ACL News

Sabrina Carpenter, The Strokes, and more revealed for 2025 ACL festival

Sabrina Carpenter is a headliner at ACL Music Festival in 2025.

Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for Coachella

Austin City Limits Music Festival is back for another year of big names including Sabrina Carpenter, Hozier, Doja Cat, Luke Combs, The Strokes, John Summit, Doechii, and more. The event will take place at Austin's Zilker Park from October 3-5 and October 10-13.

Ticket sales start with three-day wristbands at noon on May 6 at aclfestival.com.

Just in terms of buzz alone, Sabrina Carpenter and Doechii are two big pulls that perhaps could have been expected, although there are never any guarantees. The pristine pop and artistic rap performers, respectively, are each on a meteoric rise. Their sets could echo Chappell Roan's last year, which stole headlines for sheer excitement and crowd size.

Hozier, Doja Cat, Luke Combs, and The Strokes are all returning artists. That means nearly half of this year's headliners are making their ACL Fest debut right at the top. One of those newcomers is John Summit, who was speculated to show up in 2024 with Dom Dolla. Fans also expected to see Sabrina Carpenter in 2024 (in part thanks to a misleading advertisement on the "payphone" ACL Fest installed to tease its lineup), so thankfully they didn't have to wait long.

After the actual headliners, the top line of performers include Colombian reggaeton star Feid, who has collaborated with Bad Bunny, J Balvin, Karol G, and more; alternative rock band Cage the Elephant, who are back from a tumultuous patch; R&B star T-Pain, in the middle of a personal renaissance to remind people he can sing without autotune; Australian electropop duo Empire of the Sun, with alien operatic stage sensibilities; nostalgic solo artist Djo, the nearly incognito solo project of actor Joe Keery from Stranger Things; and iconic post-hardcore band Pierce the Veil, who are back in the studio again.

Attendees will have a second chance to see local favorite Passion Pit, the defining electropop group that recently dropped out of a 2025 South by Southwest showcase, leaving barely a trace. Japanese Breakfast also promises big crowds; a recent signing appearance at End of An Ear in South Austin created a line around the block for hours. Two more CultureMap favorites (if readers will indulge us) are Southern indie rock band Rainbow Kitten Surprise and British indie, post-punk band Wet Leg; respectively hyper sincere and deadpan, but both fun and high-energy.

Among Austin artists, two stand out as recent festival favorites: Geto Gala and The Point. Geto Gala is a hip hop duo favoring smooth, nostalgic beats and a laid-back lyrical delivery. The Point, a rock group, spans many styles, but their live sets tend to show off high-energy, world-influenced, and mostly instrumental blues. Dylan Gossett, while not exactly a festival staple, is much higher up on the lineup and is becoming very well-respected as a country-folk songwriter.

A press release pulls out some additional notable acts from the lineup:

Fujii Kaze (W2)
ROLE MODEL
Gigi Perez
CA7RIEL & Paco Amoroso (W2)
Olivia Dean
Yoke Lore
flowerovlove
Royal & The Serpent
Amble
Good Neighbours
Celeste (W1)

And some from Texas:

Maren Morris (W1)
Dylan Gossett
Tanner Usrey
Asleep at the Wheel (W1)
INOHA (W1)
Johnny Stimson (W2)
SL Houser (W1)
Geto Gala (W1)
Farmer’s Wife (W2)
Alex Amen (W2)
Shallowater (W2)
Aaron Page (W1)
Huston-Tillotson University Jazz Collective (W2)
Disciples of Christ (W1)

A full lineup can be viewed here:

ACL's full 2025 lineup.Graphic courtesy of Austin City Limits Music Festival

Folks who can't make the festival can once again tune in on Hulu, returning as the festival's official streaming partner for performances, interviews, and more. Hulu will stream the first weekend, only.

Movie Review

Live action Lilo & Stitch remake offers up frenzied fun and nostalgia

Courtesy of Disney

Lilo & Stitch returns to theaters this weekend.

The project to turn every single Disney animated movie into a “live action” film has rarely seemed like anything but a money grab by the movie studio. Most of the films have failed to update the original in any meaningful way, and in many of the cases, they’re almost shot-for-shot remakes, making the reason for the new film’s existence even more confusing.

Having almost exhausted the supply of their 20th century movies, Disney has now remade 2002’s Lilo & Stitch. The film follows an alien experiment, originally known as 626 (voiced by Chris Sanders), created by Jumba ( Zach Galifianakis) for the benefit of an alien race led by the Grand Councilwoman (Hannah Waddingham). Unfortunately, 626 is too uncontrollable for them, and is banished to the faraway planet known as Earth.

Landing in Hawaii, the creature soon to be known as Stitch gloms on to a young girl named Lilo (Maia Kealoha), who mistakes it for a dog while looking for companionship following the death of her parents. Tracked by Jumba and fellow alien Pleakley (Billy Magnussen), now in human form, Stitch leaves a trail of destruction wherever he goes, much to the chagrin of Lilo’s older sister, Nani (Sydney Agudong).

Directed by Dean Fleischer Camp and written by Chris Kekaniokalani Bright and Mike Van Waes, the film will surely be a blast of nostalgia for anyone who was a kid when the original came out. The now-3D Stitch is just as chaotic as ever, and they even included cast members from the first film like Tia Carrere (now playing a social worker for the orphaned sisters) and Amy Hill as a kindly neighbor.

But for all of the frenzied fun that Stitch offers, there’s very little else that holds the story together. For one, the Lilo character as a real person doesn’t work as well as she does in animated form, as there’s something fluid that happens in animation that feels stilted when it’s an actual little girl. Perhaps sensing this fault, the film is loaded to the hilt with bite-sized moments that try to make the audience laugh, but do little to give the story any meaning.

The difference between animation and live action is never more evident than with Jumba, Pleakley, and CIA agent Cobra Bubbles (Courtney B. Vance). Characters that are goofy and enjoyable in animated form come off as weird and off-putting in human form. They’re supposed to bring a sense of fun and even suspense to the film, but instead they feel like characters who are getting in the way of a better story.

Kealoha, making her professional debut, is definitely cute and offers up some interesting moments opposite Stitch and Nani, but her lack of experience shows. Agudong turns in the best performance, giving a bit of emotional weight to a film that needed more. Galifianakis and Magnussen would have been better served as voice-only roles; neither comes off well when their characters turn into humans. Hill is like a warm hug every time she comes on screen, and the story could have used more of her.

The new Lilo & Stitch is not an abomination, but like most of the Disney live action remakes before it, it fails to stand on its own merits. Never given a chance to be its own thing and featuring storytelling too disjointed to be effective, the film is another so-so effort from a studio that knows how to make much better movies.

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Lilo & Stitch is now playing in theaters.

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