Questions about the future hung in the frigid January air last week at Park City, Utah, during the 2025 Sundance Film Festival (which ended over the weekend). There was the usual hand-wringing about a lack of commercially minded movies on the slate, and a dearth of big sales. And there were more existential questions as well. Would the festival continue to be held in Park City at all? The nonprofit institute that has organized this starry event in this small mountain town had declared that it was looking at alternative locations to ease congestion and crowding. The contender cities? Salt Lake City, Boulder, Colorado, and Cincinnati. That shortlist provided constant fodder for conversation, and threatened to overwhelm the typical amiable pre-screening chatter about the actual program of films. Despite all the angst, Lisa Wong Macabasco and I found a handful of arresting indie movies to recommend. Here were our 7 favorites—which are all likely to emerge in theaters or on a streamer later this year. —Taylor Antrim
Writer-director Max Walker-Silverman’s second feature Rebuilding is a small-scale film with an overwhelming effect–a beautiful, excruciatingly moving story about a Colorado ranch owner named Dusty, played by Josh O’Connor, who loses his property to wildfire (a painfully timely subject). Rebuilding is about the aftermath of disaster as Dusty fumbles for a sense of himself without his cattle, his ranch, his home. He’s living in a FEMA-provided trailer and working on a highway crew. Should he be a full-time father now? His ex-wife Ruby (Meghann Fahy) and young daughter Callie-Rose live nearby, and Callie-Rose (Lily LaTorre) yearns in her own cautious way for a connection. Or is he going to take flight to Montana and pickup work as a cowboy? O’Connor carries the movie with gentle, earthbound affect—he’s never been so good. And the humaneness of the movie–its consideration for all its characters, especially Dusty’s mobile-home neighbors also made homeless by fire—wraps you with a sense of hard-won hope. —TA
Rose Byrne is a frightening revelation in this spiraling, hyper-anxious-making story of a mother going through a nervous breakdown. Writer-director Mary Bronstein’s Montauk-set film was one of the buzziest movies at Sundance, and for good reason: It’s not an easy movie to sit through, placing the viewer at claustrophobic proximity to Byrne’s Linda, a therapist with a young daughter with a mysterious eating disorder, who is struggling to retain her grip. While Linda’s husband is out of town, a catastrophic leak in her home forces Linda and her daughter to take refuge in a hotel. The film burrows into Linda’s anxiety during this period: that the house will never get fixed, that her daughter (who we barely see; the camera remains resolutely on Byrne) won’t gain back critical weight, that she was never meant to be a mother in the first place. Linda lashes out at everyone, a bottomless pit of emotional need, and takes refuge in drugs and alcohol. Does that all sound punishing? If I Had Legs I'd Kick You is a gripping experience, and a casting revelation: Byrne, is incandescent with pain and anger, but also Conan O’Brien plays her drolly deadpan therapist and colleague, and A$AP Rocky is her amiable neighbor and drug enabler at the hotel. —TA
The predatory aspects of 21st-century fandom get a brilliant treatment in Lurker, a creepy, gripping debut from filmmaker Alex Russell, a writer on Dave, The Bear, and Beef. The object of obsession here is pop star Oliver, played convincingly by Archie Madekwe (Oliver’s pop-electro-RnB feels totally of the moment), a young UK-to-LA transplant who surrounds himself with an entourage of childhood friends and his manager and a documentarian as his music career starts to take off. Into his tight circle comes Matthew (Théodore Pellerin, revelatory), a store clerk turned amateur filmmaker who Oliver decides, fleetingly, is cool. Matthew has secrets—he lives with his mom and reveres Oliver’s music—but he convinces Oliver he’s a neophyte, and a striving creative like him, and a mutual bond is forged. Matthew will inevitably be cast out of Oliver’s circle–Oliver is fickle and insecure and sets his cohort against each other. The way Matthew manipulates his way back inside, and reveals his bottomless need for attention and connection, is what makes this movie so riveting and disquieting. —TA
The source material for Train Dreams–a lovely grief-stricken portrait of early twentieth-century Northwestern American logging country by filmmaker Clint Bentley–is a novella by the late Denis Johnson—one of his prettier, later, off-hand works. It has made for a stunningly beautiful movie with another brilliant performance by the chameleonic Australian actor Joel Edgerton. Here he’s as good as I’ve ever seen him (which is saying a lot) as Robert Grainier, a loner and hard worker who falls in love with Gladys (Felicity Jones) and makes a life for himself and their young daughter in a log cabin in Idaho. When tragedy strikes, the film shifts into a chronicle of endurance, of solitude and grief. If that all sounds…slow, the cinematography and the sheer expressive power of Edgerton's craggy face carry you through the film's gentler moments. It ends with a powerful sense of how the sheer weight of time can bring a measure of grace. (Train Dreams was acquired by Netflix with a release date to be announced.) —TA
David Osit’s Predators is a provocative, riveting, and, at times, shocking dissection of the early-aughts TV phenomenon To Catch a Predator and the legacy of vigilante entertainment it helped spawn. The hit Dateline NBC candid-camera series lured sex offenders to a film set, where host Chris Hansen interviewed them and police waited outside to arrest them on camera. It’s no small feat to critique a production that the vast majority of viewers believe to be on the side of moral righteousness, but Osit successfully manages to cast everything, even his own complicity behind the camera, with ambiguity. It’s no doubt uncomfortable to have one’s moral certitude be shaken or to be dislodged from a seat of judgment, especially in our era of outrage, but together with Geeta Gandbhir’s gripping The Perfect Neighbor and Charlie Shackleton’s Zodiac Killer Project (all three among the best documentaries at Sundance this year), this feels like a turning point in the true-crime industry that’s dominated entertainment for the past decade.—Lisa Wong Macabasco
From Hal & Harper, Rebuilding, and Twinless to Omaha, Train Dreams, and The Thing With Feathers, grief was a major theme at Sundance this year—whether the result of a raft of projects made post-pandemic or just a measure of what feels like a now constant state of mourning humanity. Yet nothing handled grief with as much deftness and freshness as Sorry, Baby, the staggering debut by writer-director-star Eva Victor (who won the festival’s US dramatic screenwriting award). By turns extremely funny and gaspingly devastating, the perfectly calibrated film strikes surprising notes of humor and warmth amid the aftermath of a horrible incident at a bucolic New England college town. The performances are superb, from Naomi Ackie as the unwaveringly supportive best friend to the always impressive Lucas Hedges, and Victor is one of the few directors in competition this year with the acting chops to play a convincing lead. And it’s concise where many films at the festival could have used more vigorous editing; the journey of a pair of heavy boots reveals more—elegantly, succinctly, heartbreakingly—than any exposition could. I can’t wait to watch it again when it’s released by A24 (which acquired it on the final day of the festival).—LWM
Although people referred to it as the “Carey Mulligan film” around Park City, this low-key charmer is buoyed by the irresistibly funny performance of comedian Tim Key and the indie-folk songs by Tom Basden. The longtime British collaborators both wrote and star in this endearing tale, based on their 2007 short film, of an eccentric (Key) on a remote island who arranges a reunion of his favorite 2000s duo (Mulligan and Basden), now long estranged. Key just about toes the line on the right side of The Office’s oblivious chatterbox Michael Scott, and aside from some predictable developments, the film thankfully never tips into full saccharine or sentimental. How far heartwarming, music-filled indie crowdpleasers can go in today’s market remains an open question. For example, I loved John Carney’s Flora and Son, which strikes similar chords, when I saw it at this festival two years ago; Apple Original Films bought it for $20 million(!) before releasing it in a limited run to a muted response that fall. But if it’s any indication, Wallis Island garnered the biggest standing ovation (in the largest theater) that I witnessed at Sundance and was a runner-up for the festival-favorite award; I’ll certainly be rooting for it.—LWM
