Indie Film Weekly [EP 38]: Spinal Tap II-The End Continues (2025) Motherland (2025) Slacker (1990)
Welcome back to Indie Film Weekly for September 12. This week, we’re reuniting the world’s loudest fake band, wandering around a mystical Minnesota lake, rebelling against dystopian parenting policies, and learning how a certain New Yorker begins his long, strange climb to power. Plus, we revisit a cult classic that captured a city in mid-drift — where conspiracy theorists, anarchists, and pop culture prophets collide on every street corner. Whether you’re a film lover, filmmaker, or just someone wondering how you’re still not the protagonist of your own life, we’ve got something for you.
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New in Theaters
First up in theaters, Spinal Tap II: The End Continues dares to ask: what if the band actually did turn it up to eleven... again? Rob Reiner returns as Marty DiBergi, the documentarian brave enough to once again follow the most questionably legendary band in rock history: Spinal Tap. After years apart, David St. Hubbins, Nigel Tufnel, and Derek Smalls reunite for one more show — and one more search for a drummer who hopefully won’t explode. As they gear up for a New Orleans reunion concert, they wrestle with age, ego, and actual musical guests including Paul McCartney and Elton John.
This sequel leans all the way into the meta, with a knowing wink to aging rockers and aging fans alike. Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer slide back into their roles with uncanny ease, and Reiner keeps the laughs flowing. It’s a tribute, a roast, and a reminder that parody can age surprisingly well. If you’re wondering whether the band’s legacy is real or just incredibly loud fiction, well… it’s both. Just don’t ask them about Stonehenge.
Next, Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake) marks the quietly stunning debut of writer-director Sierra Falconer. Set in and around a lakeside town in Minnesota, the film unfolds in lyrical chapters: a girl learns to sail, a boy competes for first chair, two sisters run a B&B, and a fisherman chases his white whale.
Falconer weaves these lives together with the lightest of touches, letting emotion emerge in glances, gestures, and the lapping of water on dockwood. Shot on 16mm with local musicians and non-actors, the film evokes the mood of a lake at golden hour — hushed, reflective, full of memory. You can practically smell the sunscreen and hear the cicadas. It’s about small awakenings: independence, excitement, grief, joy. If Boyhood had taken place over one summer and never left the water’s edge, it might look something like this.
Finally, in Evan Matthews’ dystopian sci-fi Motherland, the state has decided to fix parenting by… eliminating it. In this near-future society, children are raised communally, parents are unburdened, and no one has to sit through a PTA meeting again. But when a by-the-book enforcer stumbles upon a buried truth, her loyalty begins to fracture.
With sleek visuals and a deeply unnerving tone, the film echoes Gattaca, Children of Men, and yes, a few pages from your worst parenting handbook. Star Talia Ryder grounds the film with a performance that’s equal parts cool resolve and rising panic. Matthews builds a textured world where bureaucratic control meets moral decay — and asks the hard question: What happens when you wake up in a system you helped build? The answer is bleak, riveting, and disturbingly plausible.
So in theaters this week, that’s Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake) and Motherland!
Films to Rent or Download
On TVOD this week, director Ali Abbasi goes full biopic-meets-cautionary-tale, with The Apprentice, tracing a young Donald Trump’s climb from outer-borough daddy’s boy to Manhattan dealmaker. It’s the ’70s, and with Roy Cohn whispering in his ear, Trump begins laying the foundations for the brand that would one day take over buildings, magazines, and — unfortunately — governments.
Sebastian Stan plays Trump with icy ambition and a pout that could melt gold leaf. The film doesn’t go full parody but leans hard into the origin myth, unearthing formative moments with the same giddy horror as watching a villain get their mask in Act One. And Jeremy Strong’s Cohn slithers through every scene with oily menace. It’s not parody, not homage — just a cautionary tale that unfolds like a slow-motion train crash. Available now on Amazon, Apple, and Google.
Indie Classic
And for our indie classic this week, Slacker turns 35 this year, and if you’ve never seen it… you’ve probably still lived it. Richard Linklater’s breakout film is a meandering, conversation-fueled journey through a version of Austin where no one has a job, everyone has a theory, and time is mostly optional.
There’s no central character, just a loose chain of moments — a guy pontificating in a cab, a woman trying to sell Madonna’s used Pap smear, a conspiracy nut reading too much into JFK. But somehow it adds up to something enduring and even profound. Slacker didn’t just launch Linklater’s career — it defined a new kind of American indie: lo-fi, lo-budget, and radically character-driven. Now streaming on HBO Max, it’s worth revisiting for its humor, its insights, and its pre-gentrification weirdness. It remains a sacred text for the meanderingly motivated and a love letter to aimlessness.
That’s a wrap for the September 12 edition of Indie Film Weekly. Whether you’re sailing across a poetic lake, watching rock legends reunite (again), or examining the moral cost of parental outsourcing, this week delivers a wide range of cinematic flavors. Support these filmmakers and keep independent cinema thriving. Go see a movie in a theater.
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