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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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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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 in which half the joke is that he’s willing to act like that.
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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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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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Nicole Daddano and Adam Wilder’s short animated film The Bleacher makes the viewer a voyeur in a dark and gritty world, centered around a laundromat where a regular has some very dirty laundry to do indeed. HFC sat down with Nicole and Adam to discuss all the strange turns the film takes and shifting from live action to animation.
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Ward Kamel’s beautiful and devastating short film, If I Die In America, which debuted at SXSW, tackles this question with searing aplomb. When Manny’s husband, Sameer, dies suddenly, his grief is usurped by an unexpected battle with Sameer’s family, who refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of their relationship and any claim he tries to stake on his husband’s body. I sat down with Ward to discuss his process and the thoughts and experiences that inspired the film.
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Secret Mall Apartment could easily have been a straightforward hagiography of a generous, interesting artist who also lived in the walls of a mall, but director Jeremy Workman never lets the catchy hook get in the way of the larger story.
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Civil War proves that Alex Garland still has some gas in the tank, exploring the morality of the media’s relationship with war while still holding the press in deep reverence.
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Bionico’s Bachata is a refreshing gut-punch.
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