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.

Carly Rae Jepsen is officially in her mother era.

The Grammy-nominated “Call Me Maybe” pop star and her husband, music producer Cole M.G.N., welcomed their first child together months after tying the knot last fall. Jepsen, 40, revealed the arrival of her little one on Instagram.

“Last 2 weeks have been the best of my life,” the Canadian singer-songwriter captioned a photo shared to her Instagram story on Tuesday. The photo, a mirror selfie, shows Jepsen all smiles in a leopard-print bucket hat, white shirt and black shorts as she cradles her child, who wears a green-striped onesie.

“Welcome to the world little one,” Jepsen wrote.

“Run Away With Me” singer Jepsen and music producer Cole M.G.N. — whose full name is Cole Marsden Greif-Neil — exchanged their vows in late October at the Chelsea Hotel in New York, three years after striking up a romance in 2022. A month later, Jepsen announced she and her husband were expecting.

“Oh hi baby,” she captioned a set of baby-bump-baring photos shared to Instagram in November. In the tender maternity shoot, Jepsen cradles her bump in bed alongside Marsden Greif-Neil. Jepsen continued posting on Instagram about her maternity journey with fans, in January posting photos from the beach, from home and from fitting rooms as she spoke about finding a lullaby for her child-to-be.

On Tuesday, she channeled a Frankie Valli classic to express her “Emotion” about being a mother: “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.”

Last year, Jepsen celebrated 10 years of her cult-favorite album “Emotion,” the follow-up to her 2012 smash hit “Call Me Maybe.” She celebrated the milestone with a lively anniversary concert in August at the Troubadour in West Hollywood, featuring celebrity guests and moments of reflection.

“I had brought a little suitcase, and I kept calling my parents and saying, ‘Send more clothes!’” Jepsen said, recalling her move to Los Angeles from her native Canada when she was 26. “Five years later, I was like, I think I live here now. I’m very happy to say L.A. has become my home.”

Pop music critic Mikael Wood contributed to this report.

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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