Screen Anarchy

The 2026 edition of the SXSW Film & TV Festival concluded yesterday and has now announced their Jury and Special Award winners. Graham Parkes’ Wishful Thinking won the Narrative Feature Competition. As I noted in our curtain raiser: “Maya Hawkes and Lewis Pullman star as a couple on the verge of breaking up when they attend a couples-therapy seminar. Somehow, after that, the state of their relationship begins affecting the world around them on a monumental scale. This is a clever premise that twists into something that is awesome, smart, and very, very funny.” Ayden Mayeri’s Summer 2000: The X-Cetra Story won the Documentary Feature Competition. In my review, I noted: “it’s a film that examines longtime friendships from all angles. I think it’s true…

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A long-term experiment in filmmaking, Candidates of Death started almost 20 years ago when documentarian Maciej Cuske took his son Stasiu and his friends Rafal and Adrian on a vacation. Friends since kindergarten, the three youths were fans of horror movies. During the vacation, Cuske encourages them to make their own horror film, starting a tradition they will continue over the years in a dozen iterations of Candidates of Death. A quick montage covers the friends’ efforts. An evil grandmother. Zombies. A monster in a blue mask. Clearly amateur work, but made with enthusiasm. Outtakes and behind the scenes material show how much fun everyone is having. In the present, Stasiu and Rafal relax on bunk beds in a camper, waiting for Adrian and Cuske…

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From Canada to Florida, from friendship to data points, four highly-charged documentaries made a mark at SXSW.

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Sergei Loznitsa’s newest film stars Aleksandr Kuznetsov, Alexander Filippenko, and Anatoli Beliy.

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Christian Petzold’s film stars Paula Beer, Barbara Auer, Matthias Brandt, and Enno Trebs.

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Actor, writer, and director Michaela Coel is teaming with A24 for a reimagining of the cult film, Bloodsport.

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Leonie Benesch delivers a restrained yet striking performance in Petra Volpe’s unsparingly realist feature.

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Mike (James Marsden) is done with the gangster life. He’s found a girl, he wants to settle down, and he’s ready to leave it all behind. There are a couple of problems, though. Number one, the girl, Alice (Eiza González), is already married to his partner, Nick (Vince Vaughn); and number two, he’s really, really good at killing people. It’s that second part that leads Nick to call on him one last time to take care of some last-minute business, and while Mike is hesitant, he feels like he owes Nick and goes along for the ride. What Mike isn’t expecting is that the business at hand involves another Nick, and what began as a gangster story is now a time travel story, and shit…

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The Diagonale 2026 competition brings together a cross-section of contemporary Austrian cinema.

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A woman seeking to rescue her little sister takes a job at an ultra-exclusive hotel only to find that the residents have a nasty, violent, murderous secret in director Kirill Sokolov’s Hollywood debut, They Will Kill You. Asia Reaves (Zazie Beetz) is a fighter. Ten years ago, she tries to rescue her little sister from an abusive father, but after trying and failing to kill him, she ran away, leaving her sister to fend for herself. After serving hard time for her crime, Asia is now determined to get Maria (played as an adult by Myha’la) out of her job at the extremely shady Virgil high-rise, but what she doesn’t know is that the building hosts a very violent cult who will stop at nothing…

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