SXSW’s Most Exciting Movies: These are the Films Everyone is Buzzing Over

AUSTIN — The SXSW Film Festival has turned into a full fledged Hollywood hotbed in the last few years, becoming a stage for launching careers and catapulting cult film favorites. Celebrating its 25th year, the festival includes more than 250 films with as many as 50 screenings each day.

The offerings range from feature films to documentaries, to shorts and buzzy virtual reality projects.

There were, of course, headliner films, the fan favorites with star studded premieres that generated social media buzz and fan phenomena that overloaded social media feeds.

While PaperCity hit a few of the high points in the film arena, it was the SXSW Film Festival Awards ceremony at the Paramount Theatre on Tuesday night that garnered the most attention. Presented by FilmStruck , the evening saluted  the crème of the crop of the juried selections, selected from more than 8,000 submissions.

The coveted Grand Jury prize for narrative feature went to Thunder Road, which stars director Jim Cummings, as a wayward police officer raising his daughter after the death of his mother.

The Documentary Feature competition award winner, People’s Republic of Desire, explores the hot topic of virtual living and virtual relationships with live streamers as a human connection. 

As it wouldn’t be SXSW without giving a little Texas love to the home state, director Dana Shapiro’s documentary, Daughters of the Sexual Revolution: The Untold Story of the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, won the Louis Black “Lone Star” award for outstanding film in Texas content.

The documentary tells the captivating story of the “den mother” of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. Black the is co-founder of SXSW and the award was created in his honor in 2011.

Future Blockbusters

Among the films garnering attention this week:

The highly anticipated Isle of Dogs, the latest offering from writer/director Wes Anderson, is set in a future dystopian Japan and follows a boy’s odyssey in search of his dog. Another trip down the animation lane, the innovative film features Japanese art style cartooning that makes the voices of stars Byran Cranston, Edward Norton and Greta Gerwig that much more appealing.

A Quiet Place, directed by the The Office star John Krasinski, is a modern horror thriller staring Krasinki’s leading lady wife, Emily Blunt.

Blockers, starring Leslie Mann, John Cena and Ike Barinholtz, hilariously follows three parents who discover that their daughters are planning to wildly misbehave on prom night. So the adults join forces in a covert operation to stop them.

And then there was writer/director Carly Stone’s coming of age film on dating and chivalry. The New Romantic offers a breath of comic fresh air amid some of the heavier subject matter.

So many films, so little time.