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.

AUSTIN, Texas — “The Sun Never Sets” is filmmaker Joe Swanberg’s 10th indie to premiere at SXSW but his first to play the event since 2017. The astonishing pace with which he made his early work — loose, idiosyncratic stories that were progenitors of the emergent style known as mumblecore — has slowed significantly, but also given way to a newfound maturity as both a person and an artist.

Introducing “The Sun Never Sets” at its world premiere on Friday night to a sold-out crowd at the Zach Theater, Swanberg called his latest “my favorite film I’ve ever made.” Shot on 35mm in Anchorage, the movie follows a 30-ish woman, Wendy (Dakota Fanning in a vibrant turn), torn between pursuing a fresh romance with a reckless old flame (Cory Michael Smith) or continuing on with the settled-in-his-ways divorced father of two (Jake Johnson) she’s been seeing for a few years.

“I guess this is what they tell you about getting older and doing this job longer,” said a thoughtful Swanberg in a video interview from his home in Chicago shortly before the South by Southwest festival. “You get better at it and you sort of mature and all of this.”

The film marks Swanberg’s fourth collaboration with Johnson, a partnership that goes back to 2013’s “Drinking Buddies.” (The actor partly financed the new project along with his brother.) Following completion of the third season of the Netflix anthology series “Easy” in 2019, for which he wrote and directed all the episodes, Swanberg was planning to take a break. A divorce and the pandemic caused that pause to grow even longer.

In the intervening years Swanberg produced a number of projects for other filmmakers, did some acting and opened a small video store in Chicago. Swanberg knew Anchorage-based producer Ashleigh Snead, who encouraged him to consider shooting something there. The scenic location would give Swanberg the opportunity to expand his visual style from his usual couches, bars and apartments of much of his work. (There still are a surprising number of scenes on couches and in bars.)

“Joe’s a real filmmaker,” says Johnson in a separate interview. “And I think sometimes he doesn’t get that credit because he can make movies with nothing. This is a real adult movie. This is a film about how complicated breakups are and how messy they get. And it’s in beautiful Alaska.”

Swanberg, center, on the set of “The Sun Never Sets.”

(SXSW)

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Swanberg has now gone from someone making talky, provocative and at times controversial films about the lives of post-collegiate 20-somethings to exploring the nuances and specifics of being a 44-year-old divorced father of two still trying to figure out his place in the world. His original cohort of SXSW-affiliated filmmakers, many of whom also fell under the rubric of mumblecore — nobody much liked the name, but no one ever came up with anything better, so it stuck — included Greta Gerwig, Lena Dunham, Barry Jenkins, Ti West and others who have gone on to more conventional mainstream success.

But Swanberg doesn’t seem to feel left behind. Rather, he only sees doors opening.

“It’s gone so much better than I thought it was going to go for me,” he says. “I mean, when I was making these really tiny, sexually explicit 71-minute movies, I was like, I’m just grateful to be here. I can’t even believe these festivals are showing this work and it’s so cool that there’s a space for me in this ecosystem.

“And so to watch my friends go off to do these giant movies, to see Greta doing ‘Barbie’ and stuff like that, to me it just opens up the possibilities,” he adds. “Each time a friend of mine sets some new record or moves into some new space, I’m kind of like: Oh, that just opened up for all of us now.”

His earlier work often featured raw sex scenes, sometimes featuring Swanberg himself. From practically the start of his career, well predating the #MeToo-era reckoning that began in 2017, Swanberg weathered accusations that he was exploitative and manipulative of his female performers. His stepback from productivity coincided with a moment when his explorations of sexual power dynamics fell out of favor. It would be easy to interpret that Swanberg preemptively soft-canceled himself to avoid a broader scandal. He doesn’t see it that way.

“Certainly in Chicago, where I’ve spent the last five years, I’m not unwelcome places,” he says, drawing a distinction between himself and “people who lose jobs or are capital-C canceled. But also my work has always pushed those boundaries and always attracted some amount of positive and negative attention.”

Though “The Sun Never Sets” has numerous kissing scenes, it doesn’t go too much further than that.

“I won’t do it,” Johnson says of more graphic scenes. “When I worked with Joe early on, I was like, ‘I love you, man — I’m not doing this.’”

For her part, Fanning had no reservations about working with Swanberg. He offered both Fanning and Smith the opportunity to work with an intimacy coordinator, but neither felt it was necessary.

“There was no planet where you’d ever be asked to do anything you were uncomfortable with,” Fanning says. “If there was ever a moment like, ‘I don’t want to do that,’ he’d be like, ‘Oh, then let’s not.’ There was a day where there was a scene and it was pouring rain outside. And we both looked at each other and he was like, ‘We’re not going to do it. The scene’s cut.’ He’s just open. And I just trusted him implicitly.”

Jake Johnson and Dakota Fanning in the movie “The Sun Never Sets.”

(SXSW)

Swanberg has long worked in an unusual style in which the script is essentially a detailed outline and the actors work to come up with their own dialogue during rehearsals. For “The Sun Never Sets,” Swanberg and Johnson developed the longest, most complete outline Swanberg has ever used, including some dialogue exchanges. Then the actors were allowed to make it their own.

Fanning recalled an early Zoom call with Swanberg and Johnson on which they explained the process.

“It’s still made like a real film,” Fanning says. “And Jake and Joe promised it’s not like we’re just flying by the seat of our pants: ‘You will know what to say, I promise.’ And then friends that know me asked, ‘Are you so nervous?’ And I was, but for some reason, I don’t know why, I just knew that it was going to be fine. And that just proved to be true.”

Even though it takes places in Anchorage, Swanberg calls “The Sun Never Sets” “extremely personal.”

“I was definitely writing a movie about a divorced mid-40s guy dating a younger person,” he says. “The questions of marriage and having children were sort of an amalgam of two real relationships that I merged into one onscreen.” He describes the material as “questions that I had and have about what my own relationships are going to look like post-divorce.”

That comes through in Fanning’s rich, layered performance, which might rank among the best of her already lengthy career. Swanberg’s style draws both an ease and an intensity from Fanning, who captures a woman at a pivotal moment of figuring out what she wants amid the emotional whirlwind she is going through. (At the film’s premiere, Fanning said, “I’ve never put so much of myself into a role before.”)

“I think the goal of Joe’s films, and I think at least my goal with this film, is trying to make everything feel real,” she says. “Things are just a mess some of the time.”

Dakota Fanning and Cory Michael Smith in “The Sun Never Sets.”

(SXSW)

Swanberg himself appears in a small role as the new husband of the ex-wife of Johnson’s character. And the characters of the two kids in the movie are named after the director’s own children. With a newfound maturity and emotional depth, Swanberg is continuing to make movies that are part diary, part generational markers.

“It’d be really cool in my 40s to make movies about characters in their 40s,” he says, “and in my 50s, 60s and 70s. It’d be neat to be making sexually explicit movies about 70-year-olds in their dating lives and sex lives and stuff. It’s really exciting to have movies about characters at this phase of their life, whether they’re finally settling down in their 40s or whether they’re getting out of relationships and reexamining their life. It’s where my head is at.”
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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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