I’ll let you in on a little secret: if you click your cowboy boot heels together three times and repeat the chorus to Bowling for Soup’s ‘Ohio (Come Back to Texas)’, you might find yourself in front of the twinkling lights of the Paramount Theatre in Austin, Texas. Truly, there’s no place like South by Southwest.

This year, the entirely in-person SXSW Film Festival runs from March 7 to 15. Blissfully, that means the fest doesn’t conflict with the Oscars for the first time since 2022, so for those of us who forgo the Gregorian calendar in favor of “awards season” and “film festival season”, SXSW marks a clean slate for a brand-new year at the movies. With the trusty Letterboxd mic in hand and an endless supply of breakfast tacos, we’ll be there to keep the celebratory mood going—give us a “howdy” if you see us! Plus, the fabled Criterion Mobile Closet will make its maiden pit stop beyond the boundaries of New York, parking right on Congress Avenue for the first four days of the fest—find details to plan your own visit here.

Opening night film Another Simple Favor promises to kick proceedings off with “even more glamor, murder and betrayal” as Paul Feig, Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively reunite in Italy for the sequel to 2018’s A Simple Favor. Across the Headliner section, beautiful women and sinister mysteries seem to be the name of the game. Nicole Kidman dons her best dancing clogs and grabs a tulip bouquet for Holland, director Mimi Cave’s twisty follow-up to Fresh, while Christopher Landon’s Drop stars Meghann Fahy as a single mom whose first date in years gets derailed by threatening, anonymous messages. Another Simple Favor and Holland soon come to Prime Video on May 1 and March 27, respectively, while Drop hits US theaters on April 11 via Universal Pictures.

The sunny streets of West Hollywood are no stranger to the silver screen, but something tells me Idiotka and its Project Runway-style reality show spiritually align more with its small screen comrades (See: Vanderpump Rules, Selling Sunset and MTV’s tragically short-lived The Real Friends of WeHo.) After memorably pining over Kristen Stewart in Love Lies Bleeding, Anna Baryshnikov stars alongside a stellar comedic cast including Camila Mendes, Julia Fox and Theater Camp’s Owen Thiele.

ionate purveyors of the 100-minutes-and-under comedy can also look forward to Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol’s feature version of their mockumentary sitcom, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, and the seemingly raunchy, seemingly sweet coming-of-ager Summer of 69, Jillian Bell’s directorial debut about a high schooler enlisting a stripper (Saturday Night Live’s Chloe Fineman) to help impress her crush.

Below, we highlight more themes and watchlist must-adds in this year’s program, but before we get into it, an urgent PSA to all Michael Bay heads to buckle in for the action aficionado’s parkour documentary, We Are Storror. Find the full SXSW 2025 feature lineup here.

We Bought a Zoo

Unicorns and snow leopards and honeybees, oh my? Critters of all kinds will abound across Austin city limits, from the loyal pup sensing malevolent forces in unique POV-horror Good Boy to the parasitic arachnid transforming an idyllic weekend getaway into something stranger in The True Beauty of Being Bitten By a Tick. Home state fave Matthew McConaughey stars as a charismatic, bluegrass-loving beekeeper who reunites with his estranged foster daughter in The Rivals of Amziah King. Big up to the bugs.

Releasing in theaters on March 28, A24 Headliner Death of a Unicorn sees Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega’s father-daughter duo accidentally hit and kill the mythical animal, a tragedy that his billionaire boss takes a little too well. As my fellow fans of The Last Unicorn already know, no good comes from exploiting the purest of beasts, so I’m expecting at least one impalement by horn.

On the documentary front, expect two starkly contrasting approaches to conservation in near-opposite environments. The Python Hunt follows an eclectic group of amateur hunters participating in a contest to remove invasive Burmese pythons from the steamy Everglades. Across the globe in the Nepalese Himalayas, Snow Leopard Sisters revolves around a friendship between two Indigenous women: the daughter of a family whose entire goat herd was killed by the endangered big cat and a local conservationist fighting to protect the species.

In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream

I view space the same way that I view the deep ocean—I respect its transfixing power and primordial vastness but also, frankly, whatever’s happening there is none of my business. More than 45 years after Alien though, my on-screen comrades have yet to agree… which leads us to the mind-melding Ash, landing in theaters on March 21. Multi-hyphenated talent Flying Lotus peers into the cosmos with this Headliner horror about a woman (Eiza González) who discovers her entire space station crew slaughtered. Stranded on the titular planet, she must decide if she can trust the man claiming to be her rescuer (Aaron Paul).

In The Astronaut, the nightmare comes back to our pale blue dot, featuring Kate Mara as the eponymous character plagued by extraterrestrial fears alongside Laurence Fishburne and Gabriel Luna. Midnighter Descendent centers around a father-to-be besieged by unsettling visions of something beyond our planet, while The Infinite Husk takes a different perspective by following an alien consciousness sent to Earth to spy on one of its own kind. Plus, featuring 34 senior of the US government, military and intelligence community, buzzy documentary The Age of Disclosure provides a timely follow-up to the recent congressional hearings on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP, aka UFOs).

The Math of Love Triangles

If my Rachel Bloom-inspired math checks out, the love triangle is certainly the polygon de jour, and as Challengers screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes once told us, a triangle is an “inherently unstable shape” prone to drama. But while our favorite tennis phenoms might’ve worked it out on the courts, I’m not as confident about the rom-com trio at the center of the aptly named The Threesome. The titular encounter might bring Connor (Jonah Hauer-King) and his longtime crush Olivia (Zoey Deutch) together, but when stranger Jenny (Bottoms’ Ruby Cruz) reappears in their lives, mess naturally ensues.

For all the White Lotus fans, two films at the fest begin as couple getaways before shaking up the dynamic with a new vertex. Psychological drama Satisfaction follows two British composers with a tenuous relationship in the picturesque Greek islands, while the deliciously named dramedy I Really Love My Husband puts a fledgling marriage to the test in Panama as a woman finds herself increasingly tired of her golden-boy husband and drawn to their charismatic rental host.

One of Them Days

Given, ahem, everything, I can’t say it’s surprising that SXSW 2025 embraces a particular genre I like to call “terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad-day movies.” Job anxieties and the precarity of trying to make it play can be acutely felt in a trio of selections. Canadian charmer Boxcutter follows an aspiring rapper frantically trying to reassemble his album after his laptop is stolen, while the homebody heroine of Mexican flick Corina must face her fears about the outside world in order to save her publishing job (Ted Lasso’s charismatic Cristo Fernández co-stars). Meanwhile, it’s time to sink or swim into adulthood for Cotton Candy Bubble Gum’s 21-year-old Carter (Nick Darnell), who has until the end of the day to receive a paid promotion at his internship, lest his mom’s vindictive cop fiancé kicks him out.

Plus, indie stalwart Jay Duplass makes his directorial debut with The Baltimorons, a welcome addition to the Christmas Eve canon that follows a man’s unexpected adventure with his emergency dentist. Writer-director-actor Annapurna Sriram experiences an even more surreal nighttime odyssey in the intriguing Fucktoys. A 16mm reimagining of The Fool’s Journey in tarot, the film takes place in a pre-millennium alternate universe city that sounds like it could be right at home in the Mad Max universe: Trashtown, USA. Consider me sold!