SXSW Film

St. Nick

It's never clear exactly what they're running from, but the unflappable young brother and sister in St. Nick who've loosed themselves from all routine obligations – school, parents, those annoying childhood chores – are running from something, even if it is only the boredom of home. Scrimping out an existence together by cadging food where they can and occupying empty homes, the scrappy pair seems at first to be living an almost postapocalyptically lonely life; it is also a briefly idyllic one. There are moments in Lowery's elegiac, spare debut feature when his sibling characters seem unequal to the insights the writer-director has given them, musing about human nature and death as the brother does, but Lowery's decision to unspool the great majority of the movie sans dialogue leaves plenty of imaginative room to roam through his characters' lives.

Friday, March 20, 12:30pm, Alamo Ritz