There is something fitting about seeing Joe Swanberg back at SXSW with a full-length feature. For a certain generation of American independent film, Swanberg was one of the defining architects of a loose, intimate, improvisation-driven style that would eventually get folded into the ever-clumsy label of mumblecore.

I Love Boosters opened the 2026 SXSW Film & TV Festival with its world premiere at the Paramount Theatre, and it felt exactly like the kind of film you would want to launch a festival with: loud, unruly, politically charged, funny, abrasive, beautifully designed, and impossible to confuse with anyone else’s work.

Certain films are built for a packed theatre, and Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is absolutely one of them. I caught the film at its SXSW premiere at the Paramount Theatre, where it played as a Headliner screening, and it felt like one of the marquee crowd events of the festival.