The headiest moment of this year’s SXSW didn’t technically take place in Austin. As the 95th Oscars ceremony broadcast live from LA, your Letterboxd SXSW correspondents watched the telecast in bits and pieces with a group of critics outside the Alamo South Lamar. Last year’s big buzz title, Everything Everywhere All at Once, kept winning award after award, hundreds of feet from where filmmakers with similar dreams were preparing to debut their labors of love. The energy was palpable. Anything could happen now.

It was the first SXSW world premiere to go all the way to Oscar glory, and the festival understandably owned Everything Everywhere All at Once’s wins, adding googly eyes to the festival bumper and playing a clip of Tilda Swinton saying “something feels different this morning” before every single screening for the next few days. It was a shot in the arm for the granddaddy of all Austin multimedia conferences, now a perfectly legitimate launching pad for future Best Picture winners.

Perhaps smelling the gold on SXSW, big name celebrities like Viola Davis, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, and Tilda herself all appeared in person to promote their films. We talked to all of them, with RZA taking our correspondents to film school and Ayo Edebiri sharing “exclusive” details about her process for playing Jenny the Donkey in The Banshees of Inisherin. Edebiri was there to promote the world premiere of this year’s big buzz title, Bottoms, which debuted in a prime Saturday night slot at the festival’s biggest venue—the Paramount Theatre in downtown Austin.

That film co-starred (and was co-written by) Rachel Sennott, the unofficial queen of this year’s SXSW with two films on our best-of list. Honorable mention goes to Megan Stalter, who starred in one marquee title (Cora Bora, Sunday at the Paramount) and featured in another (Problemista, which premiered on Monday). Later in the fest, Evil Dead Rise brought out a raucous, bloodthirsty crowd of horror fans—and one heckler, keeping Austin weird—and Air closed out the week with one last splashy red carpet event.

SXSW is primarily a showcase for American indie movies, but international titles make the grade and a favorite was Argentinian-American co-production Chronicles of a Wandering Saint, which won a prize named after late Beastie Boy Adam Yauch awarded “in honor of a filmmaker whose work strives to be wholly its own, without regard for norms or desire to conform.” In a city like Austin, where even the skyline is in constant flux, it takes a lot of work to stay ahead of the curve. This year’s festival felt like that work was paying off—and here are our ten best of the fest.

Words by Katie Rife and Annie Lyons.

Queer best friends PJ (Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri, mining 92 minutes’ worth of laughs with her reactions) are their high school’s resident losers, not because they’re gay, the film is quick to clarify, but because they’re untalented and gay. After an incident involving the school’s star quarterback, abrasive PJ urges the meeker Josie to take advantage of their newfound notoriety by forming a fight club to help them hook up with cheerleaders.

The surprisingly bloody result is “an absurd queer teenage sex comedy with campy cult classic potential,” according to Brigid. “Had the audience in stitches from start to finish, but also sweet and emotionally resonant.” The Host of MMM concurs: “It’s going to be one of those films you will have to see more than once due to the numerous amount of perfectly timed jokes and sight gags it constantly throws at you a mile a minute.” Did I mention the Charli XCX score? AL

Chronicles of a Wandering Saint

Written and directed by Tomás Gómez Bustillo

Some films gently shift gears. Chronicles of a Wandering Saint drives off of a cliff. There’s a lot to spoil in this small miracle of a movie from writer-director Tomás Gómez Bustillo, so suffice to say that just when you think that you know what Chronicles is all about, it transforms into something else. Barlayne Fletcher points out that Bustillo’s debut feature is “subversive in how it genuinely feints at being a low budget, ultra-dour attempt at regional realism” before switching into “something a thousand times more gentle, dreamy and sincere,” while Bretton A. Miller raves that it’s “almost maybe a perfect movie.”

The balance of tones and genres, which pivot on a key scene midway through the film, is certainly perfect. The story revolves around an elderly Argentinian woman named Rita Lopez (Mónica Villa), who longs for something more from her life. Her doting husband thinks that a trip to the scenic waterfalls where they spent their honeymoon will cure Rita’s restlessness. But once Rita discovers a neglected statue under a tarp in the back room of the church where she works, she embarks on a more ambitious scheme.

Again, this is one movie that you really don’t want to know too much about going in—which makes it difficult to write about, given that it’s full of wonderfully warm and heartfelt comedic details. So take some advice from Tatianabears’ five-star review: “Don’t read this review, just go see it whenever you can.” KR

Evil Dead Rise

Written and directed by Lee Cronin / In theaters April 21 via Warner Bros. Pictures

“Evil Dead fans will love it. Evil Dead newbies will be utterly confused. And that’s exactly the way it should be,” predicts Donderdonk in their review of the impish horror franchise’s latest entry. Handpicked by Sam Raimi, writer-director Lee Cronin moves the possession action from a cabin in the woods to a creaky Los Angeles apartment for a stylish one-off that takes care to preserve the franchise’s anarchic glee.

The setup is simple: Chronically irresponsible Beth (a visceral Lily Sullivan) shows up unexpectedly at her sister Ellie’s (Alyssa Sutherland, visceral in a very different way) doorstep. Ellie has three kids and has recently separated from her husband. Beth has news of her own. But, though there are some nods to horror’s familiar thematic stomping ground of monstrous motherhood, Cronin knows what we’re all really here for, and the film is all the better for it.

You don’t need me to tell you that a certain cheeky kitchen utensil that’s prominently featured in marketing materials gets put to nefarious means nor am I being hyperbolic when I estimate that the gallons of blood dedicated to this “carnage circus” must’ve been in the thousands. “I hereby declare this movie… groovy,” praises Andy Crump. “It’s the big crowd-pleasing Evil Dead movie we were hoping for. Remixing the dark humor of The Evil Dead, the polish of Evil Dead II, and the savagery of the 2013 reboot, all blended together and perfectly paced in a 1930s tower block. It moves from darkly funny to utterly savage.” Groovy indeed. AL

Joy Ride

Directed by Adele Lim, written by Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao / In theaters in July via Lionsgate

For a better idea of what to expect from Joy Ride, the feature directorial debut of Crazy Rich Asians co-writer Adele Lim, one only needs to look to the film’s cheeky original title: Joy Fuck Club. This is a “trip gone sideways” buddy comedy about four Asian-American friends that delights in sex-positive raunchiness, drug-fueled shenanigans and the effortless chemistry of its four leads, then goes for the heartstrings with its tender considerations on Asian identity and belonging.

When Audrey (Ashley Park), a corporate lawyer and the adopted daughter of white parents, must travel to China on a promotion-promising work trip, she enlists her slacker artist best friend Lolo (Sherry Cola) to come along as her translator. For Audrey, the trip is all business. For Lolo, it seems like the perfect opportunity for Audrey to find her birth mother, just like they always dreamed about when they were little. Completing their quartet is Deadeye (Sabrina Wu), Lolo’s introverted, K-pop obsessed cousin, and Kat (Stephanie Hsu), Audrey’s college friend turned Chinese soap star. Inevitably, the trip both figuratively and literally goes off the rails. Hijinks ensue. 

“An absolute romp, equally hilarious and touching,” professes Jasmine, while Thaistanley shares, “It reminded me a bit of Girls Trip and Bridesmaids with the camaraderie between the four actors, who are all amazing and scene-stealing in their own right.” A parting request from Kevin L. Lee: “Ashley Park, Sherry Cola, Stephanie Hsu, and Sabrina Wu are DYNAMITE together! I want ten more movies with them.” AL

Problemista

Written and directed by Julio Torres

The inside of Julio Torres’ head is a strange and wonderful place. The writer behind SNL’s “Papyrus” and “Wells for Boys” sketches has a unique comedic point of view that combines low-key observational humor and theatrical surrealism. Problemista gives him his biggest platform yet and “visionary” is the only word strong enough for this film, which is told through the eyes of Alejandro (Torres), an aspiring toy designer from El Salvador, who’s desperate to keep his work visa after losing his job at a cryogenic freezing facility. Enter Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton), an art critic with the energy of a yapping chihuahua inside of a tornado. Elizabeth is what you might call “a lot,” but she offers to sponsor Ale’s visa if he takes a job as her assistant.

Problemista is full of inspired details, like the weird little bunny hop Torres does throughout the film and Swinton’s phone flashlight always being on. Alejandro’s NYC is a singular place: Here, Craigslist is a living entity and the US immigration system is a Kafkaesque trap. Some of the jokes are abstract and brainy, while others are quirky crowd-pleasers that literally sparked cheers at the film’s SXSW premiere.

Coleman Spide writes in his Letterboxd review that Problemista is “one of the coolest, kindest, and most observant films I’ve ever seen,” while Exbot adds, “basically every choice in this movie stands out as weirder than I would have expected, but none of it feels like it's just for the sake of being quirky.” KR

Satan Wants You

Written and directed by Steve J. Adams and Sean Horlor

Very few documentaries are actually scary. Plenty of them cover disturbing topics, but ones that make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up are harder to find. Satan Wants You is one of those. The Satanic Panic of the ’80s is now mostly discussed as a pop-cultural oddity, a weird relic from a time when Geraldo Rivera still had some credibility as a journalist. Satan Wants You goes back to the source of this hysteria, recruiting friends and family members to tell the story of an emotionally fragile woman, her fame-hungry psychiatrist, and how the book they wrote together, Michelle Remembers, started a moral panic.

The scariest parts of the doc are re-creations of the “rituals” Michelle Smith “remembered” in hours of taped sessions with her therapist, Dr. Lawrence Pazder, as well as the screams and sobs on the tapes themselves as Michelle describes depraved, disturbing—and since disproven— acts of Satanic abuse in lurid detail. But while the film explains how all this started, it is open-ended about how to stop it.

Dan Tabor touches on this idea in his Letterboxd review when he writes, “Satan Wants You is a scathing documentary that sheds some much needed light on a cycle of fear and projection that is already running its course in our country yet again.” Isabel Bishop adds that “Satanic panic was all spectacle and no substance, and we learned nothing from the harm that came of it.” That’s the other scary thing about Satan Wants You—not only could this happen again, it already is. KR

Milestone events have a funny way of becoming vessels for others’ projections that, left unchecked, widen the dangerous gap between how you think you should feel and how you do feel. This is exactly the type of thinking that Celestina (Kiersey Clemmons) wants to avoid at her “non-wedding” wedding, aka a day-long party at the beautiful estate that her father built for her mother. Only, her guests haven’t got the memo as they parade in with unwanted gifts and expectations about Celestina’s future.

Resplendent visuals and idiosyncratic details reign, and writer-director Tayarisha Poe brings a sense of dance to the proceedings. With climate disasters raging in the background, The Young Wife takes place seemingly in the near future, one that closely resembles our present but just off-kilter enough, like how a vintage television set constantly reminds guests to take their “meditation minute”. “Incredible psychedelic/retro production and costume design, crackling script, and a cast who’s all in on this world’s heightened reality. What vision,” Katie Carter raves.

As Celestina weathers her existential crisis, the film swirls in what Andy Crump terms a “choking, dreamy inertia”. He continues: “The film ‘moves’, but nearly everything in it stays still, except for Kiersey Clemons, a bundle of exposed nerves in a crop knit pullover. She’s all agitated energy, looking for a light at the end of the world and finding nothing but domineering family and oblivious hangers on who want what they want when they want it, superstorms and toxic water supply be damned.” AL