SXSW 2025: The Final Roundup

In what has already been a weird and unnerving year, Austin’s annual tech, music, and film festival South by Southwest (SXSW) arrived this past week just in time to deliver the welcome kind of weird that is entertaining and not unnerving.

In its 32^nd year (the full conference has been running 38 years), the SXSW film festival kicked off with ‘Another Simple Favor,’ the sequel to Paul Feig’s 2018 hit ‘A Simple Favor’ and the first two episodes of the upcoming Apple TV+ showbiz industry comedy starring Seth Rogen, The Studio, from co-creators Evan Goldberg and Rogen.

Comedy featured prominently at the festival and earned plenty of recognition, with two A24 comedies playing in the headliner and festival favorites categories. The U.S. premiere of Tim Robinson vehicle ‘Friendship’warranted a follow-up buzz screening and the world premiere of the zany horror-comedy ‘Death of a Unicorn’ starring Paul Rudd, Jenna Ortega, and Will Poulter met with praise.

The jury award for narrative feature went to newcomer Amy Wang’s ‘Slanted.’ A coming-of-age story about a Chinese-American high school girl (Shirley Chen) who undergoes a procedure to become a white girl (McKenna Grace) in a small midwestern town. ‘Slanted’ shocked with a touch of unexpected body horror and impressed with biting social satire, perfectly timed for the current state of the immigrant experience in America.

The big studio films

‘Drop,’ a techno thriller from Universal Pictures and Blumhouse starring Meghann Fahy and Brandon Sklenar, had its world premiere at SXSW. It’s about a woman getting back into dating after an abusive relationship who has her first date hijacked by someone in the restaurant harassing her with threatening memes via Airdrop. Think Black Mirror’s ‘Shut Up and Dance’ episode if your semi-cool aunt directed it.

NEON Texas-premiered ‘Together,’ which brings (ahem) together Alison Brie and Dave Franco, literally, in a romantic horror-comedy about a couple on the skids who find themselves resisting a mysterious force that melds their bodies together. The chemistry between Brie and Franco is the star, but I’ll gladly drink from this firehose of body horror with which current movies have blessed us.

‘The Surfer,’ a psycho thriller starring Nicolas Cage had its North American premiere at the ZACH Theatre after a world premiere at Cannes back in May. The trailers would have you believe this is a straight revenge flick, but it surprises with just how far it goes in evoking second-hand frustration and questioning toxic masculinity. As a bonus, Cage gives one of his typical fully invested performances here.

Smaller fest favorites

‘Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie’ was my personal favorite of the fest, bringing Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol’s early 2000s web series full circle in a manic time-travel comedy that is nothing short of a miracle in how it weaves together existing footage from 2008 with modern prank comedy antics and a pitch-perfect Back to the Future riff.

‘Clown in a Cornfield,’ adapted from the series of books of the same name, solidifies that slashers are having a moment. A father and daughter move to a small town that has seen better days, and out of boredom she immediately starts hanging with a group of bad kids who film gory horror pranks for their YouTube channel. Suddenly, the group finds themselves under siege by a maniac killer wearing the town’s mascot clown mask. It’s clever, well-acted, and pure fun. I watched this film in a conference room (don’t ask) and it still brought the house down.

‘Good Boy,’ a haunted house story told from the perspective of a dog had its world premiere at the Alamo Drafthouse on South Lamar and made a star out of its canine protagonist, Indy.  Indy should win every acting award possible for a dog. It took the film’s director (and Indy’s owner) Ben Leonberg years to film this one as he and his wife (and the film’s producer) Kari Fischer, trained Indy. The result is a novel approach to the genre and a love letter to all of the dogs in our lives.

Documentaries

SXSW always programs compelling documentary features and this year was no different. I missed out on screenings of jury winner ‘Shuffle,’ the buzz screening of the Selena Quintanilla retrospective ‘Selena y Los Dinos,’ and the insane ‘The Python Hunt’ about the annual, ten-day, government-sponsored python removal contest in the Everglades, but there was no shortage of good documentaries waiting for festivalgoers.

‘The Age of Disclosure’ delves into the recent hot topic of declassified UFO information by the U.S. military and intelligence community. The doc boasts access to all the whistleblowers and experts who have participated in congressional hearings and pushes for legislation to declassify more. Additionally, career politicians from both parties, like Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, sat down for interviews. If you haven’t already been following the developments around this phenomenon, this doc serves as the definitive compendium.

‘Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror’ chronicles the history of The Rocky Horror Picture Show from the perspective of its creator, Richard O’Brien, and its stars of the stage and screen. O’Brien’s son Linus directs the doc, interviewing the likes of Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, and contemporary personalities like drag queen star Trixie Mattel who’ve drawn inspiration from the film.

And those were the hot films from this year’s SXSW film festival. Keep an eye out for their releases throughout the year and be sure to see them all so we can talk about them when we inevitably run into each other at SXSW 2026.