News

Are you a film distributor? Are you looking for a good buy? Do you need a crowdpleaser? An indie gem? An awards contender? Look no further than this year’s just-wrapped SXSW Film & TV Festival, which touts all these sorts of films (and more!), all open for the asking price of, well, we’ll leave the actual business-ing to you.

As for recommendations for those potential buys? We’ve got them in spades. While SXSW is best known for its bombastic crowdpleasers that, alas, already have a home, for every one of those big names, there are a wealth of other titles worthy of their own cinematic homes.

From Matthew McConaughey’s first starring role in years to searing documentaries, new offerings from some of our favorite filmmakers and calling cards from rising stars, this year’s batch of undistributed titles is big, and we’ve got a few favorites we’re dying to spotlight.

Another SXSW has come and gone, bringing premieres of many of the biggest movies and shows coming out later in 2025. The multi-disciplinary event is so massive — covering everything from film and TV to music, virtual reality, comedy, and tech— that it often feels impossible to sift through everything on the schedule. But IndieWire was on the ground throughout the film and TV portion of the festival, and we’ve selected 15 film and TV projects that are worthy of your continued attention.

From star-studded headliners like Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s Hollywood satire “The Studio” and Christopher Landon’s latest horror effort “Drop” to small independent films, the festival offered an excellent slate of narrative and documentary projects for film and TV lovers of all stripes. Several of our favorites came from first-time directors, including Jing Ai Ng’s art crime thriller “Forge” and Matthew Shear’s neurotic story of missed connections “Fantasy Life.

There’s no easy job description, or rest for that matter, for Roger Carstens, officially the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs (Spera) until just this January. Carstens was one of the negotiators behind aiding Brittney Griner to freedom as well as the release of Russia-held prisoners Evan Gershkovich, Alsu Kurmasheva, and Paul Whelan. Now, in Adam Ciralsky and Subrata De’s moving and effectively edited documentary “Take No Prisoners,” we see the fallout and wrongful detention of Eyvin Hernandez, a public defender hailing from California who, in 2022, was arrested in Venezuela and held there by current president Nicolás Maduro.

Ciralsky and De follow Carstens throughout the state department, on the private jets that shuttle him to prisoner exchanges, and all the way to Caracas, where he eventually helped free Eyvin Hernandez in 2023. As the film points out, we’ve seen a 175 percent increase in wrongful detentions over the last...

The decades-spanning art and activism of the Chicano collective Asco — named after the Spanish word for “disgust” — gets a generously researched and superbly edited portrait in filmmaker Travis Gutiérrez Senger’s “Asco: Without Permission.” This vibrantly pieced-together and well-sourced documentary, which premiered at SXSW, shows how a group of East Los Angeles Mexican-American artists reacted to the shifting social tides of the time, including racism and police abuse pressing force on their community.

The film features terrific archival footage of Los Angeles in the 1970s, when Asco started, through the ‘80s, a city riven by protest and violence and a feeling of, well, disgust about the political moment. “Without Permission” captures a time and place when Chicanos were the invisible, inaudible minority covered as a mere fascination out of newscasts, and its community was being tear-gassed for protesting among other American catastrophes the Vietnam War.

Gutiérrez Senger interviews key members of the collective,...

Being a curmudgeon is part of his persona, but it’s not that difficult to find evidence of Marc Maron being vulnerable. Just listen to the introductions on his “Wtf” podcast, in which the standup veteran monologues about whatever’s on his mind that day. And sure, some listeners fast-forward through these parts to get to the interview. But if you want to get to know the “real Marc Maron,” he is willing to bare his soul — it just has to be on his own terms.

Some of the most revealing content in the SXSW doc “Are We Good?” comes from Maron’s podcast, including a heartbreaking snippet of audio in which he announces the death of his partner Lynn Shelton to his listeners. Director Steven Feinartz does get one disarming on-camera interview with Maron about Shelton’s death, which happened suddenly in May 2020 from “some blood disease nobody knew about,...

The following is an excerpt from “In Review by David Ehrlich,” a biweekly newsletter in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the site’s latest reviews and muses about current events in the movie world. Subscribe here to receive the newsletter in your inbox every other Friday.

The past week presented a remarkable challenge to some of America’s longest-standing norms (and constitutional amendments). A green card-holder who’s married to an American citizen was disappeared in plain sight, the President of the United States turned the White House lawn into a car dealership as part of a naked bid to spare the world’s richest man from the consequences of the economy they’re both determined to crash at our expense, and — most unexpected of all, if also most welcome — Marvel actually released something bold and creatively provocative for the first time since Chloé Zhao...

Vincent Cassel is exploring grief the David Cronenberg way in the highly-anticipated drama “The Shrouds.”

Cassel stars as widower Karsh who creates a program called GraveTech to allow for mourners to monitor their late loved ones’ decay via shrouds. Yet when multiple graves, including that of Karsh’s wife (Diane Kruger), are desecrated, he has to find the perpetrators. “The Brutalist” star Guy Pearce and Sandrine Holt also are among the cast.

Cronenberg previously told Variety that he wrote the film while “experiencing the grief of the loss of my wife, who died seven years ago. It was an exploration for me because it was not just a technical exercise, it was an emotional exercise.”

Cassel’s Karsh is a stand-in of sorts for writer/director Cronenberg, who cited how the character has a “perverse, morbid, grotesque” way of grieving by watching his late wife’s body decompose in her grave.

When H.E.R. won an Oscar for Best Original Song for “Judas and the Black Messiah” in 2021, she used her acceptance to thank some of her biggest influences, including Sly and the Family Stone, Stevie Wonder, and Curtis Mayfield. But when articles about her speech began popping up online, she noticed that Mayfield was the name that websites always cut from the headlines.

That experience convinced H.E.R. that Mayfield, a soul legend whose legacy spanned ’60s hits with The Impressions to a solo career that included the influential “Super Fly” soundtrack, hadn’t received the appropriate recognition from modern audiences. She attempts to rectify the problem with her directorial debut, “The Makings of Curtis Mayfield,” a documentary that sees her join an A-list roster of her musical idols to discuss Mayfield’s ongoing legacy.

As the film tells it, Mayfield was ahead of the curve on just about everything.

The last time zombies dominated the horror genre, George W. Bush was in the White House. Since then, the braindead hordes have retreated — never disappearing completely, of course, but showing up in reduced numbers compared to their heyday of “Shaun of the Dead” and the “28 Days Later” series. Now, with climate change accelerating and fascism on the rise, the mood has turned post-apocalyptic once again.

Multiple films at this year’s SXSW engage with this ambient feeling of existential paranoia. The Australian entry “We Bury the Dead” takes the straightforward zombie-apocalypse route, with a little bit of “elevated” thematics mixed in. And given how many variations on both themes already exist, it’s impressive that writer/director Zak Hilditch has located some fresh angles on the concept.

Chief among them are the disarming flashes of humanity that still exist inside of Hilditch’s undead, which surface occasionally, like the...

We’ve all experienced the creepiness of a pet sensing something you can’t; the eerie sensation that comes when you see a dog barking in the middle of the night at an empty wall, staring at nothing, or wandering off in a hurry to chase something that seems invisible. It’s spooky enough to witness in real life, but add in some haunting horror imagery — as Ben Leonberg’s “Good Boy” does in great supply — and it becomes a foundation for one of the year’s scariest movies, albeit one that also doubles as an emotional and moving tribute to the emotional bond between people and their four-legged friends.

“Good Boy” has a simple concept that hides a laborious and inventive independent production. The film’s director, co-writer (with Alex Cannon), cinematographer, and producer, Leonberg spent three years with his wife and producer partner Kari Fischer coaching their own adorable retriever Indy,...

Sometimes life hands you a case of the blues that can only be cured by watching Ben Affleck line dance while doing his best to convey autism with his facial expressions. When those days come, “The Accountant 2” is the movie for you.

I’m not sure who was clamoring for a sequel to Gavin O’Connor’s 2016 film, which starred Affleck as Christian Wolff, an accountant on the autism spectrum who un-cooks books for criminal organizations while doubling as an action hero with perfect marksmanship and brutal hand-to-hand combat skills. It’s the rare movie that deserves criticism for not focusing enough on the intricacies of accounting, as the idea of Cartels turning to freelancers to solve their financial problems was a lot more interesting than the knockoff Jason Bourne that Christian was eventually turned into. But it told a complete story (some would say “and then some”), leaving most...

Screenlife filmmaking, the process of telling a cinematic story entirely through characters’ computer screens, is the kind of gimmick that’s usually bad in theory and is worse in practice. There are smart exceptions, but the pandemic year we spent watching mediocre television produced over Zoom and the amount of time many of us are still professionally obligated to spend on video calls is enough to make watching them for pleasure sound like a daunting proposition.

The format is best known for the films “Unfriended” and “Searching,” both of which were produced by Timur Bekmambetov, who has gone all in on Screenlife storytelling. The niche mogul is also behind “LifeHack,” Ronan Corrigan’s directorial debut that tries to give FaceTime screens and Discord servers the “Ocean’s 11” treatment.

For Kyle (Georgie Farmer), the Internet is the ultimate playground. Smarter and savvier about digital spaces then virtually anyone else he encounters online,...

In 2018, Steven Spielberg took to SXSW with “Ready Player One,” a movie entirely built around offering homage and worship to the kind of ’80s movies Spielberg helped popularize. Needless to say, the movie wasn’t very good. Now, director Jess Varley is trying to make that a trend with the SXSW premiere of “The Astronaut,” a movie that references “Jurassic Park,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” and even “E.T.” while telling a psychological thriller about an astronaut going back home. Unfortunately, just like Spielberg couldn’t save “Ready Player One” even with Gundam-sized references, Varley’s homages and nods can’t help save “The Astronaut” from a sudden tonal shift that takes away what makes the first half of the film interesting and brings it into redundant — and honestly, quite baffling — territory.

Kate Mara stars as Sam Walker, an astronaut returning home from her very first mission in space.

Oh, to be a fly on the wall during the writing process that sparked Katie Aselton’s fourth directorial effort, “Magic Hour.” Written alongside her real-life husband (and fellow filmmaker) Mark Duplass, Aselton has made it clear in press materials that the film, about a loving if troubled married couple (played by Aselton and Daveed Diggs) isn’t explicitly about her actual marriage. But it’s also not not about her and Duplass’ long-running relationship. Still, once you see where Aselton and Duplass’ script takes their characters, the differentiation becomes easier to swallow, if not all the more intriguing.

No spoilers here, but suffice it to say, it’s thrilling to wonder at what point in their chatting Aselton and Duplass landed on the spine of the story, one that also serves as a very big twist and an ambitious swing. And, yes, this twist does come early in the film,...

Two movies in, and nobody can accuse the “Simple Favor” franchise of not knowing what it wants to be.

Speaking to a SXSW audience after the world premiere of “Another Simple Favor,” Blake Lively recalled being nervous on the set of Paul Feig’s original 2018 film because she wasn’t sure if it was intended to play as a comedy or a drama. But when Feig reunited the cast of what turned out to be a very dark comedy for a direct-to-streaming sequel that takes place on the Italian island of Capri, it appeared that everyone had the same goal: turn this into the most consistently nonsensical franchise on the planet.

“A Simple Favor” was not exactly a film known for its restraint. What began as an uncomplicated request from one mom to another — the high-powered publicist Emily (Lively) asking Stephanie the do-gooder supermom to pick her son up from...

In recent years, SXSW has overlapped with the Oscars, forcing a major film and TV festival to take a backseat to Hollywood’s biggest night. But this year, the stars aligned for cinephiles with an interest in both events, as SXSW is starting a week after the Academy Awards. The move ensures the festival will have the film world’s attention all to itself — and there’s much to see.

This year’s SXSW Film and Television Festival features everything an attendee could hope for. There are huge studio premieres that will bring A-listers to the iconic yellow step-and-repeat and a deep roster of quality indie films just waiting to be discovered.

Headliners include big-budget sequels like “Another Simple Favor” and “The Accountant 2;” highly anticipated genre films like Christopher Landon’s “Drop” and Flying Lotus’ “Ash,” and good old-fashioned star-powered originals like the Nicole Kidman-led “Holland” and the...

It has been five years since Bong Joon Ho won three Oscars for Parasite, shocking the industry and bringing the cult auteur into the Hollywood mainstream. Finally, the South Korean filmmaker has returned with his biggest project yet: Mickey 17, the long-delayed science-fiction movie that Warner Bros. has out in theaters now.

Set in the near future, Mickey 17 stars Robert Pattinson as the title character and his several other versions. Mickey is known as an “expendable” in Bong’s latest project; those people sacrificed to the greater needs of capitalism and returned to life to do it all over again via scientific whizbang. Pattinson plays two versions of the character simultaneously (something previewed in the trailer). Costars include Naomie Ackie and Steven Yeun, plus Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette as buffonish fascists who bear a striking resemblance to some of America’s current political leadership.

Mickey 17 is the...

The latest attempt at bringing the works of Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin to the screen has sadly found itself wanting. Starring former MCU star Dave Bautista and Resident Evil lead Milla Jovovich, the epic action fantasy movie In the Lost Lands hails from Mortal Kombat and Monster Hunter director Paul W. S. Anderson who, with this latest adaptation, lands another “rotten” score to his largely green-splattered back catalog.

The first reviews for In the Lost Lands are now in, and the epic action fantasy has sadly been declared “rotten,” landing a score of just 21% from critics on Rotten Tomatoes. Shawn Van Horn of Collider scored the movie a savage 3/10, saying...

"From the effects, to the acting, and everything in between, there is nothing real in In the Lost Lands. It's an opportunity lost."

3:24

Related'In the Lost Lands' Star Dave Bautista on James Gunn's Dcu & Being...

[Editor’s Note: This list was originally published in February 2024. It has been updated to add new winners, including “Anora.”]

When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences hosted their first annual Academy Awards on May 16, 1929 — a short, 15-minute ceremony at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel with tickets that cost the equivalent of $90 today — there were two top awards that night (and an honorary trophy for groundbreaking talkie “The Jazz Singer.”) The first was “Best Unique and Artistic Picture,” honoring boldly experimental art films pushing the medium forward: “Sunrise,” F. W. Murnau’s lyrical masterpiece of a romantic drama, received that prize. Then there was “Outstanding Picture,” given to more commercial fare made within the Hollywood system: That award was given out to “Wings,” a very good and extremely popular World War I action romance starring Clara Bow.

When AMPAS mounted a second ceremony a year later, they retroactively decided that Outstanding Picture was the real highest honor they gave out and discontinued Artistic Picture forever. And, as Oscar ceremonies...

After major action movie successes Rebel Ridge, The Shadow Strays, and more, Netflix presents Demon City, a John Wick-esque revenge thriller and adaptation of the manga "Oni Goroshi" by Masamichi Kawabe, which tells the violent and visceral tale of a legendary hitman who, after his wife and daughter are killed, resurrects his particular set of skills on a bloody path of vengeance. The first reactions to Demon City, which offers gritty action with a supernatural twist, are now in. So, does Demon City continue the streamer’s action movie hot streak? Or this action thriller a disappointing imitation of Keanu Reeves’ dog-loving hitman?

Pramit Chatterjee of Digital Mafia Talkies found it to be very much the former, awarding Demon City a near-perfect score of 4/5 and praising the action on display.

“What Demon City lacks in terms of emotional depth or narrative complexity, it more than makes up for with its balls-to-the-walls,...

Hit the Atm? How about hitting the jackpot? “Anora” has won the Oscar for Best Picture at the 2025 Academy Awards, capping off a remarkable awards season run that began with the Sean Baker film starring Mikey Madison winning the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival last May. It’s only the fourth film ever to win Best Picture at the Oscars after winning the Palme, following “The Lost Weekend,” “Marty,” and “Parasite.” And IndieWire has celebrated “Anora” since it premiered at Cannes, through our Future of Filmmaking Summit, where Baker was our keynote speaker, to Oscar night itself.

“Anora” finished the night with five Oscar wins: Best Picture, Best Actress Mikey Madison, Best Editing, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Director. Of these, Baker personally won four, as the film’s director, producer, editor, and screenwriter.

Producer Alex Coco said when accepting his Best Picture Oscar, “If you’re trying to make independent films,...

As Indian cinema continues to gain recognition worldwide, it’s still hard to explain the hold it has on those of us who grew up with it.

The intrepid cinephile can always do their research; watch the latest buzzy international feature, check out popular films that are streaming, even judge a book by its cover (a movie by its hit songs). But there’s something at the core of Hindi films especially that is deeply entrenched in culture. Usually I explain it by describing the theater where I watched every new Hindi film from 2005-2009: a suburban Michigan multiplex whose concession counter was flanked by two sacred symbols — a statue of the Hindu god Ganesh, and a framed photo of actor Shah Rukh Khan.

You need to understand that, at least conceptually, to appreciate something like “Superboys of Malegaon,” the true story of film fanatics in the eponymous village...

The following article is an excerpt from the new edition of “In Review by David Ehrlich,” a biweekly newsletter in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the site’s latest reviews and muses about current events in the movie world. Subscribe here to receive the newsletter in your inbox every other Friday.

Judgment day is nigh!

Awards season is so long that America was able to become a crypto-fascist autocracy faster than Hollywood was able to decide which “Emilia Pérez” song Diane Warren should lose to, but good news: At least one of those things will all be over by the end of the weekend.

The votes have been cast, the campaigns have been campainful, and the predictions have been made and, then re-made, and then scrambled by the SAG Awards at the last second. At this point all that’s left is to hand...

Francis Ford Coppola is finding the razzle dazzle in his multiple 2025 Razzie Award nominations.

The “Megalopolis” auteur garnered six nominations for the futuristic feature — which ironically is also exactly how many Academy Award wins he has. While Coppola’s self-funded “Megalopolis” was decidedly not an Oscar contender, the writer/director is still honored to be recognized for taking a “risk” with the film, even if it was deemed Razzie-worthy. The Razzie Awards infamously celebrate the “worst” films of the year.

“I am thrilled to accept the Razzie award in so many important categories for ‘Megalopolis,’ and for the distinctive honor of being nominated as the worst director, worst screenplay, and worst picture at a time when so few have the courage to go against the prevailing trends of contemporary moviemaking!” Coppola wrote on Instagram. “In this wreck of a world today, where art is given scores as if it were professional wrestling,...

The chilling legacy of doomsday cult-turned-domestic terrorists Aum Shinrikyo is now being captured on the 30th anniversary of their Tokyo attack.

Documentary “Aum: The Cult at the End of the World,” co-directed by Ben Braun and Chiaki Yanagimoto, tells the shocking story of Aum Shinrikyo, a group that was founded by former yoga teacher Shoko Asahara. Aum Shinrikyo later unleashed a deadly nerve gas in Tokyo’s subway system in 1995. The film premiered at Sundance in 2023.

The official synopsis teases how “Japan’s police and media turned a blind eye” to the rising terrorist organization that began stockpiling weapons of mass destruction from the collapsed Soviet Union. The documentary is billed as a “potent reminder of just how dangerous unchecked fanaticism can be.”

The feature includes rare archival footage and an interview with one of founder Asahara’s former high-ranking disciples. “Aum: The Cult at the End of the World...

Movies and TV shows about true crime can be hit or miss, to say the least; sometimes, the families of real killers accuse the project of exploitation, and other times, it's just insensitive. That's what makes former Disney teen idol Hilary Duff's 2019 film "The Haunting of Sharon Tate" so baffling. Not only is it based on the very real murder of Sharon Tate at the hands of Charles Manson and his followers in her Hollywood home in 1969, but it has Duff, as Tate, playing the murdered woman's ghost as she relives the events of the horrific Manson killings.

"The Haunting of Sharon Tate" is, to put it lightly, a bizarre movie, and though it's not Duff's fault that this misguided project is pretty bad, the evidence of its numerous failures as a movie (and retelling of Tate's death) is evident in its Metacritic score. The movie only earned a...

It takes a staggering amount of arrogance and privilege to even momentarily consider using a phrase like “Ukraine War Documentary Fatigue.” Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine has resulted in the bloodiest war on European soil since WWII, and represents the largest threat to the post-Cold War international order that we’ve seen to date. It could very well end up being viewed as the genesis of an age of autocrats battling each other to expand their territories, with potentially catastrophic results looming in the near future. Not to mention the tens of thousands of Ukrainians who have already died in the war, and countless more who have had their homes destroyed and their lives permanently altered. The fact that brave documentarians have been able to capture so much of it is a remarkable achievement for humanity. When one’s biggest complaint is that they’re making prestigious film festivals feel repetitive,...

Imagine you wake up after years in a coma, tied to a chair with a masked stranger holding a gun to your head and insisting that you summarize the plot of a new movie you’ve never seen with no context other than the title. You might assume you were a goner until you heard that the movie was titled “Old Guy.” With only those two words, you might be able to infer that the film was about an old guy who had found success in some kind of stereotypically tough career, like policing or crime. And your first guess would probably be that he was set in his ways and forced to interact with someone younger who saw the world quite differently. You might guess that he insists on working alone and doesn’t take kindly to new blood, only to find his stance softening as they encountered danger together.

Miguel Gomes’ stunning “Grand Tour” is a trek through yearning, spanning both time and space.

The film, which premiered at Cannes in 2024 where Gomes won Best Director, was later acquired by Mubi for release. “Grand Tour” takes it title in stride: The film begins in 1917 Burma, where British diplomat Edward (Gonçalo Waddington) ditches his fiancée Molly (Crista Alfaiate) after getting cold feet before their nuptials. Edward instead sets off on a pursuit across Asia, with Molly following suit.

The film is billed by Mubi as a “melodrama and screwball comedy with a cat-and-mouse chase between lovers.”

“Grand Tour” includes black-and-white period visuals with modern-day documentary footage to span from Saigon to Shanghai onscreen. The film was Portugal’s Best International Feature entry to the 97th Academy Awards.

“I think I’m really attached to Portuguese cinema,” Gomes told IndieWire. “Portugal doesn’t have a film industry. Because of the economical context,...

Navigating life as a 14-year-old boy has been a challenge for just about everybody who has ever tried it, but Olmo (Aivan Uttapa) has it harder than most. With his father Nestor (Gustavo Sánchez Parra) confined to his bed — or, on the very best days, a wheelchair — due to multiple sclerosis, he’s forced to share caretaking duties with his working mother Cecilia (Andrea Suarez Paz) and his high school sister Ana (Rosa Armendariz), who is none to happy to see her social life interrupted by the needs of an ailing parent. The situation would be traumatic enough under any circumstances, but Olmo is also consumed by the same existential horniness that fills every 14-year-old’s waking days. He’s close enough to the world of high school parties and beautiful girls to understand that he wants to be a part of it, but clueless about how to leave childhood...

The following article is an excerpt from the new edition of “In Review by David Ehrlich,” a biweekly newsletter in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the site’s latest reviews and muses about current events in the movie world. Subscribe here to receive the newsletter in your inbox every other Friday.

As someone who’s always taken great pride in pretending that I don’t give a shit about the Oscars, and great pleasure in rolling my eyes throughout awards season as movies like “Jojo Rabbit” and “Don’t Look Up” are exalted as supreme examples of the form, I find myself in the increasingly uncomfortable position of … being pretty at peace with the Academy’s choices over the last few years?

Of course, that’s more than a little nauseating in and of itself; a film critic expressing any degree of approval for the...

It’s been nearly six years since Bong Joon Ho’s last feature “Parasite” debuted at the Cannes Film Festival, beginning a months-long rollout that ended with it becoming the first foreign language feature to win best picture at the Oscars. Bong received a warm welcome in his return to the spotlight at the London premiere of his long-awaited follow-up, “Mickey 17,” on Thursday evening.

Adam McKay, who wrote and directed comedies like “Anchorman” and “The Other Guys” as well as Oscar-nominated features like “The Big Short” and “Don’t Look Up,” sang his praises for the film, calling it “a perfect allegory for the hellscape stage of capitalism we’re in right now.”

Culture writer and progenitor of the #BongHive fandom Karen Han shared that “Mickey 17” is “worth the wait” and sports “really wonderful performances from Robert Pattinson.”

IndieWire chief film critic David Ehrlich is reserving his full thoughts for the review embargo Saturday,...

It’s tax season, and this year that means means two things: creepy H&r Block-mascot commercials and Ben Affleck’s “The Accountant 2.” That H&r Block mascot head, by the way, is a sniper’s dream, not that Christian Wolff needs much assistance with a rifle and scope.

In “The Accountant” franchise, Wolff (Affleck) has a talent for solving complex problems. In “The Accountant 2,” when an old acquaintance is murdered, leaving behind a cryptic message to “find the accountant,” Wolff is compelled to solve the case. Wolff is on the autism spectrum, which is alluded to in the trailer (posted below).

“Realizing more extreme measures are necessary,” as the logline reads, Wolff enlists his estranged and just-as-deadly brother, Brax (Jon Bernthal), to help. “In partnership with U.S. Treasury Deputy Director Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), they uncover a deadly conspiracy, becoming targets of a ruthless network of...

The world premiere of Marvel Studios' Captain America: Brave New World took place in Hollywood tonight, and the first wave of social media reactions are just starting to come in.

So far, the reactions are a bit of a mixed bag - which could be very telling. Usually, the initial response to any Marvel film is mostly very positive, and we tend to have to wait until the full reviews for a more balanced idea of what to expect.

Some do have high praise for Sam Wilson's (Anthony Mackie) first big-screen outing as Cap, but the general feeling seems to be that Brave New World is... just okay.

One thing most critics do seem to be able to agree on is that Mackie proves himself a worthy successor to Chris Evans' Steve Rogers, even if he's let down by certain other aspects of the story (it sounds like the...

Tim Robinson isn’t leaving the screen anytime soon. In fact, his eccentric comedy empire is expanding with indie hit feature “Friendship.”

Likened by critics to a feature-length version of Robinson’s beloved “I Think You Should Leave” Netflix series, “Friendship” co-stars Paul Rudd as the target of Robinson’s alter-ego’s affections. Kate Mara also star.

“Friendship” centers on Craig Waterman (Robinson), a middle class suburbanite who works at a dull office job. His lackluster life is interrupted by the arrival of a new neighbor (Rudd), whom Craig is determined to make his friend. “Friendship” was deemed like “‘I Love You, Man’ for sickos” after it premiered at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival; of course, Rudd also appeared in “I Love You, Man.”

“Friendship” is the directorial debut of Andrew DeYoung, who is also set to helm Robinson’s upcoming HBO comedy series “The Chair Company,” with Adam McKay and Zach Kanin executive producing.

Tim Robinson thinks you should try the Totino’s pizza rolls… or at least he does for the sake of his “I Think You Should Leave”-esque Super Bowl ad.

Robinson reunites with his frequent collaborator and “Detroiters” co-creator Sam Richardson for the eccentric short film. The duo, with Robinson clad in his “I Think You Should Leave” stripes and khakis (no Dan Flashes in sight), witness the death of the furry Totino’s mascot. It’s a bummer, but the snacks still rule.

There’s no coffin flop for the mascot, but the spot does seem like it’d be a good fit for Corncob TV. And if you don’t get all of these references, cue an episode of Netflix’s “I Think You Should Leave” Asap; Season 3 of the show debuted in 2023. Richardson regularly appears on sketch series “I Think You Should Leave,” most famously playing a judge of a baby pageant.

At its heart, Sundance is about discovery. Some of our brightest, biggest filmmaking stars — we’re talking Steven Soderbergh, Richard Linklater, Ava DuVernay, Paul Thomas Anderson, Lulu Wang, Ryan Coogler, Aubrey Plaza, Catherine Hardwicke, Todd Haynes, Tessa Thompson, Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Eggers, the Duplass brothers, Michael B. Jordan, Amy Adams, Elizabeth Olsen, Brie Larson, Lakeith Stanfield, Miles Teller, Anya Taylor-Joy, and many, many more — first rose to acclaim by bringing their work to Sundance.

In 2025, a year that was long-heralded as one all about new discoveries, that tradition only continued. While this year’s lineup included a number of returning names, like Ira Sachs, Amy Berg, Andrew Ahn, Justin Lin, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, Cooper Raiff, Kahlil Joseph, Heidi Ewing & Rachel Grady, David France, Jesse Short Bull, Ryan White, Sophie Hyde, Jesse Moss & Amanda McBaine, Meera Menon, and Clint Bentley, there were also a hefty number of newbies joining those filmmaking ranks.

An engaging documentary about the merit and mechanics of its own form, “Middletown” is set deep in the slacker era of 1991, when, in a small town in upstate New York, a vanguarding high school teacher oversees a student project that uncovers a local government conspiracy. Built mostly of camcorder archival footage from a Middletown high school audiovisual class, this often winning, occasionally rudderless film follows the students as they work together to investigate toxic waste being dumped in a nearby landfill. Worse still, the landfill was situated atop a major regional aquifer, suggesting that much of the district’s drinking water was harmfully contaminated.

The documentary was directed by Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss, the filmmaking duo behind the popular documentary mini-franchise “Boys State” (2020) and “Girls State” (2024). But the observational mode of those films is complemented here by a mountain of pristinely archived camcorder footage originally captured by the former Middletown students.

There’s something deeply comedic about hearing the word “nutty” repeatedly come up in a serious conversation about finances. Nutcrackers, as they’re formally called, are homemade cocktails of sugary fruit drinks and cheap liquor that daydrinkers hide in plastic bottles for beach consumption. They’re also the bedrock of Rico’s (Juan Collado) burgeoning underground beverage empire. The 19-year-old Bronx resident spends his summer days combing beaches with a cooler full of nutties, selling flavors like the lemon-flavored Pikachu and the pink Kirby Punch for $15, two for $10, or if a customer is pretty enough, an Instagram follow. He’s convinced that the hustle will snowball into a business that affords him a house and a car in no time at all. His looming success is such an inevitability that the details are irrelevant to him.

Rico’s blind self-confidence imbues him with some all-American charm, but the three women...

The Current Debate connects the dots around a topic of the critical conversation.Fire of Wind.Whenever I try to distill a year of moviegoing memories down to a best-of list, I like to turn to an essay telling me why I shouldn’t. “Lists of films will not save you,” Elena Gorfinkel wrote in an incendiary manifesto published by Another Gaze in 2019; “lists of films will not save films. … Lists do not enshrine your hallowed taste, they only dilute it. Lists are attentional real estate for the fatigued, enervated, click-hungry.” As someone who annually partakes in such an absurd ritual, I don’t look at lists to cross-check the consensus around this or that title, but to see what they might reveal about our relationship with the medium: how we produce, consume, and discuss moving images in a world that’s become increasingly saturated with them. Anyone attempting to...

The following article is an excerpt from the new edition of “In Review by David Ehrlich,” a biweekly newsletter in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the site’s latest reviews and muses about current events in the movie world. Subscribe here to receive the newsletter in your inbox every other Friday.

Before this month, the last time I went to Sundance in person was January 2020. I clearly remember — and will never forget — standing in the lobby of the festival’s headquarters and reading news reports about the first case of a novel coronavirus being found in the United States; Donald Trump insisted that he had it “completely under control,” so I naturally spent the rest of the festival wondering if we’d all be dead before any of the films that premiered there saw the light of the day (“Save Yourselves!” indeed). To go by the statistics,...

A kite shaped like a horse, a cicada-filled Baltimore world, and a black-and-white aesthetic almost perversely hooked on its own disaffected weirdness — writer/director Albert Birney’s “Obex” is a surreal, early-’90s’-esque odyssey into its main character’s (also played by Birney) addiction to his vintage Mac and inability to form actual human connections. With the lo-fi scrappiness of a dot matrix printer and the hallucinatory male-specific anxiety of David Lynch‘s “Eraserhead,” “Obex” tells the story of an awkward-under-his-skin computer programmer named Conor who escapes dreary black-and-white Baltimore into a fantasy world to defeat a demon named Ixaroth.

Birney, who previously co-directed the sci-fi adventure rom-com “Strawberry Mansion” with Kentucker Audley, writes, directs and stars in the movie as Conor Marsh. Living alone with his dog Sandy, he makes custom dot matrix printer photo reproductions for money over the post, while a neighbor Mary (Callie Hernandez) brings...

For an undercover cop in 1997, the art of baiting gay men into propositioning you in public restrooms is a grotesque art form that requires a strict adherence to the rules. You can’t say a word to your targets, relying on eye contact to convince them that your intentions are sexual. You can’t actually step into a bathroom stall, and have to goad them into unzipping while you remain in a public space. And you’re certainly not supposed to take their phone number and proceed to fall in love with them after failing to make an arrest.

Yet that’s exactly what Lucas (Tom Blyth) ends up doing in “Plainclothes,” Carmen Emmi’s directorial debut that revisits the world of undercover cops in the gay community most famously explored in William Friedkin’s “Cruising.” Distracted by family tensions caused by his father’s terminal illness and tortured by his own homosexual urges,...

The Sundance Film Festival is currently in full swing, giving industry professionals the chance to freeze their extremities while waiting to see a mid-budget dramedy about a family overcoming tragedy with quirkiness.

One of the most talked about movies at the festival so far is If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, a reportedly “harrowing” story of motherhood starring Rose Byrne and… Conan O’Brien?

Yes, the future Oscar host has a supporting role in the film which was written and directed by Mary Bronstein, and produced by Josh Safdie of “making you deeply uncomfortable with Safdie Brothers movies” fame.

While he’s not the star of the film, a lot of comedy fans are understandably most curious about Conan’s performance, considering that he’s not exactly known for drama (with the exception of all the Tonight Show drama from 2009).

The early word out of Sundance is that O’Brien is very good.

They weren’t the biggest band in the world, but for awhile there, they were the biggest band in the world to Charles (Tim Key). Now that he’s alone and flush with cash, there’s nothing he’d like more than to reunite said band — known as Mortimer McGwyer, after members Nell Mortimer (Carey Mulligan) and Herb McGwyer (Tom Basden) — on his far-flung island home for a very private gig. What could possibly go wrong?

While James Griffiths’ “The Ballad of Wallis Island” is built on a smidge of deception — Nell and Herb long ago parted ways, both personally and professionally, and it’s quite clear Herb wouldn’t have agreed to such a gig if he’d known Nell would be there — the film is quite warm-hearted. Charles is a dad-joke-spouting oddball, and while his relentless spew of horrible puns and gags might initially rankle, they eventually speak...

It starts intriguingly enough: An American couple (Himesh Patel and Sarah Goldberg) wait anxiously in a dowdy customs office in an unnamed Slavic country. They’ve just arrived for their honeymoon — Declan (Patel), we’re told, wanted the pair to enjoy a vacation somewhere “off the beaten path” and economical, Delores (Goldberg) doesn’t seem to have much pull in the matter — and are being held in official custody, believed to have already violated one of the major laws of their destination by smuggling in contraband. The law in question is beyond silly (this seems to be the bulk of the gag at hand), but filmmaker Evan Twohy’s concept for his debut film “Bubble & Squeak” is original enough to engender plenty of audience goodwill and patience, at least at first.

It’s about cabbages. Again: cabbages. And get ready to hear the word “cabbages” innumerable times over the film’s 95 minute running time.

Did Brad Pitt Keep A “Sh*t List” Of Actors? (Photo Credit – Instagram)

Looks like Brad Pitt isn’t just picky about his roles—he’s got a “sh*t list” of actors he’s done working with! As per Indie Wire, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, his Bullet Train co-star, spilled the tea at the Locarno Film Festival, making it clear Pitt knows precisely who’s cool to vibe with and who’s, well, not.

“He’s in a new chapter of his life,” Taylor-Johnson explained (via Variety). “Brad’s this humble, gracious guy who just wants to be around good energy. He’s all about bringing light and joy, but yeah, he keeps notes. There’s a ‘good list’ and a ‘sh*t list.’”

In Bullet Train, Pitt played Ladybug, a zen hitman with terrible luck. The film, directed by David Leitch (Pitt’s former stunt double—how cool is that?...

Get ready, PaddiSTANS: our furry king is about to return to the big screens of the United States with Paddington in Peru, and he's bringing with him a fairly decent Rotten Tomatoes score (and hopefully a marmalade sandwich or two). Everyone's favorite stuffed bear (voiced by Ben Whishaw) may have debuted in the United Kingdom back in November, but he's finally set to debut his latest adventure here on February 14, 2025 (after being pushed from an original release date of January 17). And while the crticial consensus points to a slightly-less-enjoyable thrill ride than its predecessors, it's still one of the most favorably reviewed movies of the year thus far according to the aforementioned, tomato-based website.

At the time of the film's initial international release, the Rotten Tomatoes score was 91%, but in the intervening weeks leading up to its American debut, the film's score has actually risen slightly to 93%. And while that...

Another January brings another Sundance Film Festival, where 87 feature films, six episodic projects, and more shorts will enter the fray to hopefully help shape the movie year that will be. A festival of that scope, with many first-time directors, can be tricky to navigate and parse, but IndieWire is here to help with 24 films we’re most anticipating. And a few of these we are lucky to have seen in advance.

Sundance this year is, of course, still in Park City, even as the nearly 50-year-old festival eyes potentially another location beginning in 2027, with Salt Lake City, Cincinnati, and Boulder as the contenders. Back in December when the lineup was unveiled, Sundance’s director Eugene Hernandez and lead programmer Kim Yutani gave us a peek at sales titles and possible breakout features to look out for. It’s ever helpful to have a guide to some of the must-see titles heading into snowy,...

Adam McKay is not someone to let things go. He took to X to bash the Democratic Party left and right after Donald Trump won re-election in November. And he’s apparently still aggrieved by how critics trashed his Netflix movie “Don’t Look Up” in 2021.

The movie was positioned as a metaphor for climate change: A comet was heading toward a collision with earth that would cause an extinction-level catastrophe. Instead of most people taking the impending doom seriously, the U.S. president tries to deny it by peddling Maga-style “Don’t Look Up” caps, the media tries to sensationalize it and divert attention instead to the hotness of the astrophysicist (Leonardo DiCaprio) who first made the discovery, and a tech CEO (Mark Rylance) tries to figure out how they can mine precious metals from the comet all while preparing his own getaway from the planet.

As wildfires continued to burn...