SXSW 2025 Reviews: ‘Another Simple Favor,’ Death of a Unicorn,’ ‘The Accountant 2’
In my first dispatch for the 2025 SXSW Film Festival, I take a look at three of the headliners from the festival line-up that features the anticipated follow-ups to the A Simple Favor and The Accountant franchises, and the newest horror-comedy from A24.
Another Simple Favor (Dir. Paul Feig)
Picking up five years after the events of the first film, Another Simple Favor finds Stephanie Smothers (Anna Kendrick) struggling not only to raise her rebellious son Miles (Joshua Satine), but also coming to terms with her recent success as a private investigator and the surge of followers on her “mom-blog.” She’s written a book about the events of her claim to fame: the case and capture of Emily Nelson (Blake Lively), who was locked away for killing one of her triplet sisters and their father while also trying to frame Stephanie and her ex-husband Sean (Henry Golding) for her crimes. While the book hasn’t been nearly as successful as she would’ve wanted, Stephanie is trying to push forward with life till, as a local reading for her book, walking in, with a designer, black and white pinstriped dress with chains wrapped around her body, is Emily. She’s been released from prison due to her involvement with Dante Versano (Michele Morrone), a powerful Italian mob-boss, and the duo are getting married in Capri, where his empire and family reside, and she wants Stephanie to be her maid of honor. It’s within this moment when you realize why audiences really feel in love with A Simple Favor, with Kendrick and Lively ripping through dialogue back and forth, hurling insults and shady observations at each other (anytime the duo brings up Kendrick’s relationship with her brother from the first film, you can take a shot when watching it at home on Amazon Prime).
Stephanie, curious about what Emily is up to, accepts her offer, and from there we are thrust into an international adventure featuring so many twists, double-crosses, alliances, and shocking reveals as the events of the film play out, and we find multiple people close to Emily dead, with Stephanie blamed for the murders. One would think Feig and company learned from the Pirates of the Caribbean original trilogy how to tell a story this convoluted, as this film feels like a kindred spirit to Dead Man’s Chest in the sense that it tangles itself into so many webs, you would think the film would suffer. But much like the film it’s being compared to, it’s too thrilling to see how this creative team finds ways to get out of the mess they made. Feig, who has been on a rough spell of late, fully commits to his project and delivers his best work since the original Simple Favor, and carries along with him this star-studded cast of actors performing at their comedic best, with Kendrick, Golding, series staple Andrew Rannells, and newcomers Elizabeth Perkins and Allison Janney each having a moment to shine. But as we all know, these films rest upon the work of one performance, and that’s Blake Lively as Emily, who continues to showcase that this is the role of her career, doing even more work in this film as we go back and forth throughout the timeline of Emily’s past and discover even more secrets to this already complex character. She wields so much unpredictability with every action she does, proving that there is still so much to explore within Emily that we see here and could see going forward; all the while doing it in impeccable, elegant costumes, another signature feature found in this franchise. Another Simple Favor is an entertaining start to not just the SXSW Film Festival, but the summer season; it’s just a shame audiences will have to experience this film at home like Glass Onion for the Knives Out series, because this sequel was born for audiences to laugh and gasp at every turn together in a theater.
Grade: B
Another Simple Favor will premiere on Prime Video May 1, 2025.
Death of a Unicorn (Dir. Alex Scharfman)
From the moment they get off the plane, Elliot Kintner (Paul Rudd) and his daughter, Ridley (Jenna Ortega), are at odds with each other. The recent death of Elliot’s wife and Ridley’s mother has separated the two, not knowing how to communicate and process the loss of the person they loved without the other. When Elliot is invited to Odell Leopold’s (Richard E. Grant) family estate to conclude some business they have, he decides to bring Ridley along with him, but it proves to be disastrous as they start arguing as they are driving. Not paying attention to the road as well as losing the directions on his phone, Elliot’s car hits an animal-like figure walking into the road. Shocked by this event, Elliot and Ridley get out of the car to examine the creature they hit, only to discover that they hit a white, majestic baby unicorn. Enamored by its beauty, Ridley touches the unicorn’s horn and is transported to another astral plane, where she becomes connected to the unicorn, but that trip is cut short when Elliot takes a tire iron, bashes it in the head, and stuffs the unicorn in the back of their trunk. From sincerity to hilarity to horrifically violent and tense, Death of a Unicorn can’t figure out what kind of movie it tonally wants to be, which makes the overall experience not as fun as its premise suggests.
From the moment the unicorn is brought to the house, Odell (who is dying from cancer), alongside his wife Belinda (Téa Leoni) and son Shepard (Will Poulter), start to come up with an idea on how to use the unicorn for their own personal benefit. When it is discovered that the unicorn’s horn and blood can be used to heal injuries and illnesses, the Leopold’s use their insanely rich resources to create a compound that they believe they can market as “the cure for cancer,” which would make them even more rich than they are. Elliott is mostly along with the plan, as he wants to make sure his family is financially secure, a deal he made with his dead wife. But Ridley, who starts to research the myths of unicorns, notices that when you mess with one of them in a violent nature, as they have with the baby, it can result in a gruesome attack by the other members of the unicorn’s clan, leaving all that harmed one of their own dead within their path. This quickly becomes an obvious “eat the rich” fable as each member of the Death of a Unicorn ensemble is devoured by the over-the-top CGI-beasts who come into play around the halfway point of the film. The commentary is not biting enough for it to land a relevant punch, while the humor of the film varies from actor to actor, with Leoni, Poulter, and Anthony Carrigan (the family butler) being the film’s brightest comedy stars. The action sequences aren’t nearly as suspenseful as they should be, with the unicorns themselves looking like they were made for an action movie from the mid-2000s. Honestly, the whole plot of the movie feels like a knock-off version of The Lost World: Jurassic Park, just with a lot grislier deaths in this than in Spielberg’s original monster movie. As with the 1993 classic, there is an emotional element to this film involving Rudd and Ortega that does land well considering most of the time they aren’t given too much to do. This speaks to the talent of these two actors more than anything else. Though most of the film doesn’t work entirely together, on the whole when you start thinking about it after the credits start rolling, debut writer-director Alex Scharfman does show some promise within individual characters, and finds a way to land his premise within the rules he set up. It’s a wild, bumpy ride that should’ve dived deeper into lore and experimented with the premise but instead is resolved rather conventionally in its final execution; something that might come from future films from this new voice from behind the camera.
Grade: C
Death of a Unicorn will be released in theaters from A24 on March 28, 2025.
The Accountant 2 (Dir. Gavin O’Connor)
Well it’s tax season folks, and you know what that means. It’s time to get those W-2 and itemized receipts ready because everyone’s favorite accountant, Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck), is back. Nine years ago, the world was introduced to the world of Gavin O’Connor’s The Accountant, where Affleck played Wolff, an autistic accountant who launders money for some of the most dangerous criminals and powerful people in the world. Because of his upbringing, he also is a trained assassin, alongside his brother Braxton (Jon Bernthal), who operates a private security company for high profile clients. Their childhood was hard because of their strict, military-minded father, who saw Christian’s condition as a weakness and trained him to see it as a tool to use, thus making him a smart, physically empowering machine. Essentially, he is a superhero; he even funds a school for gifted children that is run by his childhood friend, Justine (Allison Robertson), who has nonverbal autism and communicates with others via her computer. While this all sounds weird on paper, and is dealing with very serious subject matters, O’Connor has always been a director that is sincere in the films he is making, making some if the best movies that can emotionally gut you like a fish (thinking about 2011’s Warrior or 2020’s The Way Back, which starred Affleck at his most vulnerable). The nearly decade in the making sequel still has an intriguing mission Wolff has to go on, but is also surprisingly funny and touching in its elevation of the brotherly storyline.
When Ray King (J.K Simmons) is gunned down in an altercation at a nightclub in Los Angeles, Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), who replaced King as the Director of the Treasury Department’s FinCEN, must call upon Wolff to uncover a missing person’s case that King was investigating. As he starts to uncover more and more of the truth, the threat of danger grows as this case connects to human trafficking, illegal immigration, and children being separated from their families, living in Mexico in a children’s prison. O’Connor is able to use his protagonist’s empathy to take the burden of these issues on with the right amount of severity needed for a film like this. At the same time, screenwriter Bill Dubuque knows that he has two movie stars with incredible chemistry with Affleck and Bernthal, and in order for their team-up at the end of the film to work, we need to see this broken relationship forge back together over the course of this sequel. In what might be the scene of the year so far involving a rodeo bar and Affleck two-stepping to country music, we get to do something the first film didn’t allow the audience to do; have fun with these characters and get to know them beyond their archetypes. The film does get a little too much into the weeds with the mystery character and reveal at the end, and every scene involving Justine is beyond silly, but that is kind of the point. This is big, dumb fun at its finest, with O’Connor’s signature emotional attachment to his characters grounding the film, it’s a hell of a ride thanks in large part to Affleck and Bernthal, in what might be his biggest role in a film in years (note to the world, cast Jon Bernthal in every movie, you won’t regret it). The Accountant 2 is a better overall film than the original and one of the most entertaining films of the year so far.
Grade: B+
The Accountant 2 will be in theaters from Amazon MGM on April 25, 2025.
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