Right as Oscar season finally crosses the finish line, South by Southwest comes around to start the next phase of the Hollywood calendar. It’s the springiest of any film festival. SXSW loads its lineup with raucous crowd-pleasers befitting a city known for breweries and warm weather, and for several days downtown Austin is flooded with celebrities zipping in and out of town to promote their projects, some of which will open in theaters or debut on streaming platforms a few short weeks later. What often gets lost in the commotion is the fact that SXSW is also a robust hub for small, off-kilter indies that struggle to stand out when Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt are staging a mini-parade at a headline-making premiere. Unfortunately, this particular fest is not known for producing huge acquisition deals, which might preempt any handwringing now that Sundance has come and gone with alarmingly few sales. SXSW has managed to launch a Best Picture winner, though, so you never know what might happen.
Whatever fate the next week brings, there are a lot of promising titles on SXSW’s roster. That includes your standard commercial stuff — Another Simple Favor, The Accountant 2, and A24’s Death of a Unicorn are among this year’s biggies — as well as new films from Jay Duplass, Amy Landecker, Chad Hartigan, Under the Shadow’s Babak Anvari, and The Vast of Night breakout Andrew Patterson. Here’s what we’re most looking forward to at the festival, which kicks off Friday.
The Accountant 2
Bet you forgot this one was coming. The Accountant 2 has been in the works since 2017, less than a year after the original made an unexpected $155 million killing at the global box office. In fact, it’s the second installment in a planned trilogy. Gavin O’Connor is back in the director’s seat, and Ben Affleck is reprising his role as a money-laundering suburban CPA generous enough to lend criminal organizations a helping hand. This time, he and his brother (Jon Bernthal) are drawn into a web of unknown assassins when his old Treasury Department friend (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) requests his help in solving a murder. Affleck lit up SXSW a couple of years ago when Air premiered here. This is him… now, but we’re expecting a lot of fanfare around his presence in Austin.
Another Simple Favor
While it’s possible that Blake Lively’s ongoing war with It Ends With Us director and co-star Justin Baldoni will someday make it to actual court, it’s currently being waged in the court of public opinion in a way that threatens to overshadow her reunion with Anna Kendrick and director Paul Feig. Which would be a shame, because 2018’s A Simple Favor was an engagingly overheated dark comedy that made good use of Kendrick’s manic edge, Lively’s ability to look fantastic in a suit, and various plot twists and queer undercurrents. Its sequel deserves a fair shake — especially given that it ditches the ‘burbs in favor of far more fabulous Capri. —Alison Willmore
Are We Good?
Marc Maron started doing stand-up in 1987, but it’s the podcast he launched in 2009, filled with fascinatingly frank interviews and even rawer confessions from the comedian’s life, that launched him into his current level of fame. Are We Good? director Steven Feinartz is no stranger to working with comedians, having directed over a dozen specials, including Maron’s own 2023 From Bleak to Dark, as well as the 2012 Eddie Pepitone portrait The Bitter Buddha. His new documentary isn’t just about Maron’s career, but something that sounds more melancholy and meditative, as it picks up a year after the 2020 death of Maron’s partner, the filmmaker Lynn Shelton. —A.W.
The Baltimorons
This is the first movie Jay Duplass has directed since The Do-Deca-Pentathlon in 2012, as well as the first without brother Mark by his side — how Coen-y and Safdie-y of him. It’s also a Christmas comedy premiering at a festival where the temperatures will reach nearly 80 degrees. Despite those mismatched elements, we have a good feeling about the elder Duplass gent’s latest endeavor, in which a Christmas Eve dental emergency leads to an unexpected connection between a newly sober improv performer (Michael Strassner) and his older dentist (Liz Larsen). Maybe The Baltimorons can be this year’s Christmas Eve at Miller’s Point, a lo-fi holiday indie set over the course of one existentially rocky night. Equally exciting is the fact that the movie features Mary Catherine Garrison, whom Duplass directed in several episodes of the late, great Somebody Somewhere. —Matt Jacobs
Death of a Unicorn
A24 usually reserves at least one starry crowd-pleaser for SXSW’s rambunctious audiences — over the past few years, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Problemista, and Y2K have lit up the Paramount Theatre on SXSW’s main drag. This time, the studio is using the festival to launch Death of a Unicorn, the debut feature from Resurrection producer Alex Scharfman. Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega play a father and daughter who happen upon a real-life unicorn with supernatural abilities that a couple of boorish businessman types (Richard E. Grant and Will Poulter) are keen to exploit. As is the case for many of the highest-profile SXSW premiere titles hoping to drum up attention, the fantastical horror-comedy will open in theaters just a few weeks later (on March 28). —M.J.
Deepfaking Sam Altman
Filmmaker Adam Bhala Lough’s had a fascinating career that’s taken him everywhere from an incredible portrait of Lil Wayne (in 2009’s The Carter) that Lil Wayne tried to block to a wild true crime expose about fundraising fraud (HBO’s Telemarketers). His latest documentary (based on a New York magazine story) delves into AI by way of an intriguing hook — denied an interview with Sam Altman, he decides to make Sam Bot, an AI version of the OpenAI CEO, to talk to instead. —A.W.
Drop
Scream 7 drama aside, Christoper Landon has turned out a couple of the cleverest horror-comedies of the past decade, namely Happy Death Day and Freaky. His latest, Drop, appears to be more of a traditional cat-and-mouse thriller in the vein of Landon’s first script, Disturbia. Meghann Fahy stars as a single mom who receives threatening AirDrops ordering her to kill the man she’s on a date with (1923’s Brandon Sklenar) lest her family die. There’s got to be some sort of Shyamalanian twist built in, but the movie seems like a fitting substitute for Scream, which also uses modern technology — specifically phones, cellular or otherwise — to facilitate murderous scares. —M.J.
The Dutchman
Director Andre Gaines has made documentaries about Jesse Owens, Dick Gregory, and Black baseball players’ fight for equality, and his first fiction feature is a delicious-sounding modernization of the similarly named Amiri Baraka play from 1964. André Holland plays a successful New York businessman going a little haywire — he’s attending couples counseling with his wife (Zazie Beetz), and both their therapist (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and an arresting subway stranger (Kate Mara) seem to be stalking him. Holland and Beetz had a great rapport in Steven Soderbergh’s High Flying Bird, though it sounds like Holland will spend a lot of The Dutchman trapped alone in his own fraying psyche. He’s always been good at playing things close to the vest (see: The Knick, Moonlight, Exhibiting Forgiveness), so it’ll be fun to see Holland in freakout mode if that’s where this thriller is headed. —M.J.
Ghost Boy
Rodney Ascher’s primarily a documentarian, but he nevertheless occupies a space on the boundaries of the genre world, leaning into recreations to explore where speculation meets fact in films like Room 237, a kaleidoscopic assembly of sometimes outlandish theories about The Shining, and A Glitch in the Matrix, which was all about simulation theory. Ascher’s latest feature, Ghost Boy, sounds very much on brand for the filmmaker in centering on Martin Pistorius, a South African man who, at the age of 12, spent three years in a vegetative state, only to wake up with locked-in syndrome, surrounded by caretakers who had no idea he was aware of what was going on around him, but unable to communicate. —A.W.
Good Boy
The horror scene has given us some high concept films in the last decade, from time-looping slasher Happy Death Day to ambient one In a Violent Nature. But Ben Leonberg’s feature debut may top them all, because it’s a film about a haunting that unfolds from the perspective of the family dog. Indy isn’t just the hero of the story, he’s the only character able to pick up on the fact that something nefarious is lurking in the rural home he moves into with his owner. That’s an irresistible premise for any dog lover, but I’m also just very curious about how the film will pull this off. —A.W.
Holland
No one had a great time making the 2004 edition of The Stepford Wives, so why not give it another go? That’s certainly what the Holland trailer feels like, putting Nicole Kidman at the center of a paranoid satire about a seemingly picture-perfect Michigan homemaker whose husband (Matthew Macfadyen) is up to … something. We all know Kidman has made her fair share of easy-to-digest streaming mysteries lately, but this one, which premieres March 27 on Prime Video, seems a bit kookier and more promising than The Perfect Couple or The Undoing (plus it’s not nearly so long). It’s the second feature from director Mimi Cave, whose 2022 debut Fresh had enough stylistic verve to make up for its thematic shortcomings. —M.J.
The Rivals of Amziah King
Writer-director Andrew Patterson’s self-financed debut, the loquacious throwback sci-fi film The Vast of Night, just knocked me out when I caught it at a festival in 2019. I can’t wait to see how he handles working with more resources — not to mention a big old Hollywood star in Matthew McConaughey — in his sophomore effort, The Rivals of Amziah King. The film takes place in Patterson’s home state of Oklahoma, and is a crime thriller that unfolds in, of all things, the honey industry. McConaughey plays the title character, a musician and honeymaker whose relationship with his competitors escalates into a conflict that will hopefully involve some bee-based violence. —A.W.
Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror
How has it taken this long to get a real Rocky Horror Picture Show documentary? Strange Journey director Linus O’Brien, who had an uncredited role in the 1981 Rocky Horror sorta-sequel Shock Treatment, recruited Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, Barry Botswick, original writer Richard O’Brien (his dad), and others to chart the film’s unlikely journey from stage musical to big-screen bomb to cult movie so beloved it inspires Glee sing-alongs. SXSW has booked its two biggest theaters for Strange Journey’s screenings, a treatment that few documentaries get. The festival’s pop-culture docs aren’t usually its strongest, but we’re hoping this one is enough of a wild and untamed thing to rise above. —M.J.
Take No Prisoners
Vice veterans Subrata De and Adam Ciralsky teamed up to make a riveting documentary about hostage negotiations, specifically a recent crisis involving Los Angeles-based public defender Eyvin Hernandez, who was wrongfully held hostage in a merciless Venezuelan prison. Take No Prisoners goes inside the sort of high-stakes process that has never been publicly chronicled in such detail, following Roger D. Carstens, the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs under Joe Biden, as he wades through a geopolitical system that has only grown more complex in the wake of Brittney Griner and Evan Gershkovich. The movie doesn’t have a buyer yet, but in the right hands it could be one of 2025’s nonfiction breakouts. It’s also going to be turned into a scripted Hulu series called The Envoy. —M.J.
The Threesome
Chad Hartigan became a lowkey Sundance darling thanks to films like This is Martin Bonner and Morris From America, warm-hearted works that never tipped over into the cloying. But his last feature, Little Fish, got lost in the pandemic shuffle, and he’s only now made a new one. The Threesome, which stars Jonah Hauer-King, Zoey Deutch, and Ruby Cruz, may begin with a modish sexual encounter between the three main characters — a smitten audio engineer, his elusive crush, and a grad student the pair meet one evening — but it then morphs into a wonderfully complicated romantic comedy about what happens when the idealistic visions of the future we nurture give way to unexpected realities. —A.W.
The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick
This acquisition title has the sort of oddball-indie potential that sometimes gets drowned out by SXSW’s ever-growing celebrity hoopla. The cast — The Afterparty’s Zoê Chao, Alien: Covenant’s Callie Hernandez, and Slave Play collaborators Jeremy O. Harris and James Cusati-Moyer — co-wrote the script with director Pete Ohs, portraying queer friends who are spending some earthy time in upstate New York when one of them develops unsettling symptoms from a tick bite. Press notes have called the satirical thriller “a 2020s take on films that exaggerate the unease of domestic living like The Stepford Wives and Rosemary’s Baby.” It marks the start of what could be a very sexy year for Harris and Ohs, who also made the forthcoming Charli XCX vehicle Erupcja. —M.J.