Patricia Gillespie’s documentary aims to expose the insidious nature of unchecked mental illness at its most extreme, and for the most part she succeeds. #SKYKING is a tough watch but it is a rewarding one.
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While Scott and Deadwyler are magnetic performers, The Saviors becomes too focused on its own plot to let the viewer engage with it as a pure character piece, but the plot is so obviously foreshadowing a twist that the film feels slow in execution.
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Ready or Not 2: Here I Come aims to be bigger and bolder, but a suite of new characters can’t save the movie from a dumbed-down script.
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In advance of its 2026 World Premiere at SXSW, Hyperreal Film Journal staff writer Ziah Grace sat down with writer/director Eric Jackowitz to talk about his giallo parody The Seeing Eye Dog Who Saw Too Much.
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Though director Max Hey is focused and dialed in from the moment the documentary begins, Now! More! Yes! ultimately meanders around with its subject without inspiring much interest.
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The Rivals of Amziah King is one of the most strangely-paced films and thematically-incohesive films I’ve ever seen. That’s both to its benefit and its greatest flaw.
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The Python Hunt expertly delivers on its promises of humor and human interest.
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Where some stories of addiction slip into melodrama and misery, Surviving Earth shows the reality of sobriety as a choice that’s made every single day.
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The Infinite Husk falters under the weight of its big philosophical ambitions, leaning too far into the pessimism of the human condition without actually exploring what it means to live and move through the world’s structures.
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Following its first screening, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie proved itself as the SXSW breakout of the year, with the word-of-mouth buzz resulting in a frenzy around the film’s second showtime.
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Friendship, which had its Texas Premiere at SXSW in 2025, is all about the strange amorphous heartbreak when a (mostly) heterosexual male friendship is ended. It’s also about star Tim Robinson continuing his streak of ego-less humiliation comedy.
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Slanted does well to avoid the pitfall of many modern satires by avoiding an explicit morality tale or an ending that ties everything up with a bow and a preachy monologue.
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Shuffle adeptly straddles the line between documentarian and subject while uncovering a deep web of fraud and scams at the heart of addiction treatment.
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Bunny (Mo Stark, also co-writer), the titular lead of the dramedy Bunny, which premiered at SXSW 2025, is the sort of guy you’d want for a neighbor.
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Despite the occasional lapse in focus, Spreadsheet Champions offers a fascinating look at an under-discussed subculture.
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The short film Make Me a Pizza is on its surface a very silly nod to ‘80s and ‘90s porn, but director Talia Shea Levin and producer Kara Grace Miller approached the preparation and filming of these comedic scenes seriously and methodically.
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For director Shaun Seneviratne, life is cinema and cinema is life. His first feature film, Ben and Suzanne: A Reunion in Four Parts, which debuted at SXSW this year, places the viewer as a fly on the wall, witnesses to a week in the life of a couple’s attempt to figure out their future. It is the result of a fourteen-year-long filmmaking process.
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Told exclusively through iPhone footage, laptop cameras, and text exchanges, Patricia Franquesa’s My Sextortion Diary plays out more like a thriller more akin to films like Missing, Searching, and UnFriended than the traditional talking head documentary.
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The first feature-length film from Rocket Jump (Freddie Wong and Matthew Arnold), We’re All Gonna Die has some rough edges but is at its greatest when it finds the balance between emotional and comedic.
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With Dissolution, the short film which won the Narrative Shorts Jury Award at SXSW, director Anthony Saxe explores this disconnection from the past by looking to his parents. Through home videos captured in his infancy or before he was born, he investigates who his parents were to themselves and to each other when they lived completely different lives to the ones he now knows.
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