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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 launched 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.

The Accountant 2 ‘The Accountant 2’

Section: Headliner

Director: Gavin O’Connor

Cast: Ben Affleck, Jon Bernthal, Cynthia Addai-Robinson, Daniella Pineda,...

One of the unexpected pleasures of this year’s vast SXSW slate of movies is Bunny, a kind of zany comic throwback to extreme indie New York City-centric movies that find a manic energy and rhythm that lets them exist on their own breathless cloud, with a cast of wacky characters moving in and out of frame in action that takes place almost entirely in an East Village tenement, or outside just in front of it.

In some ways Bunny is an oddball cross of Weekend at Bernie’s, Abbott & Costello, Cheech & Chong and a new-age Marx Brothers movie, plus films of the Safdie brothers (particularly Uncut Gems) all the way back to Hal Ashby’s wonderful directorial debut with 1970’s The Landlord, another NYC tenement movie I kept thinking about watching this stew. Throw them all into a blender and you might have something resembling what first-time director...

Once upon a time, mostly in the 1980s and 90s, the downtown Manhattan indie movie was a thing. Films like Jim Jarmusch’s Permanent Vacation, Edo Bertoglio’s Downtown 81, Larry Clark’s Kids and, later on, early Safdie brothers efforts like The Pleasure of Being Robbed were gritty off-the-cuff street features made on tiny budgets, shouldered by directors looking to capture the weird and wild world below 14th Street.

But living in that part of the city soon became expensive, and more expensive, and even more expensive — to the point that many writers, artists and filmmakers were priced out of their neighborhoods. Shooting in Manhattan also became exorbitantly costly, leaving room for only well-funded TV shows like Law & Order, Billions or Succession. Even the latest NYC-set Safdie joint (directed by Josh Safdie in his first solo effort) is an epic period piece, starring Timothée Chalamet, with a budget estimated between $50-$70 million.

The lineup for the SXSW film and TV festival has been announced with new projects from Seth Rogen, Ben Affleck, Jenn Ortega and Nicole Kidman set to premiere at the Austin fest.

Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s Hollywood-set comedy series The Studio will kick off SXSW as the opening night TV screening. Rogen stars as the newly appointed head of an embattled studio as he and his executives struggle to make their movies relevant.

“The same undeniable creative electricity in The Studio runs through our 2025 program — you can feel a bit of magic happening in every film, series, and immersive experience we’ve curated this year,” said festival head Claudette Godfrey. “From groundbreaking independent films to unforgettable studio premieres and documentary revelations to genre-defying experiments, this lineup celebrates the fearless storytellers who make SXSW so unique.”

Elsewhere in the Headliner lineup is Affleck’s The Accountant 2, the sequel to...