The Premieres We Can't Wait to See in Austin.
AFF’s 33rd edition arrives with nearly 200 films across eight days, and unlike almost every other festival on the calendar, this one is organized around the writer rather than the auteur, which gives the slate a different center of gravity entirely. This Austin Film Festival 2026 Preview highlights the 14 films we will be covering across the week, spanning Jesse Eisenberg’s follow-up to A Real Pain; new work from Pedro Almodóvar, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Andrey Zvyagintsev and Mike Leigh, whose entry is the final film of his career; a run of directorial debuts arriving with more heat behind them than most established filmmakers manage; and a world premiere nobody has laid eyes on yet. What ties them together is the writing, since this is a festival where the screenplay is the headline rather than the footnote, and the strongest entries here are the ones whose scripts have been the first thing every reviewer reaches for. These are the 14 films from this year’s lineup that we consider essential viewing. Austin Film Festival 2026 runs October 29 through November 5 in Austin, Texas.
Plot descriptions throughout are drawn from Austin Film Festival 2026’s official lineup announcement, with all opinions and analysis our own.
The Debut
December 11 - Jesse Eisenberg - Theaters
The Debut is the biggest release of the entire festival and the one we are endlessly excited for, with Jesse Eisenberg following A Real Pain by writing and directing a musical comedy about a shy New Jersey housewife who auditions for a community theater production and slowly loses her grip on everything as the role takes her over. Julianne Moore, who plays Mona, is already positioned as a likely Best Actress nominee and has been collecting festival honors since Telluride, while Paul Giamatti’s enigmatic director Jerry, the engine pushing her toward the edge, looks like another great performance in a career full of them. A24 has a genuine awards contender here, with Halle Bailey, Bernadette Peters and Eisenberg himself filling out the company, and the fact that it has already played Telluride, TIFF and San Sebastián and closed out London suggests the reception has held everywhere it has gone.
Bitter Christmas
November 25 - Pedro Almodóvar - Theaters
Pedro Almodóvar is one of the best directors working and has been for forty years, so Bitter Christmas is an automatic seat regardless of what it turns out to be, and the premise of a film about a film being written about the filmmaker’s own life sounds exactly as intriguing as it should. The structure splits across two timelines, with Bárbara Lennie’s Elsa hospitalized across a long weekend in 2004 working through her grief and her relationships, and Leonardo Sbaraglia’s celebrated filmmaker Raúl writing all of it as a screenplay in 2025 with Elsa standing in as his own alter ego. What turns it is his assistant objecting to how he has used a grieving friend’s storyline because it mirrors a real tragedy in her own life, which forces him into a new draft and puts the entire question of what a filmmaker is entitled to take from the people around him at the center of the movie. It premiered in competition at Cannes and has been working the circuit ever since with reactions split between brutal honesty and self-indulgence, which is a divide Almodóvar has been producing his entire career and usually the sign of something worth arguing about.
I Play Rocky
November 20 - Peter Farrelly - Theaters
I Play Rocky brings Peter Farrelly back with a biopic about the writing of Rocky itself, following an unknown Sylvester Stallone as he refuses to sell his script to anyone unwilling to let him play Balboa. It’s exactly the kind of underdog-behind-the-underdog story the Green Book director should be able to land. Anthony Ippolito takes on the young Stallone with a performance already rumored to make him an awards front-runner, and the fact that Farrelly is chasing another entry for his trophy case with this material makes it one of the more interesting swings on the slate. An ensemble running from Matt Dillon and Tracy Letts to AnnaSophia Robb and Stephan James gives it real depth around the lead, and Amazon MGM timing the release to mirror the original film’s November 1976 premiere suggests they know what they have.
A Long Winter
December 4 - Andrew Haigh - Theaters
Andrew Haigh has been critically successful at nearly every turn, and All of Us Strangers was enough to have us trusting him with absolutely any project he picks up next. A Long Winter adapts Colm Tóibín’s 2006 short story, with Fred Hechinger as Mike and Kit Connor as his younger brother leading alongside Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Caitríona Balfe as their parents, and both the storyline and André Turpin’s cinematography have us ready to buy in on sight. At 117 minutes, with TIFF Special Presentations and New York Film Festival Main Slate selections already behind it, this is one of our most anticipated films of the festival and the screening we would least want to miss.
The Stalemate
TBD - Nicholas Arioli - Theaters
The Stalemate is one of the real unknowns of the festival and the kind of world premiere that makes going to a place like Austin worth it, a comedy western from first-time feature director Nicholas Arioli built on a premise so simple it is almost a joke in itself: a robber and a sheriff run out of bullets miles from town and end up locked into an absurd, unending chase neither one can win or walk away from. That setup lives or dies entirely on the cast, and this one is stacked well beyond what a debut feature usually gets, with Ben Foster and Manny Jacinto at the center, alongside Fiona Shaw, Shea Whigham, Anthony Carrigan, Paul Sparks and Tony Hale. Arioli wrote it as well as directed it, which, in Austin of all places, is the right pedigree to show up with, and a film this contained has nowhere to hide if the script is not genuinely funny. We are going in with no reactions to work from, and that is exactly the appeal.
The Long Haul
TBD - David Drake - Theaters
The Long Haul has been gaining traction across multiple festivals since it opened Tribeca back in June, and Austin gives David Drake’s debut another audience to keep building on that run. Margo Martindale plays CJ, a woman who has spent her entire life behind the wheel of a semitruck and who gets a letter from the parole board that forces her to confront her past, her present and her future all at once. Reactions out of Tribeca have called the performance the best work of her career, which for an actress with this filmography is a genuinely enormous claim. Cole Sprouse plays an influencer trucker running alongside her, with Stephen Root, Yalitza Aparicio and Wes Studi filling in around them, and a film built on this much stillness depends on whether the lead can carry the quiet stretches. Drake wrote and directed it himself, which makes it exactly the kind of debut Austin exists to put in front of people.
Purgatory
TBD - Lindsay Lanzillotta - Theaters
Purgatory is a directorial debut from Lindsay Lanzillotta that sounds genuinely well written coming out of its TIFF Discovery premiere, an early-1980s coming-of-age comedy-drama following Beatrice as her life gets upended when her mother walks out on the family to go find herself and leaves Beatrice and her sister in their father’s care. Christine Speer’s script is the thing getting singled out, approaching a divorce from the specific vantage point of a kid who is old enough to understand exactly what is happening and far too young to do anything about it, which is a much harder register than most films in this lane bother attempting. Ruby McGurrin leads, with Abby Elliott and John Reynolds as the parents and J.K. Simmons turning up as Father Malone, which is the kind of casting that tells you where the comedy in this is going to come from. A first feature this specific about a time and a feeling is the reason we keep coming back to Austin.
Ray Gunn
December 18 - Brad Bird - Netflix
Ray Gunn is Brad Bird branching off from the studio that gave us Ratatouille and The Incredibles to make a genuine passion project, built on a script he and Matthew Robbins wrote back in 1996 that has spent almost thirty years waiting for someone to fund it. The premise alone makes this one of the coolest animated releases in years: a sci-fi noir set in Metropia in an alternate 1939, where a private eye named Raymond Gunn gets pulled into a case involving aliens, murder and a multimedia star. That’s not a pitch anyone else in American animation is making. Sam Rockwell, Scarlett Johansson and Tom Waits lead the voice cast, and the chance to see Bird operating with total creative control and no franchise obligations makes this an easy highlight of the festival.
Behemoth
December 4 - Tony Gilroy - Theaters
Behemoth! puts Tony Gilroy back in the director’s chair, with Pedro Pascal, one of the biggest names in the business, starring as Alex, a classically trained cellist who walks away from a Chicago orchestra to go west and record Hollywood film scores. The story is told nonlinearly, intercut with his childhood as a prodigy inside a musical family. Gilroy writing and directing again after everything he built on Andor is reason enough to show up, and the fact that a premise this specific is described in Austin Film Festival’s lineup announcement as “a thundering tribute to the power of music” suggests he is working at full strength rather than coasting. Olivia Wilde, Eva Victor, Hank Azaria and Will Arnett round out a deep supporting cast, and between its New York Film Festival Centerpiece slot, the early reactions and the imagery released so far, everything here points toward a critical hit across the board.
Bunker
TBD - Florian Zeller- Theaters
Bunker is Florian Zeller’s first film since The Father and The Son, and the pivot from dissecting families to building a psychological thriller is exactly the kind of move that makes this intriguing rather than predictable. Javier Bardem plays an award-winning architect who, seventeen years into a strained marriage, gets courted by an unnamed billionaire to design a luxury bunker. The project turns into a war between him and his wife and pulls the widening rich-poor divide right into their living room. Reuniting Bardem with Penélope Cruz is the obvious draw, with Stephen Graham, Paul Dano and Patrick Schwarzenegger in support, and the performances have already been singled out as the film’s strongest asset. Reactions out of Venice and TIFF have been mixed enough to suggest this may be Zeller playing it safer than in his first two films, but the premise and the pairing are more than enough to get us in the room.
Look Back
December 30 - Hirokazu Kore-eda - Theaters
Look Back is the new Hirokazu Kore-eda, and it looks magnificent, which is about all the justification anyone needs from the filmmaker who made Shoplifters and Still Walking. This is his live-action take on Tatsuki Fujimoto’s one-shot manga, following Fujino, a popular student drawing for her classmates, and Kyomoto, a shut-in whose natural talent Fujino initially resents, as the two girls bond over making manga together, and then tracing that friendship all the way into adulthood. Putting this material in Kore-eda’s hands is the most interesting pairing of the year, because nobody alive is better at the small resentments and quiet devotions that pass between people over long stretches of time, and this story lives entirely inside that. It premiered in competition at Venice and took five collateral awards before moving through TIFF and London, and we can’t wait to finally see it for ourselves.
Tender Loving Care
December 4 - Mike Leigh - Theaters
Tender Loving Care is the final film of Mike Leigh’s illustrious career, which he has confirmed himself, citing the physical toll of illness. From everything out of its festival run, it looks about as reflective as he has ever allowed himself to get as a director. Kate O’Flynn leads as Amy opposite Marion Bailey and Paul Jesson in an intergenerational family drama built around caregiving, which is the most Mike Leigh subject imaginable and the one he has spent fifty years quietly circling in everything from Secrets & Lies to Another Year. The reactions have been extraordinary, with the film taking the Golden Shell at San Sebastián alongside Best Screenplay and a Silver Shell for O’Flynn, and holding a perfect critical record since it premiered at Telluride. Getting to see the last picture from one of the great humanist filmmakers of his generation with a festival audience is not an opportunity that comes around twice.
Club Kid
November 6 - Jordan Firstman - Theaters
Club Kid was one of the biggest hits of Cannes and has since become one of the biggest titles A24 has in front of it right now, and after that trailer dropped, this directorial debut may genuinely rival The Debut as our most anticipated film of the festival. Jordan Firstman wrote, directed and stars as Peter, a washed-up underground party promoter whose life gets rearranged when he has to take in the ten-year-old son he never knew existed, with Cara Delevingne as his business partner and Diego Calva as the kid’s social worker. It took a seven-minute standing ovation in Un Certain Regard, picked up Caméra d’Or and Queer Palm nominations, and then set off a bidding war that A24 won at seventeen million dollars, which tells you exactly how the room responded to it. The reactions since have been glowing across the board, with the praise consistently landing on how loving and non-judgmental its portrait of queer party culture is rather than on the premise alone. A first feature arriving with this much buzz behind it is the easiest ticket of the week.
Minotaur
TBD - Andrey Zvyagintsev - Mubi
Minotaur sounds stress-inducing and has pulled rave reviews everywhere it has played, which makes it a great way to end our festival journey in Austin. Andrey Zvyagintsev returns with his first feature in years, loosely reworking Claude Chabrol’s The Unfaithful Wife and moving it to a provincial Russian town in 2022, where a business executive preparing to lay off his entire workforce discovers that his wife is having an affair. The wartime backdrop hangs over everything without the film ever needing to address it directly. This is the filmmaker behind Leviathan and Loveless, so the expectation is a slow, clinical and absolutely merciless examination of a marriage coming apart, and the early write-ups are using phrases like “disturbing intensity” and “masterful maze.” It took the Grand Prix at Cannes and the Sydney Film Prize before moving through Telluride and New York, and it has yet to receive a negative review, which is about as strong a finale as we could have asked for.
