TEXAS, USA — Dungeons and dragons, deadites and assassins’ duels were all the rage at the 2023 South By Southwest Film & TV Festival, where a healthy slate of headliners gave Paramount Theatre audiences a taste of what’s to come from major studios this year.
At the same time, whole other moviegoing worlds awaited further down the lineup. Directorial debuts provided intriguing glimpses at the medium’s future, thrill-seekers had plenty to scream about and documentarians continued bending the rules to keep pace with a world that’s doing the same. Not all these movies might hit theaters in your city in the next few months, but they – and the filmmakers behind them – are worth keeping on your radar nonetheless.
Here are some of the best "smaller" movies we saw at SXSW this year.
“Confessions of a Good Samaritan” (dir. Penny Lane)
There are few things broader or more frequently said about any particular movie than calling it an exploration of human nature. The latest work from always-interesting documentarian Penny Lane earns the descriptor, and then some.
A video diary of the director’s unluxurious quest to donate her kidney and an inquiry into what would compel anyone to go so out of their way for a stranger, “Confessions of a Good Samaritan” is frank in its reflections and unflinching in their scope. Lane makes for a subject as compelling as any she’s interviewed for her prior work – she often arrives at the same contradictions at the very same time the viewer is – while retaining her penchant for filmmaking decisions as playful as they are uneasy, as if the movie itself were coming alive to its own questions.
Most documentarians don’t devote time to contemplating the natural performativity of their work. “Confessions of a Good Samaritan” is a fascinating, feature-length exploration of it.
“If You Were the Last” (dir. Kristian Mercado)
Speaking of aesthetically playful movies, some audiences might initially balk at the cardboard rocketships and paper-mache-looking planets of Kristian Mercado’s unorthodox stranded-in-space drama.
But Mercado (recently enlisted to direct an upcoming Cheech and Chong biopic) isn’t taking after Wes Anderson for the sake of it. He’s playing off the deeper existentialism of the story, crafting a colorfully lo-fi setting mimicking the astronauts’ states of mind as they make a home out of scientific spaces and a newly messy debate out of the classic “When Harry Met Sally” debate: Can Adam and Jane have sex and still get along, millions and millions of miles away from everyone else? Anthony Mackie and Zoe Chao are aces in the lead roles, and Mercado nails the payoff of his feature-length debut even as it takes a more predictable landing.
“National Anthem” (dir. Luke Gilford)
What Luke Gilford’s radical Western – about a young rancher who finds community with a posse of queer neighbors – might miss in its script, it more than makes up for with his talent of brewing up a mood that’s borderline intoxicating.
As we watch Dylan (Charlie Plummer) finally open himself up to emotional reciprocation, “National Anthem” creates the sensation of your pulse quickening with personal discovery—as well as the eventual tug back to reality. Plummer’s been enlisted for major projects from Ridley Scott and Roland Emmerich in the early stages of a young career, but his abilities take a major leap under Gilford’s direction.
“The Ordinaries” (dir. Sophie Linnenbaum)
There are movies about movies, and then there’s “The Ordinaries,” in which German director Sophie Linnenbaum creates a world governed by cinematic principles. The social hierarchy is one in which Main Characters run things while Outtakes live on the fringes, where they glitch in and out of everyday life or communicate through corrupted audio.
Linnenbaum’s sense of invention never rests on its laurels, introducing quirk after quirk quirk informed by the medium’s triumphs and flaws in what feels like every scene. But while the world of “The Ordinaries” relies on cinema’s technical leaps, its narrative – focused on a young girl, Paula, who struggles to make “emotional music” – takes a stab at confronting what its denizens even want. Is it the status quo? Is it ingenuity? Is it the tried and true, or the messy and peculiar? Movies are life but explicitly so in “The Ordinaries,” and it’s moving to see Linnenbaum wrestle with her living, breathing double-entendre of an experiment.
“Upon Entry” (dirs. Juan Sebastián Vásquez, Alejandro Rojas)
A young couple arrives in New York from Spain, eager to start the next stage of their life before being unceremoniously led to a windowless waiting room that may be just down the hall but feels like it’s several miles underground. What unfolds over the next 70 or so minutes of “Upon Entry” is many things: an indictment of dehumanizing immigrant systems, a thrilling look at the pitfalls of social transaction, a border drama in which entering a new place means gaining newfound clarity about where you’re coming from.
The movie’s points of entry are endless, and the exacting filmmaking its codirectors deploy leaves you on the edge of your seat over what the next revelation will be, so long as you can keep yourself from submerging in the gray area.
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