All Of Deadline’s Reviews From The Festival

The 2025 SXSW Film & TV Festival kicked off Friday, March 7 in Austin with world and North American premieres of movies in 11 sections, TV shows in three sections and several short film and virtual reality programs.

This year’s festival kicks off with opening-night film Another Simple Favor reteaming Paul Feig, Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick, with other notable world premiere titles including Chad Hartigan’s The Threesome, Kate Mara‘s two entries The Astronaut and The Dutchman (the latter also starring André Holland), the Ben Affleck-Jon Bernthal sequel The Accountant 2, the Nicole Kidman-starring Holland and Death of a Unicorn starring Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega.

Check out Deadline’s reviews recaps below as films premiere at the fest, which runs through March 15, and click on the titles for the full reviews.

Section: Headliner
Director: Gavin O’Connor
Cast: Ben Affleck, Jon Bernthal, Cynthia Addai-Robinson, Daniella Pineda, Allison Robertson, J.K. Simmons
Deadline’s takeaway: Nearly a decade after The Accountant, the sequel stands perfectly on its own while delving further into the dynamics that felt halfheartedly introduced the first time around, like Ben Affleck and Jon Bernthal hitting perfect comedic chemistry as estranged brothers who still know how to push each other’s buttons. — GG

Section: Headliner
Director: Paul Feig
Cast: Anna Kendrick, Blake Lively, Andrew Rannells, Bashir Salahuddin, Elizabeth Perkins, Michele Morrone, Alex Newell, Henry Golding, Allison Janney 
Deadline’s takeaway: While some might argue that Feig and writers Jessica Sharzer and Laeta Kalogridis are too reliant on obvious nods to the original film — bringing back familiar plot devices like the mommy vlog teaser opening and an act-three twist that felt a little too recycled — the references ultimately add a playful wink to a fun and exciting film that stands on its own. — GG

Section: Narrative Spotlight
Director: Jess Varley
Cast: Kate Mara, Laurence Fishburne, Gabriel Luna, Ivana Milicevic, Macy Gray
Deadline’s takeaway: Ultimately, The Astronaut doesn’t soar quite as high as some of the better entries in this universe, notably Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival, which I kept thinking about watching this unfold. Its climax just feels a bit rushed and a little incomplete for this to be more than a minor addition to an overly ripe genre. — PH

Section: Narrative Spotlight
Director: Eli Craig
Cast: Katie Douglas, Aaron Abrams, Carson MacCormac, Vincent Muller, Kevin Durand, Will Sasso, Verity Marks, Cassandra Potenza, Ayo Solanke, Alexandre Martin Deakin
Deadline’s takeaway: It’s pretty easy to guess who the baddies are once you realize the film is basically Jaws (1975) set in a landlocked state. The predictability doesn’t make the message any less timeless or satisfying. — GG

Section: Headliner
Director: Alex Scharfman
Cast: Jenna Ortega, Paul Rudd, Will Poulter, Richard E. Grant, Anthony Carrigan, Téa Leoni, Jessica Hynes, Sunita Mani, Stephen Park
Deadline’s takeaway: And while the film touches on some serious issues through a humorous lens — like addiction, price-gouging and science deniers — the message felt uneven, hidden beneath a comedy horror that struggles to find its footing, despite its star-studded roster. — GG

Section: Headliner
Director: Christopher Landon
Cast: Meghann Fahy, Brandon Sklenar, Violett Beane, Jacob Robinson, Ed Weeks
Deadline’s takeaway: With Christopher Landon’s visually striking Hitchcock-ian direction, screenwriters Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach provide a fun, tech-driven update on the urban legend that spawned 1979’s When a Stranger Calls (and its fun 2006 remake). — GG

Section: Narrative Spotlight
Director: Andre Gains
Cast: André Holland, Kate Mara, Zazie Beetz, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Aldis Hodge, Lauren E. Banks
Deadline’s takeaway: Although the symbolism is strong and the underlying themes might seem a little heavy-handed at times, given that the source material was originally written for the stage during a wholly troubling era not unlike our own, that’s forgivable. The film is a dialogue-driven character study that presents as a journey of self-reflection as a nightmarish fever dream. — GG

Section: Narrative Feature
Director: Matthew Shear
Cast: Amanda Peet, Matthew Shear, Alessandro Nivola, Judd Hirsch, Bob Balaban, Andrea Martin, Zosia Mamet, Jessica Harper, Holland Taylor, Sheng Wang
Deadline’s takeaway: Shear has crafted a classic kind of family dynamic for this kind of smart, dialogue-driven comedy but he shows a great deal of promise in carefully keeping the inherent drama beneath the surface, particularly involving mental illness and depression, without using any of it as the butt of a joke. These characters and their deep anxieties and life problems feel very real. — PH

Section: Headliner
Director: Mimi Cave
Cast: Nicole Kidman, Matthew Macfadyen, Jude Hill, Gael García Bernal
Deadline’s takeaway: In Holland, a beautifully composed portrait of the claustrophobia of suburbia and the darkness simmering underneath the niceties of the Midwest, the witty and manic performance by Nicole Kidman makes it seem like a spiritual sequel to Gus Van Sant’s To Die For. — GG

Section: Narrative Spotlight
Director: Andrew Patterson
Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Angelina LookingGlass, Kurt Russell, Jake Horowitz, Rob Morgan, Tony Revolori, Owen Teague, Bruce Davis, Cole Sprouse
Deadline’s takeaway: The film is up for sale and will no doubt find a willing buyer with McConaughey and Russell in the cast as well as those dazzling bluegrass musical interludes, but it will need careful nurturing from whichever distributor gets it. It certainly continues to show what an original voice Patterson remains in making movies on his own terms. — PH

Section: Midnighter
Director-screenwriter: Julia Max
Cast: Colby Minifie, Kate Burton, Neil Sandilands, Vaughn Armstrong
Deadline’s takeaway: Notionally, The Surrender is a film about grief and how the death of a father reverberates around a tight-knit family that has drifted apart. But the real meat is in the story of a mother and daughter who find that his sudden absence opens up a whole other can of worms. — DW

Section: Narrative Spotlight
Director: Chad Hartigan
Cast: Zoey Deutch, Jonah Hauer-King, Ruby Cruz, Jaboukie Young-White, Josh Segarra, Robert Longstreet, Arden Myrin, Kristin Slaysman, Allan McLeod, Julia Sweeney
Deadline’s takeaway: The soap-opera turns The Threesome takes are in the hands of talented indie filmmakers who devise a complex tale of three young singles simply looking for love but find complications pulling them apart and keeping them together in ways they never could have imagined. — PH