There seemed to be two questions on everyone’s mind at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. The first was the same as ever at this festival or any other: “What have you seen?” This question is often academic because there aren’t many available tickets left to get by the time it’s asked – usually by a stranger in line for another film.
Nevertheless, people like to hear which films are getting buzz and which aren’t, not to mention what they should look for among the festival entries that will eventually trickle into some form of release. (Some films, like Love Me at Sundance Film Festival 2024, took a year to make it to theaters.) This is why one overhears snatches of conversation like “It’s amazing, you should check it out,” “I heard that was only so-so,” or “It’s like an alien sex horror thing.”
This year’s second question percolating is timelier: Where is Sundance moving to? This is the penultimate Sundance Film Festival to be held in Park City, Utah, as it has been every January since 1981. Legend has it that Sydney Pollack suggested the winter timing to Robert Redford, arguing that doing so would bring in Hollywood people looking to hit the slopes between screenings.
Now that Park City has become even more the playground of the wealthy—locals refer to one mountain as being “10-10-10” meaning all its homes are at least 10,000 square feet, cost $10 million minimum, and are only lived in 10 days a year—Sundance organizers are looking for a new home starting in 2027. The candidates have been narrowed down to Salt Lake City, Utah, Boulder, Colorado, and Cincinnati, Ohio. Attitudes about these choices can be summed up by the man who shouted out unprompted before a screening, “Not Cincinnati!” Relocating Sundance to Ohio might cut down the number of producers willing to fly east so soon after the holidays.
Wherever the Sundance Film Festival moves to, the fact remains that it will do so in a different landscape from when the festival started. These days, almost every American city you have heard of (and many you may not have, like Bentonville, Arkansas, and Columbia, Missouri) already has a film festival. Sundance has been where eager filmmakers, new and seasoned, tramp through the slush to gin up buzz for films that might otherwise fly below the radar while the industry obsesses over award season and looks forward to the summer box office. However, with streaming services tightening their belts and fewer distributors willing to take a chance on anything remotely risky, the landscape is less inviting than it used to be.
Sundance has been quiet this year, with only a few big film buys. Netflix snapped up Sing Sing, co-writer Clint Bentley’s adaptation of Denis Johnson’s novella Train Dreams, starring Joel Edgerton, Felicity Jones, and Kerry Condon. Neon grabbed Together, Michael Shanks’ body horror gross-out starring Alison Brie and Dave Franco, which reportedly had audiences climbing the walls. A24, already using the fest to launch 2025 titles like Mark Anthony Green’s Opus, picked up Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby, a slow-burn drama that seems less gimmicky or attention-grabbing work than their usual fare.
Questlove’s documentary Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius) was already set to stream on Hulu this February, so it didn’t need to be shown at Sundance. In between the lesser-known films people were taking a chance on, it’s nice for the festival organizers to toss in something like this rollicking and ruminative odyssey into the thrilling, tragic career of genre-shattering proto-funk psychedelia and disco pioneer Sly Stone.
Another fun offering was Andrew Ahn’s update of Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet, which Bleecker Street is releasing later this year. Largely unnecessary and all the better for it, the film has an unapologetically goofy 1990s vibe that mixes laughs and tears with gimmicky hijinks. It also shows that Joan Chen and Lily Gladstone are surprisingly as adept at comedy as they are at high drama.
Some worthy films came out of the festival without distribution. Ira Sachs’ Peter Hujar’s Day captivated people with its slow, intimate, and yet absolutely riveting style. It’s a minimalist documentary-like rendering of a recorded conversation from 1974 where writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall) interviewed scene-making photographer Hujar (Ben Whishaw) about what he did over one day. Experimental in form but deeply personal in execution, this is a big step up for the sometimes underwhelming Sachs.
Despite the presence of an A-list star, Bill Condon’s adaptation of the 1992 stage musical version of Kiss of the Spider Woman wowed few people, suggesting an audience insistence on quality even in the presence of fame. This Condon-scripted update of the story about two prisoners using fantasy to escape their grim reality in a junta-era Argentinian prison grabbed attention primarily for featuring Jennifer Lopez in the glam role of the Dolores Del Rio-like screen goddess. While Lopez handles the snazzily mounted dance numbers with aplomb, her acting is drearily perfunctory (fame not guaranteeing the ability to play a diva convincingly) in a film that mostly makes you miss Hector Babenco’s superior 1985 adaptation.
Max Walker-Silverman’s Rebuilding seems like it could find an audience somewhere based only on the appeal of watching Josh O’Connor (finally getting real attention now post-Challengers) play a stoic rancher who tries to put his life back together after a devastating fire. However, despite the impeccable work of O’Connor, its quiet pace and predictable story may keep it from garnering attention. The same could be said for Last Days, Justin Lin’s first film after leaving the Fast & Furious franchise. Despite a strong premise (a dramatization of the mysterious 2018 death of missionary John Allen Chau) and high-gloss production, Last Days fails to cohere or thrill.
The thin nature of the narrative offerings at Sundance Film Festival 2025 was signaled by subpar work getting attention. Hailey Gates’ Atropia is a jumbled 2006-set satire starring Alia Shawkat as an Iraqi-American actor working in a fake Iraqi town as part of an “immersive” war simulation. Though based in reality (the U.S. army has used such movie set-like places for training) and delivering a few laughs in the Catch-22 vein, this is an inert and underwritten film that somehow took home the Grand Jury Prize Dramatic.
Albert Birney’s OBEX is imperfect but still worthwhile. Part science fiction and part horror, this 1980s-set nightmare about an isolated computer artist who unexpectedly unleashes a demonic force has some of the same lo-fi grit of Andrew Bujalski’s Computer Chess (2013) but a highly original and vivid imagination that makes Birney a director to keep an eye on.
Far better is Amel Guellaty’s Where the Wind Comes From. Despite taking place in the shadow of Tunisia’s despotic regime, this road-trip comedy about a couple of slacker best friends (Eya Bellagha and Slim Baccar) looking for a way to escape their country’s limited opportunities is an unexpectedly warm-hearted and free-spirited romp. While the satire ranges in all directions, cutting down close-minded conservatism and the pretensions of the country’s seemingly more liberal upper classes, Where the Wind Comes From is as memorable for its sweet romanticism as its evocation of Arab Spring disappointments.
This edition of the Sundance Film Festival also presented a particularly strong slate of nonfiction films. David Borenstein’s Mr Nobody Against Putin (which won the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award) was a revelatory look at what Vladimir Putin’s increasingly authoritarian dictates look like on the ground in Russia. Edited from tapes smuggled out by teacher Pasha Talankin, the film shows both his love for the students in the polluted Ural Mountains mining town he calls home and his increasing discomfort with the “patriotic” education demands from Moscow. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the slow creep of nationalistic fascism it generates are rendered in highly personal terms by the wry and heroic Talankin.
Predators by David Osit (2020’s Mayor) presents a thoughtful unpacking of the legacy of the gotcha Dateline show To Catch a Predator. Not so much a takedown as a reexamination, Predators looks at the queasy blurring of news and entertainment, which the short-running but exceptionally popular show excelled in, and queries whether it did good or harm. While stopping short of calling for consideration of the sexual predators the show targeted with its on-camera sting operations, Osit does ask some uncomfortable and potentially unanswerable questions about the value of such titillating on-camera humiliations.
Even more gripping is The Perfect Neighbor. Winner of the U.S. Documentary Directing Award, Geeta Gandbhir’s film is a riveting reconstruction of an infamous Florida “Stand Your Ground” case that touches on everything from race to anti-social behavior to mental illness and access to firearms. Gandbhir uses an artfully edited stream of body camera footage to show how a typical “get off my lawn” neighborhood dispute too easily turns murderous. Almost unwatchable in its intensity, The Perfect Neighbor eschews talking heads, instead favoring illustrating the escalating conflict from multiple perspectives. Gandbhir presents a deeply tragic story without losing sight of the humanity of everyone involved.
There is a lot of grousing from many people at this year’s Sundance about the quality of the films on offer, which may be a fair critique; however, it is not clear that the answer is to have a blowout hit like the overpraised Little Miss Sunshine every year. The current issue with Sundance is not its location or whether there are fewer headline-grabbing $15 million distribution deals. Instead, it’s whether audiences will seek out the work presented by the filmmakers who trekked up to this overpriced sky town to find out if their hard work was worth it.