HFC at SXSW '24: Full Coverage List
Eight days, 267.12 miles walked, 10 interviews conducted, 29 articles written, dozens of films watched, and an untold amount of fast food consumed. The Hyperreal Film Journal stayed busy during SXSW 2024. If you missed any of our coverage over the last month, here’s a handy rundown of every film that we wrote about with links included.
Pre-SXSW Screenings Calendar
See what the team wanted to see before we saw the fest.
Timestalker
The most romantic and comedic film to hit the big screen in years
-Ziah Grace
Oddity
Throwing together a blind medium, a dark (yet chic) house, and an open-mouthed wooden man, Irish director and writer Damian McCarthy opens his frightening funhouse to the world.
-Justin Norris
Texas Shorts
This year’s slate of short films have really lived up to this promise and provided a much needed reminder of all the art around us.
-Julia Hebner
Gasoline Rainbow
The latest film from brothers Bill Ross lV and Turner Ross, Gasoline Rainbow joins Nomadland in that group of films keeping one foot in reality and one in manufactured filmmaking.
-Justin Norris
Road House
It’s a disservice to the movie that it had to pass on a theatrical release and go straight to streaming, because this is the type of movie you go to the movies for.
-Blake Williams
Immaculate
Immaculate is simply a film that doesn't need to exist.
-Ziah Grace
Grand Theft Hamlet & Ghostlight
Funnily enough, Kelly O’ Sullivan and Alex Thompson’s Ghostlight and Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls’ Grand Theft Hamlet share a lot of similarities.
-Justin Norris
The Gutter
The Gutter, directed by brothers Isaiah and Yassir Lester, is the comedy we've been waiting for.
-Ziah Grace
Arcadian
What really sets Arcadian apart is its willingness to follow through on the promise of the film's premise.
-Ziah Grace
Grand Theft Hamlet Take Two
Making art is its own raison d'être, and if there wasn't a point to it, then why are people trying to stop you?
-Ziah Grace
Didi
As a whole, Didi thrives off its assured establishment of time and place.
-Justin Norris
It’s What’s Inside
Like its characters, It’s What’s Inside is a little vapid and bland underneath the surface, but for the duration of its runtime, it maintains an enviable momentum that kept me on the edge of my seat.
-Summer Wright
Cuckoo
Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo joins the pantheon of movies giving audiences a first-hand glimpse into a filmmaker untethered from studio notes.
-Justin Norris
Interview with Ken Kao and Josh Rosenbaum of Waypoint Entertainment
Desert Road
It's the subtlety of writing and directing that really helps Desert Road stand out among so many other indie movies with similar premises.
-Ziah Grace
I Saw the TV Glow
I Saw the TV Glow is already one of the best films of 2024, a deeply sympathetic film about what we lose when we give up on being our true selves.
-Ziah Grace
Bionico’s Bachata
Bionico’s Bachata is a melding of recorded observation and Hollywood tropes that shows art’s connection to life while evoking the empathy that serves to connect us all. But also, have fun with it!
-Andrew Cheatham
Monkey Man
You can feel the passion oozing off of the movie. Patel went away to iron out every detail, to the point where it feels like you can see the movie playing in his head.
-Blake Williams
Civil War
Civil War proves that Alex Garland still has some gas in the tank after his previous film, Men, was so poorly received.
-Blake Williams
Secret Mall Apartment
Art has no value because it doesn't need to be for sale. Art has no value, but that's not the same as art being meaningless.
-Ziah Grace
Interview with If I Die In America director, Ward Kamel
Ward Kamel’s beautiful and devastating short film, If I Die In America, which debuted at SXSW, tackles this question with searing aplomb.
-Julia Hebner
Grand Theft Hamlet Take Three
Los Santos is not a place for working out problems, it’s a place for subverting them.
-Julia Hebner
Interview with The Bleachers directors Nicole Daddona and Adam Wilder
The Bleacher plops the viewer as a voyeur in a dark and gritty world, centered around a laundromat where one of the regulars has some very dirty laundry to do indeed.
-Julia Hebner
Interview with Dissolution director Anthony Saxe
And as we age, we gain not just a distance, but an alienation from some of these former selves.
-Julia Hebner
Interview with Rainbow Bridge directors Dimitri Simakis and Suki Rose
The grief I’ve experienced over pets has been as intense as for a human. Most people own pets, and most people experience this grief, but we’ve been conditioned to regard indulging that grief as eccentric.
-Julia Hebner
Sing Sing
Sing Sing is a magician’s best trick from a filmmaker still early in his career. A gentle film that embodies what we as people crave: the ability to explore the facets of ourselves that we push down deep, and the pain that comes with being human.
-Blake Williams
We’re All Going to Die
We’re All Gonna Die is at its greatest when it finds the balance between the emotional and the comedy.
-Blake Williams
My Sextortion Diary
We watch the paranoia from the perspective of both the documentarian and the extortionist.
-Blake Williams
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