10 Hotly Anticipated SXSW Movies You Need To See In 2014

9. Boyhood

Indie darling and Austin native Richard Linklater is certainly no stranger to the festival scene: he is such a SXSW staple that there is a documentary playing this year called Double Play, which exclusively deals with his friendship with accomplished documentary filmmaker James Benning. The director has had a long and storied journey, from working on an oil rig to founding the Austin Film Society to having his screenplays for Before Sunset and Before Sunrise nominated for Academy Awards. Throughout his career, Linklater has made a variety of successful films and made them on his own terms. It should come as no surprise then that a filmmaker who's interested in the long tail would chose to make a movie like Boyhood, a dramatization of the life of a young man named Mason, from the ages of 5 to 18, which actually took 12 years to make. The film stars all the same actors (including Patricia Arquette and long-time collaborator Ethan Hawke) playing fictional characters that grow and change with the film, and it is apparently as spell-binding and heartfelt as it sounds. Critics have so far unanimously loved it, and Linklater continues to prove - as he did with films like Slacker, Waking Life, and Bernie - that he's an artist who is not afraid to push the limits of narrative filmmaking.