought him into the liberty movement.

“Brian Doherty was the best kind of libertarian: one who holds true to the principles of liberty as they are,” Dean said in an email. “He was a tireless champion of both gun rights and police reform who wrote books on both [former U.S. Rep.] Ron Paul and Burning Man; his work did not sit on either the ‘left’ or ‘right’ side of the authoritarian box, but delightfully outside that tired frame, where libertarian principles truly sing.”

Doherty began working at Reason in 1994, according to the publication’s obituary, left the company and returned in 2000 at the behest of Nick Gillespie, then editor in chief.

“What I liked most about Brian was his abiding interest in things happening on the margins of American culture, politics, and thought, and his deep appreciation for the prodigious bounty that markets deliver reliably and without moralizing,” Gillespie wrote in his farewell to Doherty, who had many opinion pieces published in The Times.

Far from just heady subjects, Doherty covered “both libertarian and whimsical” subcultures, according to the obituary, including New Hampshire’s Free State Project and the Seasteaders, a growing community of individuals dedicated to living on the seas.

The Seasteading Institute tweeted its condolences and noted the group had “appreciated his coverage of seasteading over the years.”

Doherty was a native of Queens, N.Y., majored in journalism at the University of Florida and joined the college’s libertarian group in 1987, according to Reason’s obituary.

He moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1990s and joined a group known as the Cacophony Society, a gang that “inspired or created phenomenon ranging from the novel/movie Fight Club to urban exploration, billboard alteration, the Yes Men, flash mobs, and ‘Santa Rampages,’” according to the obituary.

One of those projects translated into the formation of the annual Burning Man festival, the obituary stated. Doherty later chronicled the famed artsy, hippie-like festival in his book “This Is Burning Man.”

“Libertarians talk a lot about freedom and responsibility. Brian embodied both,” Reason Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward said in his obituary. “His weird, colorful life — filled with comics and festivals and music and books — was a model of life lived freely and openly.”