SXSW 2026: 22 Most-Anticipated Movies

Movie zombies didn’t begin with George A. Romero — the walking dead have haunted cinema since the medium’s early days. Their cultural roots not only predate Hollywood’s dream factory by decades, however, but can be traced to the fields of Haiti, where a mix of homegrown religion and European colonialism helped give birth to surprisingly malleable horror-movie staple. Documentarian Maya Annik Bedward digs into the way the concept of undead bodies shambling among us has been used, abused and exploited over the years, as well as mounting a reclamation of the screen zombie as a figure of resistance. The SXSW screenings will be BYOB (Bring Your Own Brains).

Jonás Cuarón — co-writer of Gravity, director of Desierto (2015), and son and creative collaborator of Alfonso Cuarón — brings his latest project to SXSW, which involves a young immigrant named Liborio (Juan Daniel García Treviño) struggling to survive in New York’s outer boroughs. It turns out that, after involving the ire of a local gang, our man demonstrates the ability to take a punch and still get up swinging. Even better: The kid has one hell of a right hook. Under the tutelage of a foster-parent-slash-coach (Rubén Blades), Liborio starts training to become a prizefighter — and an unlikely folk hero among the downtrodden. Rosario Dawson, Cheech Marin, and Eddie Marsan costar.

In May 2024, country star Charley Crockett hopped the pond to Merry Olde England™ and played a trio of sold-out shows in the legendary Hoxton Hall. Documentarian Jared L. Christopher followed the not-so-lonesome drifter and his fiance, Taylor Grace, as they experienced a “typical” week in the life of a hit singer-songwriter. Let’s hear what the man has to say in his own words, via an Instagram post: “Three nights in London. Solo shows. Real life in between. The most honest film we’ve ever made.” We can’t put it any better than that.

A young woman (Lizzie Caplan) breaks into a fancy-pants artist’s house in the country, with the idea of liberating a few luxury items for her own personal gain. Her sister (Lucy DeVito — why yes, she is related!) has been reluctantly co-opted into keeping watch outside the place. What’s supposed to be just a good-old fashioned burglary becomes complicated by the fact that the thief suddenly throws out her back, and her literal partner-in-crime has to go in and drag her out. See, now the title makes sense! Even worse: The owner (John Stamos) returns home before the two exit the premises. Uh-oh. Given that this is playing in the Midnight section, you should expect some fake blood and a few horrifying twists.

The family that plays together, stays together. And the family that makes a horror movie, specifically one that’s all about a family making a horror movie, together — why, they’re the tightest clan of them all! Just ask Kevin Bacon, who’s directing and starring in this extremely meta genre flick, which costars Kyra Sedgwick, a.k.a. his wife, and Josie “The Final Girl in Smile” Bacon and Travis Bacon, a.k.a. their IRL kids. Long story short: The fictional filmmaking relations discover a real body on the set of their latest scary movie. Chaos, and we assume a few dire family meetings, ensue.

Writer, director, musician, and overall Renaissance man Boots Riley drops his latest satirical smart bomb, in which a group of professional, Oakland-based thieves led by Keke Palmer do battle with a fast-fashion CEO played by Demi Moore. It’s the festival’s opening night selection, and if it’s one-third as outrageous as Riley’s 2018 feature debut Sorry to Bother You, we’re in for a wild ride. Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige, LaKeith Stanfield, Will Poulter, Eiza González, and Poppy Liu co-star.

Whether or not Robert Christgau truly “invented” rock criticism is beside the point — the legendary “Dean of American rock critics” perfected the art of writing in depth about everyone from Elvis Presley to Public Enemy, and changed the way many of us read about music, talked about music, and heard music across dozens of different genres. Documentarian Matty Wishnow paints a picture of the elder statesman and Consumer Guide author, digging into his early days, his long decades-long tenure at the Village Voice, and his continual influence on generations of both writers and readers. (P.S.: We truly hope this blurb gets at least a B-.)

Finally, one of the greatest bands ever to come out of East L.A. gets the long-overdue music-doc treatment! Filmmakers Doug Blush and Piero F. Giunti takes a look back at Los Lobos’ 50-years-and-counting history, complete with new interviews, loads of live footage, and everyone from Tom Waits to Cheech Marin weighing on the group’s music and cross-cultural bona fides. Fingers crossed that the perpetually underrated, hidden-gem album Colossal Head will now get the credit it richly deserves.

Meet Margo Millet — a promising young writer at Fullerton University who finds herself involved with a married professor and unexpectedly pregnant. Raising a baby on your own ain’t cheap — see title! — so Margo is forced to turn to slightly less orthodox ways of solving her money troubles. A hint: It rhymes with ShmonlyFans. The great Elle Fanning (coincidentally, star of The Great) leads this Apple TV+ adaptation of Rufi Thorpe’s novel, alongside Michelle Pfeiffer, Nick Offerman, Greg Kinnear, Marcia Gay Harden, Laura San Giacomo and Michael Angarano. SXSW will be premiering the first two episodes on opening night.

Normally, we don’t pay too much attention to the questionable-at-best fest blurbs for SXSW’s lineup — they often run the gamut from notoriously WTF vague to “Unclean! Unclean!!!” — much less copy text from the catalogue in lieu of writing our own description for lists like this one. The synopsis for this headline title from writer-director BenDavid Grabinski (Scott Pilgrim Takes Off), however, is sorta perfect: “A hilarious, stylized, R-rated action-comedy about two gangsters and the woman they love trying to survive the most dangerous night of their lives. As if that wasn’t enough, there’s one wild ingredient added to the mix: a time machine.” Remember, when you need to push your action-comedy just that much further, add a time machine! The cast includes Vince Vaughn, Eiza González, James Mardsen, Stephen Root, Ben Schwartz, Emily Hampshire, Keith David and Arturo Castro. No word on who plays the time machine.

If you’ve been listening to the Lonely Island and Seth Meyers podcast, you know former SNL writer and Popstar co-director Jorma Taccone spent a good portion of 2025 filming something in Finland. Now you’ll get a chance to see what he was up to. A remake of the 2021 Norwegian movie The Trip, this dark comedy follows a couple (Jason Segel and Samara Weaving) whose relationship is on the skids. Both of them are respectively planning to murder each other during an upcoming vacation. Then they’re taken hostage by some criminals on the lam from the law, and, well… nothing really messes up your homicide plans like a hostage situation, amirite? Juliette Lewis, Timothy Olyphant, and retired MMA fighter Keith Jardine add to the mayhem as well.

Most of us have dreamed of becoming an IRL superhero. Benjamin Fodor took it one step further: After stopping a friend’s assault outside of a Seattle bar in 2010, he began putting on a costume and adopting an alter-ego named “Phoenix Jones.” He even recruited fellow masked do-gooders to help him fight crime. You’ll notice there’s a “fall” in the title of this doc, and while his story does indeed take a downward turn, this look at Fodor’s attempt to rise from the ashes of a fairly public disgrace suggests that F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong about that whole “no second acts” maxim. Especially when it comes to actual flesh-and-blood superheroes.

A message to any college students who may be reading this: Please, please, please try to refrain from taking random drugs you’ve found in a mysterious breath-mints tin. Unfortunately, we’re a little too late to warn three freshmen (played by Billy Giambrone, Lulu Wilson and Stranger Things‘ Gaten Matarazzo) who gobble down some shady looking pills. They then have to embark on a near impossible journey that requires them to leave their dorm room, go downstairs, and pick up the pizza they ordered, all while they’re trippin’ balls. Every generation requires at least one seriously gonzo stoner comedy, and it sounds like directors Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher — better known as the online sketch duo BriTANicK — want to fill that need.

What happens when a down-and-out wedding singer (Paul Rudd) and a former boy-band star (Nick Jonas) decide to do an impromptu, just-kickin’-back-no-big-deal jam session? They come up with a song that becomes a big comeback hit for the latter — which naturally inspires a good deal WTF? resentment in the former. Because this is cowritten and directed by John Carney, who’s forged an entire career making feel-good movies about the power of song (see: Once, Begin Again, Flora and Son), we’re going to guess that everything ends on an uplifting note.

Long before the Red Hot Chili Peppers were arena headliners, they were just a trio of snotty SoCal misfits named Anthony Kiedis, Hillel Slovak, and Michael Balzary, better known as Flea. Along with the drummer Jack Irons, these childhood best friends would mix punk, funk, and surfer-dude scat-rapping into an underground-music sensation. Put on your socks — IYKYK — and strap in for filmmaker Ben Feldman’s look back at the origin story of the RHCP; the subtitle “Hillel, Our Brother” signals that it’s doubling as an extended tribute to the late, great guitarist who was instrumental in forging the sound that would turn the band into a juggernaut.

Every family is dysfunctional in their own unique way, yadda yadda yadda, but the Bachmans could give any screwed-up blood relations a run for their money. Kayla (Hannah Einbinder) is a struggling writer with social anxiety. Zach (John Paul Reynolds) is a lawyer who’s hoping his side hustle writing odd folk songs will pay off. Wes (Griffin Gluck) is a graphic novelist addicted to sports gambling and pills, in that order. And their baby sister Scarlett (Succession‘s Justine Lupe)? She’s run off with a “spiritual” group that’s about to pull a Jonestown, which is why the siblings have hired a deprogrammer (Justin Theroux) and put aside their many, many, many differences in order to save her. It’s a cult comedy, just not in the usual sense of the term.

What do you do when you’ve just been fired and are three weeks into sobriety? You move into a suburban rental and start over. This is exactly what Julia (Severance‘s Britt Lower) has done, except someone is sending mysterious packages to her new address, which gives her the feeling that maybe she’s being watched — and perhaps even stalked. What’s the old saying about how just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you? Rhea Seehorn and Jamie Lee Curtis costar.

Picture, if you will, a WWII veteran who goes to college on the G.I. bill, dabbles a little bit in radio broadcasting, begins sending out scripts to television producers — and ends up creating one of the most influential anthology TV show’s in the medium’s history. Jonah Tulis’s doc on Rod Serling looks into the life and times of Rod Serling, the award-winning creator of The Twilight Zone, as well as his battles with network censors and his fight to bring more socially conscious stories to the boob tube.

Back in the summer of 2000, four preadolescents from Santa Rosa, California decided to form a pop band on a lark. They called themselves X-Cetra, and wrote a handful songs about crushes, having fun, and various other ditties that rhymed “girl” with “world.” One of their moms, a former musician, offered to record them; she then set their songs to backing tracks from a German experimental-music producer (!) and burned a CD for the kids. The result… well, let’s say it did not sound like the Spice Girls. The quartet all grew up, grew apart, went their separate ways. Then, 20 years later, their music found their way on to the Internet, they became a cult sensation, and a label out of Chicago offered to release a remastered version of the recordings on vinyl. The now-grown women get to live out their tween dream, while also dealing with two decades of unresolved business between them. You know how truth is stranger than fiction? This is a great example.

A young woman (Zazie Beetz) in need of a job is hired to be a housemaid at one of the most “exclusive” buildings in New York City. Nice gig, right? Except there’s a catch: This home to Manhattan’s elite doubles as a Satanic temple, and they plan on using the newest addition to the hired help as a sacrifice. Quicker than you can say Rosemary’s Baby, your hero has to defend herself from a whole bunch of weapon-wielding rich folks. We’d always hoped that the Atlanta star would get her own John Wick-style action vehicle — and we didn’t even have to make a deal with the devil to get it! Patricia Arquette, Heather Graham, Industry‘s Myha’la Herrold, and Tom Felton costar.

You may consider the Shaggs the epitome of amateur enthusiasm over musical chops — no less than Frank Zappa and Kurt Cobain were big fans — or find yourself repelled by the way this trio of sisters from Fremont, New Hampshire, seem to be playing a half dozen different songs simultaneously. But once you’ve heard the band’s 1969 album Philosophy of the World, you will never, ever forget it. God bless Ken Kwapis, one of The Office‘s go-to directors, for giving the band the even-handed music doc they deserve, and digging into how, after years of obscurity, the Shaggs suddenly found themselves a bona fide cult sensation.

Would you go to couples therapy with your significant other if your relationship was having trouble? Maybe? Ok, let’s raise the stakes a bit: What if the state of your relationship caused seismic reactions around the world — earthquakes, stock-market fluctuations, etc. — according to whether you guys were bitterly fighting with each other or not? That’s the idea behind this high-concept rom-com from writer-director Graham Parkes, in which Maya Hawkes and Lewis Pullman must talk through their issues or we all suffer the consequences. Very curious about this one.