After making a film about an obsessive teenage wannabe Hollywood director, Gabriel LaBelle went from The Fabelmans (2022) — in which he starred as a thinly veiled version of its co-writer-director Steven Spielberg — to a film about an aspiring 30-year-old TV showrunner, playing SNL creator Lorne Michaels in Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night (2024). Dempsey Bryk’s debut feature Crash Land brings him back full circle to the world of no-budget movie-making, putting his bearded baby-faced appeal to good use in a coming-of-age story that makes up in naive charm what it might otherwise lack in originality.
Films about exuberant no-talent amateur filmmakers are an interesting sub-sector within the whole film-within-a-film genre, and Crash Land makes the smart choice not to riff on specific movies, a key flaw in the likes of Be Kind Rewind and Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. Instead, the three heroes at the heart of
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