Funniest Person in Austin Prelims
Through August, Cap City Comedy Club
This annual contest is not for the faint of heart. The contestants will be alone onstage with nothing but their wits and a mic to hopefully impress the judges. Audience members must also have to muster some courage as these are the preliminary rounds, so the talent is unproven, and there are few things more squirm-inducing than watching a stand-up comedian bomb. But as they say, fortune favors the brave, and, who knows, you might just be on the ground floor to see Austin’s next big comedy talent. – James Renovitch
Reproductive Health 101
Monday 30, Central Library
One of the things about growing up in the Texas public school system is that if a football coach didn’t skim the required reproductive health and sex-ed lesson, you probably had some digging to do on your own. But don’t you worry: Local stewards of reproductive justice from the YWCA are here to help, presenting info to educators, advocates, and anyone interested in everything from menstrual cycles to contraception. – Levi Langley
After Void World Premiere
Monday 30, AFS Cinema
The big screen goes vertical for just one night with the world premiere of After Void, Stephen Robinson’s new micro series about a group of strangers who find themselves trapped in a mysterious and dangerous office building where the rules of reality no longer seem to apply. Presented by Austin Studios, catch this special theatrical screening before the series launches on TikTok. – Richard Whittaker
Frankenhooker
Monday 30, Alamo Village, Slaughter Lane & Lakeline
Few films are brave enough to tackle New York’s super-crack epidemic, but let it never be said director Frank Henenlotter shies from the tough topics! His fifth feature film is an extremely loose Frankenstein play about a man whose fiancée is lost after a fatal lawnmower accident shreds her into a thousand pieces. Luckily, this man also happens to be an amateur scientist and isn’t afraid to play God if it means he gets his girl back. His solution? To create the ultra drug super-crack, which is so potent that a single injection causes sex workers to explode and leave their body parts open for his pilfering. Exploitation in its most excitingly grotesque form, Henenlotter delivers freaks and fun so good even Bill Murray said, “If you see one movie this year, it should be Frankenhooker.” – James Scott
I Know What You Did Last Summer
Tuesday 1, Hyperreal Film Club
If an über-Nineties cast of three-name YA stars (Sarah Michelle Gellar, Freddie Prinze Jr., and Jennifer Love Hewitt – plus Ryan Phillippe) wasn’t enough, a forthcoming sequel cements I Know What You Did Last Summer as one of those not-very-good slashers you simply can’t hate. Before director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson’s reboot (only a fellow three-namer could get this gig) – featuring Prinze and Hewitt alongside a new Gen Z friend group – arrives next month, relive the Fisherman’s original Fourth of July hunt of four beautifully dumb teenagers. To quote Julie James: What are you waiting for? – Carys Anderson
Strategies for Healthy Trees
Tuesday 1, Terrazas Branch Library
Arbor Day was in April, but tree health is a year-round deal. Austin Public Library invites the city of Austin’s Community Tree Preservation Division Education Forester Keith Babberney to share his expertise as a board-certified master arborist. Come for the workshop on “keeping your trees happy and healthy” but don’t leaf right after! Make sure you stick around for a Q&A with Babberney, where you can ask all your Qs about caring for our urban forest. – James Scott
North by Northwest
Tuesday 1, Paramount Theatre
Mysterious organizations, staged car crashes, well-dressed men, and a framed Cary Grant: It’s a Hitchcock film so overwhelmingly Hitchcockian some have called it a self-parody. Suave suits with bad intentions (and Cary Grant) run through a narrative maze of government information and espionage that’ll keep you on the edge of your seat. One of Hitchcock’s most commercially and culturally successful films, North by Northwest won all the awards, it’s on all the lists, so if you call yourself a movie buff you should probably see this film. At the Paramount, no less! – Caroline Drew
Seizing the Zines of Production
Tuesday 1, Monkeywrench Books
Zines aren’t just “back” – they are (for many of my friends, at least) a means of survival. They’re a way to push back against the bureaucracy of who decides what gets turned into print and what stays as mere scraps. Perhaps the art of zine-making is also a way of creating a space for something physical in our excessively online world. Whatever it may be, it’s up to you – that’s the point. Make a fan zine. Make a zine about plants, or knitting, or knitting plants. Just whatever you do, don’t go about saying print is dead. – Levi Langley
Piranha (1978)
Tuesday 1, All Austin-area Alamo Drafthouses
For some reason, the Texas Lottery is getting in on Jaws’ 50th anniversary celebration with a shark scratch-off as well as sponsoring screenings of films Jaws inspired, and this might be the funnest of the bunch in the Great Bites series that runs through July. It’s a gory and goofy spoof with ravenous piranhas standing in for murderous sharks, helmed by a pre-Gremlins Joe Dante, and it went on to spawn multiple remakes. The master himself, Steven Spielberg, called it the best of the Jaws ripoffs, so Great Bites is off to a great start! – Kat McNevins
Tammy and the T-Rex
Wednesday 2, Violet Crown Cinema
Before she put the star in Starship Troopers, Denise Richards’ most memorable role involved making out with a blood-drenched robotic T-Rex containing the brain of her jock boyfriend. This is a movie that only exists because a theme park operator offered director Stewart Raffill an animatronic dinosaur and gave him a week to start filming – and, boy, does it show. Join Trash in the Can podcast hosts Eric Samaniego and Wright Sulek as they take a bite out of bad taste with a very special screening of the goriest teen rom-com of the 1990s. – Richard Whittaker
Zodiac
Film
Wednesday 2, Paramount Theatre
In high school, I had a David Fincher phase and used my Blockbuster pick power to force my family to watch this 2007 thriller. Needless to say, it was not exactly what Mom and Dad pictured us enjoying with Nana. But this mostly true accounting of the Zodiac Killer’s terrorizing of the Bay Area earns its spot as one of Fincher’s finest, with the slow unraveling of all those attempting to unscramble the killer’s puzzles being more about the inexplicable nature of murder than actual code-breaking. Come for the stellar CGI blood splatter; stay for CGI hair added on the back of Jake Gyllenhaal’s hands. – James Scott
Contempt
Monday 30 & Wednesday 2, AFS Cinema
Fritz Lang stars in this Jean-Luc Godard classic as himself, a director adapting The Odyssey in Capri, at odds with a brash American producer (Jack Palance). Of course, the producer is obsessed with Brigitte Bardot, the wife of a failed playwright-turned-screenwriter. Godard works out a lot of his gripes with the film industry through these characters, and it’s unclear how much of it is autobiographical or allegorical. But what is undeniable is the beauty of the Capri coast, and of course, Brigitte Bardot’s whole thing. Why not indulge in what is widely considered Godard’s most accessible fare on whatever level you choose this summer? Whether it’s about a canary yellow French escapist vision for you or the futility of the creative act, it’s gonna be a good time at the movies. – Lina Fisher
Kicking the Bucket Podcast Club: Explore End-of-Life Decisions With Humor and Heart
Wednesday 2, Spicewood Springs Branch Library
Death comes for everyone, so why not prepare for it? Austin Public Library hosts an eight-week listening series of the Kicking the Bucket podcast. Each episode follows an elderly couple avoiding the nursing home and navigating the aging and dying process. After the episode ends, attendees will engage in discussion about the themes with an elder care expert as well as one of the podcast’s creators. – James Scott
Remember My Name
Wednesday 2, AFS Cinema
Lest you get the wrong idea about AFS’ newest Essential Cinema series, On Our Way to Where: Women of ’70s Cinema, do note they mean women in front of the camera; though the nine films featured may uniquely (for the era) foreground women’s experiences, they are uniformly directed by men. Amidst more celebrated works like John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence and Paul Mazurksy’s An Unmarried Woman are some intriguing lesser-seens, including series starter Remember My Name. An early film from Alan Rudolph, no slouch with strong women (Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle), it stars Geraldine Chaplin as a woman freshly out of prison for murder and looking to, erm, reconnect with her ex-husband (Anthony Perkins). – Kimberley Jones
Ninja Terminator
Wednesday 2, Alamo South Lamar
Remember how American director Terry Morse took revolutionary Japanese kaiju flick Gojira, added some scenes with Raymond Burr, butchered the script, and made big bank with what he called Godzilla, King of the Monsters? Well, Godfrey Ho was arguably trying to do the same thing when he got the U.S. rights to Korean gangster actioner Uninvited Guest of the Star Ferry and tried to tie it to the current trend of Ninjasploitation. Hey, it was 1985, when ninjas were the third-greatest threat to life after guys in windowless white vans and quicksand. However, Ho didn’t just cannibalize the Korean film, but many of his own films, meaning lead actor Richard Harrison had no clue he was even in this baffling mélange of Garfield phones, bowl-cut wigs, screaming crabs, intense conversations about pleats, messenger robots, and watermelon abuse. As one character ponders, “Why did God do this to us?” – Richard Whittaker
Babe: Pig in the City
Wednesday 2, Hyperreal Film Club
You know how the film Babe is a quiet, sensitive story? Yeah, well: Throw that expectation out the window. You’re watching the sequel Babe: Pig in the City, which in every second of its overwhelming runtime reminds you that THIS is a movie directed by Mad Max’s George Miller. The plot: On the way to a sheepherding contest – the prize money of which would help save the farm from foreclosure – pig Babe and farmer’s wife Esme are incorrectly accused of carrying drugs and get stuck in an unfamiliar city waiting for their next flight. After that, like, I simply can’t explain. A lot happens, from Mickey Rooney as a clown to orangutans and chimpanzees, and of COURSE there’s a little dog in a wheelchair. My advice? Just go see the movie. – James Scott
Heartworn Highways
Thursday 3 – Friday 4, AFS Cinema
Before Austin’s tech boom and ensuing personality change, it was mostly known as a (cosmic) cowboy enclave, helmed by the likes of Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, David Allan Coe, and Blaze Foley. Heartworn Highways is an intimate, taped-together VHS, day-to-day look into what it was really like for the musicians whose work is now the stuff of legend, but whose lives looked a lot like some of our friends’ do back then. Watching Clark fix a guitar or being in the room for a Christmas party at Guy and Susanna Clark’s house might specifically tickle die-hard country fans, but it’s the satellite scenes including Austinites of all stripes, some born before the turn of the 20th century, that flesh out this ambient portrait of our place in a different time. – Lina Fisher
Want to see all of our listings broken down by day? Go to austinchronicle.com/calendar and see what’s happening now or in the coming week.
This article appears in June 27 • 2025.
