Sundance Film Festival (Park City, Utah)

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    Sundance Film Festival 2025: Standout Movies, Moments and Performances

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    The movies and performances most likely to make an impact in the year ahead, including an ode to 1970s New York and Josh O’Connor going full cowboy.Just as the Sundance Film Festival is in flux, likely soon to leave its longtime home of Park City, Utah, so too is the state of film — and indie film in particular. Yet the industry and its most ardent fans still came to the mountains for America’s most important event in independent cinema to schmooze, ski and see lots of movies, hoping to find this year’s “A Real Pain,” the breakout hit from last year’s slate. Sometimes it can feel like you’re wading through too much muddy snow to find the bright spots, and the 2025 festival, which ended on Sunday, definitely felt less shiny than in years past. But below are some standout moments that might influence the year ahead in culture.Eva Victor in “Sorry, Baby.”Mia Cioffi Henry/Courtesy of Sundance Institute1. One new name to know: Eva VictorThere’s a particular kind of Sundance movie that centers on a young woman who perseveres with wry humor and grit despite something terrible happening to her. Often, it takes place on a college campus. This year’s exemplar was “Sorry, Baby,” which was among the funniest, saddest and most exciting films of the week. Victor, 30, first found success in the Brooklyn comedy scene, but this is her feature directorial debut. She also wrote and stars in the tender project (alongside Naomi Ackie and Lucas Hedges).Rebecca Hall and Ben Whishaw in “Peter Hujar’s Day.”Courtesy of Ira Sachs2. Queer cinema is still ascendant (but still very male)Indie film has always been a genre through which teenagers who feel like outsiders learn to discover themselves, but this year’s roster felt especially crowded with L.G.T.B.Q. projects. Although the three with the most buzz were — for better or, mostly, for worse — about handsome white men: “Twinless,” in which two guys (one straight, one gay) meet in a bereavement group for people who’ve lost their siblings; “Plainclothes,” featuring Tom Blythe and Russell Tovey as a duo (one a closeted cop, one his target) grappling with temptation and intimacy; and “Peter Hujar’s Day,” Ira Sachs’s ode to 1970s-era New York, following the titular photographer (Ben Whishaw) as he narrates his quotidian schedule to his friend the writer Linda Rosencrantz (Rebecca Hall), based on Rosencrantz’s 2022 book of the same name.Josh O’Connor and Lily LaTorre in ”Rebuilding.”Jesse Hope/Courtesy of Sundance InstituteWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At Sundance Film Festival, a Sense of Uprooting Onscreen and Off

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      As it searches for a new home beyond Park City, Utah, the film festival showcases a neo-western, a promising comedic debut and two unsettling documentaries.If a festival can be summed up in one word, then the word for this year’s Sundance Film Festival is weird. That was the adjective that drifted through my mind as I circled in and out of screenings, chatted with other attendees and scanned local headlines. Weird could apply to some of the selections in the event, which ends Sunday. But it wasn’t so much the lineup that struck many of us, it was the festival, the pre-eminent American showcase for U.S. independent cinema and beyond. The vibe felt off, we murmured, the energy muted.For good reason, too. The fires in Los Angeles County were still burning when Sundance opened on Jan. 23. Park City, Utah, is a long way from the Hollywood sign, but Sundance and the mainstream industry have always been codependents, and when the mainstream feels unsettled, you can feel the anxiety in the air. Making matters worse is that the conflagration in California is just the latest crisis facing the movie world, which continues to grapple with the aftershocks of the pandemic and back-to-back strikes, along with its self-inflicted wounds.Adding to this Great Movieland Unsettlement is Sundance’s search for a new home. Last year, the festival announced that it was exploring alternatives to Park City, where it has been held for decades. Among the stated reasons is that the event has outgrown the resort town, which has a population of just over 8,200 and an infrastructure that remains ill-equipped to handle such a large annual inundation. Every year, tens of thousands of movie lovers swarm into Park City, straining resources and local patience. Now, after a search, Sundance has settled on three alternatives: Cincinnati; Boulder, Colo.; and Salt Lake City, where the festival already screens movies, with some events remaining in Park City.Questions about where Sundance will land percolated throughout this year’s event, which features the usual great and good, bad and blah selections. Among the standouts is Geeta Gandbhir’s documentary “The Perfect Neighbor,” which tracks how friction between a white woman and her multiracial neighbors in Florida turned progressively heated and then horrifyingly lethal. Consisting largely of imagery culled from police body cameras and interrogation interviews, it offers up a horrifying look at everyday racial animus and stand-your-ground laws. It also underscores, as the white woman makes one 911 call after another, that there’s nothing funny about the prejudices and pathologies of a so-called Karen.“The Alabama Solution,” a documentary by Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman, looks at the state’s notoriously deficient prison system.Sundance Institute, via Associated PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Sundance Film Festival Unveils a Lineup Heavy on Politics

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      The annual event also makes room for a remake of the musical “Kiss of the Spider Woman” and the return of Justin Lin.There is a point during every Sundance Film Festival, usually as movie fans are trudging through the cold, slushy snow in Park City, Utah, when they wonder, why do they hold this in January? And yet, so often current events — most often of the political nature — are reflected not only in the films being screened on the mountain but also in the happenings around town.In January 2009, huge crowds gathered to watch Barack Obama’s inauguration. In January 2017, 4,000 festivalgoers, including Charlize Theron, Kristen Stewart and Chelsea Handler, marched down Main Street the day after President Donald J. Trump’s inauguration. The following year, amid a considerable snowstorm, Jane Fonda, Gloria Allred and Tessa Thompson gathered protesters with fiery speeches to coincide with the one-year anniversary of his presidency.The 2025 edition of Sundance will debut on Jan. 23, three days after Trump is inaugurated a second time, and the Sundance lineup suggests politics are on the mind of this year’s filmmakers.In the five-part documentary series “Bucks County, USA,” Barry Levinson and Robert May take a close look at two 14-year-old girls, best friends despite their opposing political beliefs, living at the epicenter of the nation’s political divide.The documentarian Sam Feder was shooting in Washington as recently as last week for “Heightened Scrutiny,” about the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Chase Strangio and his battle before the Supreme Court for transgender rights.“The Librarians,” from Kim A. Snyder, tracks the efforts of workers in Texas, Florida and other states to protect democracy amid a wave of book bans, while “2000 Meters to Andriivka,” from Mstyslav Chernov (“20 Days in Mariupol”) follows a Ukrainian platoon on a mission to liberate a strategic village.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      For ‘Dinner in America,’ a Surprise Theatrical Run Is Dessert

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      The film became popular on TikTok two years after its quiet initial release. Now, it’s getting a second chance in movie theaters.On a recent weeknight at the IFC Center in Manhattan’s West Village, staff members corralled a 400-person crowd in and out of the doors while swarms circled the lead actors of the sold-out feature playing that night: “Dinner in America.” The film — an angsty rom-com that debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in 2020 but struggled to find distribution before being self-released in 2022 — has catapulted from crickets to cult status since going viral on TikTok in the past couple of months. Seizing on a rare encore, the filmmakers have rallied fans to support a shot at the theatrical run they never had.“You don’t get second chances in this business,” the film’s writer-director Adam Carter Rehmeier told the audience during a post-screening Q&A. The surprise comeback began around September when an inexplicable bump in TikTok’s algorithm turbo-blasted the movie and its earworm original song, “Watermelon.” Soon after, the film was trending across Hulu (where it is currently streaming), Letterboxd and Google. The Frida Cinema in Santa Ana, Calif., was one of the first theaters to announce a screening, selling out in less than 24 hours. The nonprofit cinema said the requests for “Dinner in America” were the most they’d received for any film.The plot follows the unlikely musical and sexual chemistry between Simon (Kyle Gallner) and Patty (Emily Skeggs). He’s an on-the-lam, slick crust punk; she’s a mousy 20-year-old whose parents keep her away from strobe lights and on five different medications. She finds refuge from bullies and suburban stupor by mailing Polaroid nudes and love poems to her favorite hardcore band’s ski-masked lead singer, who, coincidentally, is Simon.Emily Skeggs with Gallner in “Dinner in America.”Best and Final ReleasingWhen “Dinner in America” was released for a limited theatrical run, as well as on demand, in 2022, The New York Times gave it a mixed review. The critic Concepción de León wrote that the movie “delivers on surprise and explosiveness, but much of its offensive language, both racist and homophobic, feels gratuitous in a film that might have otherwise landed as an offbeat love story.”But content creators have been lifting up the film. The screenwriter Nic Curcio pitched the film to his TikTok followers as the “love child of ‘Napoleon Dynamite’ and Todd Solondz” after noticing the uptick beyond the usual MovieTok nerds. Those millions of viewers, he told The Times, are probably sitting alone in their rooms: “The screening elements bring this whole phenomenon full circle.” The film’s success on social media meant it wouldn’t have to wait decades to achieve an underground cachet.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Sundance Institute Announces Six Finalists for Its New Home

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      The organization, and its influential film festival, may stay in Park City, Utah, or move to another location like Atlanta or Cincinnati.The Sundance Institute announced on Friday that its search for a home has been narrowed to six finalists: Atlanta; Cincinnati; Boulder, Colo.; Louisville, Ky.; Santa Fe, N.M.; and its current locale, Park City, Utah, which would team up with the city down the mountain, Salt Lake City.Sundance, whose annual influential film festival has made the organization synonymous with the snowy mountain town of Park City for the past 40 years, announced in April that it was reviewing whether it should move when its current contract with the city ended after the 2026 event, which traditionally takes place in January. (The timing of the festival will remain the same no matter where it is held.)The 10-day event often pushes Park City to its limits, with snarled traffic and exorbitant rental prices.When evaluating the individual locations, Sundance said it focused on logistical concerns, infrastructure issues and a city’s commitment to artistic endeavors and its ability to capitalize on its local film community.“Each of these cities has a vibrant creative ecosystem, either expanding or established, and has enabled creativity to flourish in their cities through their support of the arts,” Eugene Hernandez, Sundance’s festival director and director of public programming, said in a statement.Sundance, which was founded by Robert Redford in 1981 and moved to Park City in 1985, continues to be the dominant festival for independent film. When Steven Soderbergh’s film “Sex, Lies and Videotape” debuted there in 1989, it was seen as a transformational moment for independent moviemakers. For the 2024 edition, the festival received a record number of submissions, over 17,000 from 153 countries. More

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      Theda Hammel’s Road to a Directorial Debut With ‘Stress Positions’

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      Theda Hammel is under no delusion that Covid is box-office gold.“I don’t think it’s going to draw people in, the idea of dwelling on that time,” she said last week at the Soho Grand Hotel in Manhattan, sipping an herbal tea on a leather couch. “But I think it has value as a little bit of a time capsule.”Later this month, her debut film, “Stress Positions,” an ensemble comedy that showed at Sundance, will ask audiences to return to the early days of the pandemic, a time that many people would rather forget.And what about the no-straight-people-in-her-entire-movie thing? Was that some sort of canny strategy?No, just a function of circumstance.“I don’t know any straight people,” Ms. Hammel, 36, said. “I don’t know any.”The film is largely set within the confines of a Brooklyn brownstone, where an anxious 30-something, played by the comedian John Early, tries to keep his potentially virus-carrying friends at bay as they clamor to meet his 19-year-old nephew, an injured Moroccan model he started caring for just as the world shut down.Masks dangle from chins, but the word “Covid” is uttered only once. That’s because Ms. Hammel is less interested in life during the pandemic than the way a certain set of bourgeois millennials responded to it. The preoccupation of her movie is privilege: the way it coddles, insulates, divides.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Young Filmmaker Lives His ‘Fairy Tale’ at Sundance

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      “I feel like I’m in a fairy tale,” Sean Wang said to the sold-out crowd gathered at the Ray Theater in Park City, Utah, last month for his Sundance Film Festival debut.Mr. Wang, a 29-year-old filmmaker, was dressed in a black suit and white Vans (a nod to his skateboarding roots). He grabbed his chest in a show of how fast his heart was beating as he introduced his film, “Didi.” It is a coming-of-age story about an angsty, insecure 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy trying to find his place in the world.“I’m just going to take a few seconds to take this all in,” he said before snapping a photograph of the audience. The warm crowd included Mr. Wang’s family and friends, the film’s cast and crew, and a handful of potential buyers who have the power to transform his station in life from aspiring filmmaker to bona fide Hollywood director.It has happened before. Luminaries like Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino, Damien Chazelle, Ava DuVernay and Lulu Wang all went from hopeful dreamers to actual filmmakers in part thanks to the Sundance Film Festival, which just concluded its 40th year.Mr. Wang made a series of short films while working on and off for Google Creative Labs.Mr. Wang has mined aspects of his childhood in much of his work.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Which Sundance 2024 Movies Will Make It to Next Year’s Oscars?

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      A Jesse Eisenberg-Kieran Culkin film, along with performances by Saoirse Ronan and André Holland, may be on the ballot next year.We’ve only just gotten this year’s Oscar nominations, but is it already time to begin looking ahead to next season?I can sense you bristling, and I understand. “Kyle, no,” you’ve just muttered, because we’re on a first-name basis now and you’re still mired in dinner-party discourse over whether the snub of Greta Gerwig in the best-director race is an extinction-level event.I hear your concerns, and I share them. But even as we continue to sift through the wreckage and tea leaves following this season’s Oscar nominations, I’ve just come back from snowy Park City, Utah, where the 40th edition of the Sundance Film Festival debuted a full slate of new movies that could give shape to next year’s awards race. Make no mistake, trophy-related considerations can affect these films’ fortunes even at this early date: I’ve already heard that one terrific Sundance indie has had trouble selling because of concerns that its lead would be unavailable for a full-blown press tour next awards season.Could any of these films follow best-picture nominee “Past Lives,” which premiered at Sundance last January, or even “CODA” (2021), the first Sundance movie to win the top Oscar?The likeliest film to factor into next year’s race is “A Real Pain,” a dramedy starring Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin as mismatched cousins who embark on a road trip through Poland to better understand the personal history of their late grandmother, a Holocaust survivor. Eisenberg, who also wrote and directed the film, plays the by-the-book cousin and generously hands the flashy, sure-to-be-nominated role to Culkin: His cousin is a charismatic hot mess, and the Emmy-winning “Succession” actor zigs and zags through every scene like a freewheeling live wire.Searchlight bought “A Real Pain” for $10 million, and I could see it making a deep run into awards season. Pronounced a “knockout” by our critic Manohla Dargis, it’s the kind of thematically resonant, culturally specific comedy that voters often respond to. Most of all, I think movie folks will be eager to welcome Culkin into their club: They were just as obsessed with “Succession” as their TV brethren, and it’s finally their turn to shower the 41-year-old with awards attention.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Sundance Documentaries: ‘Eternal You,’ ‘Ibelin’ and More

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      Festival documentaries ranged across the genre map, but several explored the lengths we’ll go to communicate with lost loved ones.Everyone from the academy to streaming services splits cinema into two buckets: movies (comedy, romance, horror, whatever) and documentaries, lumped into one unholy pile. Besides being obviously reductive, the division is false: Nonfiction movies can be comedies or romances or horror or any other genre, and they can create new indescribable genres, too. But American audiences still tend to be fed documentaries of only a few types: true crime stories, cult exposés, hagiographies, and educational disquisitions full of talking heads.There’s more than that to nonfiction. And though plenty of star-driven, lightweight biographies show up at Sundance — famous folk on the carpet create much-needed social-media attention — there’s a lot of other nonfiction on offer, some of which will make its way to theaters and streaming services over the next year or two. A couple of lucky films may even eventually make their way into Oscar contention.Documentaries at this year’s Sundance, which concluded Sunday, ranged across the genre map, often playfully mixing up conventions. But it was striking how often a particular thread kept popping up: the human longing to communicate with the dead, and the lengths — technological and otherwise — to which we’ll go to make it happen.That was the theme of “Love Machina” and “Eternal You,” which feel picked by the programmers to complement one another. “Love Machina” (directed by Peter Sillen) is a romance looking at the efforts of the married couple Martine and Bina Rothblatt to create a robotic replica of Bina, powered by artificial intelligence and an extensive database of her thoughts, speech and emotions, that can communicate with her descendants when she is gone. “Eternal You” (directed by Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck) takes a broader, more analytical look at the burgeoning market for “afterlife technology” designed to do what the Rothblatts hope to accomplish: let people communicate with their loved ones after death using A.I. If that sounds like a “Black Mirror” episode, you’re right — and some “Eternal You” participants note the humanity-altering danger in this quest.In “Love Machina,” the robotic likeness of a woman is part of an effect to communicate with her descendants after she’s gone.Peter Sillen, via Sundance InstituteYet, as the eminent sociologist Sherry Turkle points out onscreen, what we see in these efforts is A.I. offering what religion once did: a sense of an afterlife, a quest for meaning, the feeling of connecting to transcendence. One of the festival’s best documentaries, the sociological portrait “Look Into My Eyes,” taps into this same longing from a more mystical direction. Directed by Lana Wilson, the film drops audiences into the lives of several New York City psychics. The clients are hoping to communicate with the beloved dead through a literal rather than technological medium. (One participant helps people communicate with their pets, some of whom are still living.) But the focus is on the psychics themselves, the reasons they’ve come to their work, and what they believe they’re actually doing in their sessions — and the film is marvelously nuanced and fascinating in its examination. Is this performance? Is it “real”? And if it brings peace to the living, does it matter?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More