The 12 Best Movies We Saw This Year at SXSW

South by Southwest has long been a rambunctious celebrity harbor, but this year’s lineup was especially heavy on A-list premieres. When onlookers crowded the streets near Austin’s stately Paramount Theatre to glimpse Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt as they arrived for The Fall Guy in the bed of a pickup truck, the ensuing cheers could be heard all the way to Los Angeles. Sydney Sweeney unveiled the Catholic horror nightmare Immaculate with the help of a spooky nun choir. Moved by audiences’ real-time reactions to their movies, Dev Patel and Anne Hathaway both wiped away tears. “You have no idea the gift that you’ve just given us with your responsiveness by being so connected to every little nuance in this,” Hathaway said onstage after The Idea of You ended. “I will never forget this screening.”

That’s the SXSW way. If you’re seeking the most enthusiastic festival hordes on the planet, there’s no better launchpad. It certainly worked for Everything Everywhere All at Once, the eventual Best Picture winner that premiered at SXSW, a high the festival will forever chase. But the showcase wasn’t limited to studio movies with baked-in release plans. Many smaller titles hoping to land distribution shined, too. Here are 12 films of varying stature that deserve to be hits this year.

Babes

If there’s one thing SXSW is going to do, it’s program an excess of comedies so rowdy the jokes get drowned out by audience laughter. This year’s best gut-buster was Babes, Pamela Adlon’s first live-action project since Better Things. It’s both a motherhood story and a friendship story about lifelong BFFs (Ilana Glazer and Michelle Buteau), one of whom is married with kids and one of whom is single but finds herself unexpectedly pregnant. In a sort of reverse Obvious Child, she opts to keep the baby, much to her bestie’s bewilderment. Glazer co-wrote the script with Broad City’s Josh Rabinowitz, and her comedic DNA — rapid-fire dialogue, gross-out humor, millennial aimlessness — is all over this gem. Babes asks what adult companionship looks like once the spoils of youth have dissolved. The answer is sweet and hilarious.

Neon will release Babes on May 17.

The Black Sea

The Wolfpack director Crystal Moselle paired up with art curator Derrick B. Harden, who appeared in an episode of her HBO show Betty, to make this improvised travelogue about a Brownsville-born chaos agent. When Khalid (Harden) absconds to Bulgaria to meet his new “sugar mama,” he encounters a small wrinkle: She died just a few hours before his arrival. What’s a broke American who lost his passport and doesn’t speak a lick of Bulgarian to do? Hustle. Harden charms his way through this comedy of errors, which turns into a budding romance as Khalid opens a Brooklyn-inspired café (read: He sells matcha tea) with the help of a sympathetic local (Irmena Chichikova).

The Black Sea is seeking distribution.

Bob Trevino Likes It

Easily SXSW’s loveliest movie, Tracie Laymon’s debut won the Narrative Feature Jury Award, and soon it will win your heart. Barbie Ferreira gives a winsome performance as Lily, a seemingly happy-go-lucky people pleaser likely to text “no prob!” even if she really wants to say “LOSE MY NUMBER YOU JERK.” When her self-absorbed dad (3rd Rock from the Sun’s French Stewart) writes her off, Lily befriends a different Bob Trevino (John Leguizamo) on Facebook. Soon enough, he becomes a surrogate father figure. That might sound saccharine, but this two-lost-souls comedy transcends its conventions with strongly defined characters and an amusing script.

Bob Trevino Likes It is seeking distribution.

Civil War

Alex Garland has thus far positioned himself as a sci-fi whiz, which makes the stark plausibility of Civil War all the more jarring. The plot is right there in the title. Avoiding the “left versus right” clichés expected from a movie about homeland disunity, Garland imagines a United States torn asunder by an authoritarian president (Nick Offerman) who has turned the country into one big military zone after Texas and California secede. Zeroing in on four journalists traveling by van to Washington, D.C., the film is mostly a roving character study — until they arrive in the capital for an explosive, dystopian third act. This is A24’s priciest release to date, and it shows: Blowing up the Lincoln Memorial isn’t cheap.

A24 will release Civil War on April 12.

The Fall Guy

Two days after his barn-burning “I’m Just Ken” singalong at the Oscars, Ryan Gosling turned up at SXSW to blow the lid off another room. The Fall Guy is a feature-length flex. Gosling was a comedic titan long before Barbie (see: Crazy, Stupid, Love; The Nice Guys; every talk show he’s ever appeared on), and Hollywood has finally caught up. In David Leitch’s loose remake of the ’80s TV show about stunt performers who also happen to be bounty hunters, Gosling plays a wisecracking action choreographer who’ll do anything for his true love (Emily Blunt), including hunt down the rogue actor (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) hijacking her directorial debut. The Fall Guy is a high-adrenaline action crowd-pleaser, a sweet rom-com, an ode to grueling stunt work, and a burst of movie-star charisma.

Universal Picture will release The Fall Guy on May 3.

The Idea of You

It’s exactly what you want from a movie where Anne Hathaway falls in love with a boy-band singer she meets while using the bathroom at Coachella — cute, playful, utterly implausible. It’s Hathaway’s Notting Hill, her How Stella Got Her Groove Back. Some people wait a lifetime for a moment like this. Her pursuer (Nicholas Galitzine, the rising star from Bottoms and Red, White & Royal Blue) is a paparazzi-hounded Harry Styles type, which presents a complex proposition for an older, divorced Silver Lake art-gallery owner with a teenage daughter (Ella Rubin) to consider. Michael Showalter directed The Idea of You, with Jennifer Westfeldt adapting Robinne Lee’s debut novel.

Prime Video will release The Idea of You on May 2.

Monkey Man

Here’s a whole new Dev Patel. This is Dev Patel the director, Dev Patel the action hero, and Dev Patel the shirt-shredding heartthrob. He saw John Wick and said, “Just you wait.” Rumbling through a fictional Indian metropolis overloaded with political strife, Monkey Man follows an underground fighter determined to vanquish the corrupt authoritarians who killed his mother. Even when the backstory gets cluttered, the fireworks never let up. At one point, Patel drives a knife down a dude’s throat using his mouth. It’s the sort of towering thrill ride that makes many of today’s action movies look lazy.

Universal Pictures will release Monkey Man on April 5.

MoviePass, MovieCrash

MoviePass’s late-2010s heyday — for $10 a month, subscribers could see one movie per day — was too good to last, but it didn’t have to be that way. The company’s downfall came after white executives pushed out the two Black founders and tried to scale up at an irresponsible rate. Director Muta’Ali Muhammad (Cassius X: Becoming Ali) outlines MoviePass’s humble origins, details what was once a promising future, and dishes on the egotism that precipitated its demise. The film makes an apt companion piece to the WeWork documentary from a few years ago, or really any 21st-century exposé about a trendy corporation soiled by leaders who see power as one long party.

HBO will air MoviePass, MovieCrash later this year.

Omni Loop

Let’s manifest a major Mary-Louise Parker moment, shall we? She stars opposite Ayo Edebiri in writer-director Bernardo Britto’s time-loop dramedy, reliving the final week of her life over and over again as a Miami scientist who possesses a mysterious blue pill that sends her back to the start. Edebiri’s metaphysicist might hold the secret to escaping this repetition, but like most time-loop movies, it’s really about the bond they form along the way. Britto gives Omni Loop a melancholic charm that aligns perfectly with Parker’s signature world-weariness.

Omni Loop is seeking distribution.

Secret Mall Apartment 

Catnip for anyone who ambled around busy shopping malls in the ’90s, Jeremy Workman’s affectionate documentary is about a group of Providence friends who made one their home. Thanks to a quirk in the architecture, they located an alcove no one else could access and claimed it for themselves. The group transformed a consumerist hub into a private sanctuary, bucking the gentrification that was threatening the Rhode Island capital’s artistic spirit. Luckily for Workman, they also captured everything on camcorder, including the crawl spaces that became their evolving art installation. Secret Mall Apartment manages to both critique and romanticize the mall culture that seems quaint in the age of Amazon, but it’s really a testament to youthful ingenuity — that period in life when you have the time, and the chutzpah, to treat a pet project like a higher calling.

Secret Mall Apartment is seeking distribution.

Whatever It Takes

How’s this for corporate intrigue? In 2019, managers deep inside eBay’s C-suite ignited an elaborate harassment campaign targeting two journalists who ran a niche blog focused on the e-commerce giant’s practices. Annoyed executives shipped a pig fetus and live cockroaches to the couple’s home, stalked them, and sent thinly veiled death threats. But that’s only the start of the story. What happened inside eBay to inspire such persecution is equally astonishing. Director Jenny Carchman (Gossip, The Fourth Estate) charts it like a true-crime saga, which is pretty much what it was.

Whatever It Takes is seeking distribution.

The World According to Allee Willis 

This affectionate documentary is a blast for a few reasons. First, Allee Willis was the most prolific songwriter you’ve never heard of, with credits that include Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September,” Patti LaBelle’s “Stir It Up,” the Friends theme, and Broadway’s The Color Purple musical. Second, she had a parade of celebrity friends with amusing anecdotes about her life, from Paul Reubens and Michael Patrick King to Pamela Adlon and Lily Tomlin. And finally, she was a fun-loving Jewish lesbian who saw her life as a never-ending art project, documenting much of it like a sort of proto-reality show. Willis died in 2019, but director Alexis Spraic resurrects her spirit for an infectious tribute.

The World According to Allee Willis is seeking distribution.

And a few others to look out for

Karan Soni and Jonathan Groff star in the tender gay rom-com A Nice Indian Boy. The prizewinning documentary Grand Theft Hamlet finds two out-of-work actors staging a Shakespeare production inside the video game Grand Theft Auto. Alice Lowe, who directed 2017’s Prevenge, keeps romancing the wrong guy as she crisscrosses centuries in the imaginative comedy Timestalker. And Immaculate (out March 22) has a jaw-droppingly thrilling finale that makes up for the movie’s undercooked plot.