Amid the hotly anticipated premieres and snowy ski slopes, the 2025 Sundance Film Festival grappled with a feeling of uncertainty. Following the horrific LA fires, this year’s edition had a more understandably muted atmosphere as Hollywood continues to contend with the devastating aftermath. Online premiere leaks threatened the festival’s robust virtual platform, which offers global viewing opportunities to cinema fans with limited means and accessibility barriers. And, the ongoing question of the beloved independent festival’s new home, after more than 40 years of setting up shop in Park City, Utah, brings with it even more existential qualms.

As our team on the ground hit the Sundance streets to speak to artists including John Malkovich, Ayo Edebiri, Logan Lerman, Rachel Sennott, Andrew Ahn and Conan O’Brien, our conversations highlighted the enduring importance of independent stories and giving them a chance to commune firsthand with audiences. “This is such an unusual film, and it wouldn’t belong anywhere else than in a location like this, where you have so many people who are open-minded,” actor Sarah Goldberg told us on the red carpet for her idiosyncratic comedy Bubble & Squeak. “I feel like movies like this really need the . They need a big screen and a chance to celebrate and come together with community to talk about it.”

At the festival this year with the episodic series Hal & Harper, Sundance darling Cooper Raiff echoed Goldberg’s sentiments on how vital that word of mouth can be for a fledgling project. “To be a TV show, it’s really scary because there’s not a lot of TV buyers here. I don’t know if there are any here,” he explained to Letterboxd. “I’ve been trying to just tell people to make as much noise as possible, so that we can end up in front of an audience instead of on YouTube.”

On the awards front, Atropia, Seeds, Cactus Pears (साबर बोंडं) and Cutting Through Rocks (اوزاک یوللار) took home the Grand Jury Prizes (find the full list of winners here). Ahead of the queer Marathi-language film’s big win, we snagged Cactus Pears director and Letterboxd member Rohan Kanawade’s four favorites, featured below alongside fellow filmmakers making their feature debut at the festival. Plus, in an evergreen testament to cinema’s power to foster community in the most unexpected of ways, Zodiac Killer Project’s Charlie Shackleton, winner of the NEXT Innovator Award, gave us the scoop on how his 607-minute protest film Paint Drying became a Letterboxd hub for personal reflections—despite never being publicly screened.

All That’s Left of You (اللي باقي منك)

Written and directed by Cherien Dabis

Bleak, devastating, yet coursing with a defiant and riveting hope, there isn’t a historical epic like Cherien Dabis’ generations-spanning All That’s Left of You. A film that grows more prescient by the day, it tells the story of Palestinian suffering under Israeli occupation across several distinct periods: 1948, 1978, 1988, and 2022. As Dabis traces one family over time, it becomes a harrowing audit of Israel’s violence towards Palestinian people.

reviews out of the festival have cited that it’s difficult to hold back tears while observing not only the scale but also the depth of brutality. While All That’s Left of You doesn’t shy away from the horrors of relentless bombing and forceful expulsion, it also depicts how Israeli occupation causes relational violence and division among Palestinians. Akash believes that the film “understands how intimate moments can fracture and build towards the grand, historical epic,” while other have noted that, like films such as No Other Land and From Ground Zero, Dabis’ picture needs to be seen repeatedly and imminently. “Please please please someone distribute this film,” Isra asks, while Sophie writes that the film is “required viewing and also best picture.”

Matt shares that it remains “poetic without being over[wrought], dark without lacking beauty.” Indeed, as one of the film’s most powerful lines reminds us, humanity is resistance, and All That’s Left of You is determined to celebrate the Palestinian people in all of their multifaceted glory. ZL

As journalist Shayla (Shaunette Renée Wilson) notes the sensations and reflections of engers onboard the Osiris, breaking news segments about the “British monarchy’s collapse” are spliced into the form, alongside videos of pedestrian four-wheeler tricks, reenactments of W.E.B DuBois’ and Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti’s political contributions, Ron Funches’ stand-up on Black tuba players, SZA’s music, and reflections from Fred Moten and Saidiya Hartman on Black futures. Ambitious and dense in its scope, BLKNWS manages to never bloat. It unspools itself with an elusive ease and ethnographic elegance—no mean feat, considering the impressive editing renders the project some parts documentary, some parts narrative, some parts video installation. AT

Cactus Pears (साबर बोंडं)

Written and directed by Rohan Kanawade

Homegoing stories are intrinsically about death and life. Rohan Kanawande keenly articulates and enshrines this sentiment in his lilting semi-autobiographical debut feature, which won Sundance’s World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic. Cactus Pears approaches first with its prickly exterior about complex family reunions and death rituals, only to reveal a softer, fleshy nectar and pastoral-set sensual romance at its core. 

When Anand (Bhushaan Manoj) leaves Mumbai for his hometown in the Western Indian countryside, he intends to stay just two of the ten days required for his late father’s funeral rituals. Work and metropolitan life demand his attention and the longer he stays in the countryside, the longer he and his mother Suman (Jayshri Jagtap) must field tricky community questions about Anand’s singledom and sexuality. With time, Anand surrenders, choosing to stay for the duration of the ritual which demands he not wash his hair, not drink dairy, sit upon the Earth and receive a deluge of visiting mourners. Vestiges of the past find Anand and Suman as those days , the most seismic of them coming in the form of Balya (Suraaj Suman), Anand’s boyhood lover who never left their town.

The film thrives in the geometric orchestration of bodies in the frame, the simple but not simplistic camera work which lingers on each scene like the formidable quiet after death. Above all, Kanawande visualizes a sliver of queer sensuality that I seldom see celebrated in movies: the ways an interpersonal alchemy can form in the corners of honest conversations, and in pockets of time spent caressing beneath shaded trees. As Jahan writes, Cactus Pears is “a stunner of aching, exquisite tenderness—punctuated with images of startling, naked intimacy that took my breath away.” AT

The film takes a deep dive into Peltier’s story, with extensive use of archival footage retracing his journey from the 1970s as an Indigenous activist to an FBI fugitive on the run (aided and abetted by Marlon Brando, no less) to a modern-day folk hero in prison now in his 50th year. There is extensive use of an interview with Peltier for the 1970s section, but no current interview (the federal prison banned press with Peltier in 1979). With Peltier heading back to his community for home detention, filmmakers may now be able to get the contemporary conversation they always wanted. Sometimes documentaries need to be reframed as the world changes around them—this is both the dilemma and opportunity ahead for the filmmakers; I can’t wait to see this film’s next iteration as reality overtakes history. LK

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

Written and directed by Mary Bronstein

An Uncut Gems-style nightmare colliding with Montauk mundanity, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’s relentless portrait of an unraveling mother plays out as if someone were trying—and failing—to curtail a scream with diaphragmatic breathing exercises. It’s been more than fifteen years since filmmaker Mary Bronstein co-starred alongside Greta Gerwig and the Safdie brothers in her microbudget Yeast, which zeroed in on the toxic, codependent friendships of three twenty-something women through oppressive close-ups. Produced by Josh Safdie, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a corrosively funny and intermittently surreal follow-up that diverges from Bronstein’s debut’s mumblecore but cultivates a similar claustrophobia, magnifying every furrow of a career-best Rose Byrne grasping for a foothold.

No dice. Byrne’s therapist Linda is already teetering when her apartment floods, and the gaping hole in her ceiling pushes her beyond the brink as she navigates her young daughter’s mysterious illness, her absentee husband and an antagonistic relationship with her own therapist (Conan O’Brien). “The way Rose Byrne was able to just show exactly what it looks/feels like when you’re not sleeping and are so tired you can’t keep your eyes open but have to keep doing things was just so visceral,” exalts Kale. For nearly the entire runtime, her unnamed child remains out of frame, instead existing more as a disembodied high-pitched manifestation of Linda’s guilt that she just might not be cut out for motherhood. In a four-star review echoed by Robert, Jeff and Letterboxd’s Ella Kemp, Itsjustajoe declares, “I never want to watch this movie ever again.” Part of me concurs, but part of me just can’t wait to see Byrne wage war against a parking attendant again. AL

When pedestrian retail worker Matty (Théodore Pellerin) has a chance encounter with rising music star Oliver (Archie Madekwe), Matty cues up Nile Rodgers’ ‘I Want Your Love.’ Oliver’s ears perk up and daps are exchanged. Matty has ed a vibe check of sorts and gets an invite to hang out at Oliver’s concert with his posse, including manager Shai (Havana Rose Liu) and Sweet, portrayed with debonair by actor, rapper and DJ Zack Fox. As Matty clings tighter to Oliver’s world, ultimately taking up housekeeping, video editing and documentary projects to strain for relevancy and belonging, the insecurity at the heart of Matty’s motives rise to the surface in ways that prove destructive for himself, co-worker Jamie (Sunny Suljic), and those around them. Lurker manages to be a movie about a musician with bumpable original music that subverts the power dynamics of the obsession character study, with titillating sexual subtext and toxic reciprocity.

As James writes, Russell “takes a familiar story but updates it for our current state of cultural decay and decline where followers and ‘likes’ and an artist/entertainer/influencer’s ‘brand’ and ‘image’ matter more than any kind of emotional authenticity or artistic truth.” AT

The Perfect Neighbor

Written and directed by Geeta Gandbhir

The winner of this year’s Directing Award: US Documentary, Geeta Gandbhir’s piercing The Perfect Neighbor comprises almost entirely of police bodycam footage taken over an unspecified period in a community in Florida as a neighborhood dispute escalates with fatal consequences. Through a pristinely edited examination of one particular case, Gandbhir builds an urgent chronicle of the consequences of Florida’s “stand your ground” law, which protects citizens from prosecution for homicide if they have demonstrable proof that they believed a person was in imminent danger of bodily harm or death. In sum, one can escape homicide charges if they can prove to have used deadly force to prevent the commission of a felony.

The legalese may sound dull, yet The Perfect Neighbor is anything but: an infuriating portrayal of the monster next door that Zachary says is “impossible to ignore and vitally important to understand.” Many Letterboxd detail the intense outrage they felt after watching the film, praising Gandbhir’s ability to navigate the murky path between anger and fear without pandering to the cheap sensationalism that has plagued the true-crime documentary subgenre over the past decade. Chris points out how there is something “innately terrifying” about bodycam footage, “even more so when it’s capturing the type of quiet evil that festers on American soil,” while Brad astutely dubs the film a found-footage horror documentary. Go into it wary of the story’s terrors, but, please, do not let it keep you from facing it. RSR

Osit speaks to those who worked on the show, but also to folks spurred on to take matters into their own hands (To Catch a Predator was, surprisingly, only on air for three years). Are they doing a public service, or are they becoming really good TV presenters? “An incisive look at what happens when justice and entertainment get their incentives intertwined,” David summarizes. Formally bold and emotionally delicate, Predators inspires meaningful, conflicting questions on the ethics and responsibility of it all, maybe introducing the very concept of rehabilitation to those who need it. Chris sums it up for me: “One of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen. Also made me want to crawl out of my skin on more than one occasion.” EK

Prime Minister

Directed by Michelle Walshe and Lindsay Utz

“Wait, so having an articulate, intelligent, principled, comionate, human person for a national leader is an option?” Coscarson asks after watching Prime Minister, a sentiment that hit me as well in the conventionally made but no less invigorating portrait of New Zealand’s former political leader Jacinda Ardern. I can’t imagine a time in history where her time as prime minister wouldn’t be studied as an anomaly—a breath of fresh air or hopelessly optimistic fluke, depending on how you want to look at it—but it feels particularly good to tap out of the world and watch this right now.

Prime Minister, almost entirely filmed by Ardern’s partner Clarke Gayford, goes closer than other tell-all docs might do—it’s the kind of incredible journey you would want to document if your nearest and dearest was thrust into a position of power and governed a country while pregnant, then breastfeeding, then leading your nation through an unprecedented global pandemic and countless societal crises. Whether you were making a movie or not.

While mapping Ardern’s time from 2017 to 2023, countless Letterboxd reviews mention inevitable comparisons and conversations in light of other elections around the world, in a time of great uncertainty and political precariousness. “Exhibit A for why we need more strong, smart women in power positions,” Tami says. Dan adds: “I’m just sitting here crying watching a government govern.” A moment of history to study, a green shot of hope to keep believing in. EK

Our Sundance crew caught Frett’s four faves on the ground, during which he also shared how he uses Letterboxd as a teaching tool for his students. It’s fitting that the director uses our platform as a way to cultivate community—itself one of Ricky’s most powerful themes. No matter how much time has been stolen from you, the right relationships and people will always be there to help restore. As Steve muses, the film “highlights how reliant someone in Ricky’s situation is on humanity and his community. His relationships and how he navigates them are the life force of the entire movie.” ZL

Sorry, Baby

Written and directed by Eva Victor

The writing in Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby won her the Waldo Salt screenwriting award at Sundance, and her voice is indeed sharp and withering and brilliant. Agnes (Victor) is a grad student in English literature at a small New England college who has just completed her thesis when a traumatic event (the film just refers to it as “the bad thing”) happens to her. She lives in her head, and so she observes the effects of that trauma with the same hyper-intelligent, slightly exasperated detachment with which she approaches life in general.

“Agnes embodies a feeling of constant doom, but she never loses her joy—that’s the difference between Sorry, Baby and other films that fail to come correct to this delicate subject matter,” Dylan writes. “Eva Victor understands that even in the worst moments of our lives, and in the aftershocks, we are still us.” Her specificity of voice enables the mastery of tone cited in multiple Letterboxd reviews of the movie: Ema notes that she’s “always in control… even when it shifts from funny to heartbreaking.”

But the writing isn’t the only thing worth praising in this drama. Victor, of course, feels real and natural in her role—she wrote it (with Barry Jenkins’ PASTEL producing). But Naomi Ackie also slides into her part as Agnes’s best friend and roommate Lydie like a pair of old jeans, pointing towards Victor’s skill as a director as well.

The official description for Sorry, Baby is vague, but it should be noted that this film is about the sensitive subject of sexual assault. Don’t let that keep you away if you’re a survivor, however: This is a special film, empathetic and understanding and so relatable and funny. “Can’t write about this one without choking on my own experiences with the subject matter. What I can write is this: Sorry, Baby nails it,” Claira confirms. KR

Based on Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella of the same name, Train Dreams gives Joel Edgerton his finest role in years as logger Robert Grainier, mapping the ing time of his life and the ways he drifts through, and what he can hold on to in that period. William H. Macy, Felicity Jones and Kerry Condon all provide beautiful ing performances, speaking to the tiny details in those we meet, and love, that make up a lifetime. JustinePicasso sums it up well: “a very reflective and bittersweet film that just reminds you to appreciate life despite all the bad things. Live and love deeply, y’all.” EK

Two Women (Deux femmes en or)

Directed by Chloé Robichaud, written by Catherine Léger from the 1970 film Two Women in Gold

There comes a point in many a film festival where it does not matter if the next emotionally devastating feature in my schedule is destined to be my favorite movie of the year; my body simply demands an easygoing comedy. Amid my fatigue, I found exactly the balm I needed in Two Women, an airy romp that scooped up a Special Jury Award for Writing for its refreshing frankness on complicated women and their desires. (Babygirl acolytes, come get your milk!) That Catherine Léger’s screenplay is such a highlight will come as no surprise to my fellow devotees of Slut in a Good Way, a black-and-white underseen gem about teenage sexuality that goes down like a Québécois answer to Easy A.

The deux femmes in question here are Florence (Karine Gonthier-Hyndman) and Violette (Laurence Leboeuf), two Montreal next-door neighbors who bond over their sexually stale relationships before, as Celly puts it, “getting handsy with their handymen.” Violette’s husband is having his own affair, while Florence’s long-term partner simply observes “our relationship works best when one of us is on antidepressants” the minute that she goes off her meds. Léger and director Chloé Robichaud delight in letting such cringeworthy conversations drag out, finding off-kilter humor in the mess. “No surprises that I loved this French-language film about complicated people living their lives and talking to each other and feeling things and being silly,” shares Hayden, while Bruh_it_knee teases: “Watching a hot bitch with bleached eyebrows, unbothered in a floatie, deliver the most ego-shattering lines to a mid man… that is peak cinema.” AL

We do see that happen, in excruciating detail. But the tiny lakes of blood pooling in Elvira’s severed digits aren’t the most horrific sight in this film: that luxury is saved for a series of lengthy, unblinking depictions of primitive plastic-surgery techniques, made even more stomach-churning by their historical accuracy. The body horror and pain-is-beauty theme led many Letterboxd to compare The Ugly Stepsister to The Substance, with Mashable’s Kristy Puchko throwing Wicked into the mix as well. I’ll add Dario Argento’s Opera and a gross-out Hong Kong horror flick like 1981’s The Boxer’s Omen, just to hint at two of the movie’s more triggering scenes.

There’s more going on here than just shock value, though. The production design is beautiful and lavish, and Skar-Myren gives her all in a physically challenging role. Even better, “this film does not shy away from the evils of the patriarchy,” as Hyrum writes. “To be a fan of fairy-tales is to be a fan of horror and it’s about time someone made a film that gets that,” Megan adds. “Emilie Blichfeld’s feature debut is as grotesque, hilarious, and enchanting as the Grimm brothers would have wanted.” A happy ending for all. KR

The Virgin of the Quarry Lake (La virgen de la tosquera)

Directed by Laura Casabé, written by Benjamín Naishtat

In a year in which Sundance was filled with urgent documentaries on the very real horrors of our crumbling society, Laura Casabé’s thrilling coming-of-ager felt like a welcome dip into not-so-real but oh-so-cool terrors. Taking place during one terribly hot summer at the height of the Argentinian economic crisis, The Virgin of the Quarry Lake trails queen bee Nati (Dolores Oliverio), who believes her dear Diego (Agustín Sosa) will finally be hers after the two get together over the holidays. What she did not count on was an older woman coming in to swoop him away, igniting not only her burning jealousy but ancient dark powers.

I will spare you many details on the film’s gruesome, riveting third act, but Laís puts it well by saying, “no one understands the pure rage that jealousy brings on a horny girl.” While Michael points out that the movie plays “in the same crooked sandbox David Lynch built,” Justin writes that the Argentinian thriller “imagines what would have happened if Lucrecia Martel made a Y2K era riff on The Craft,” adding that the film “faithfully captures the erratic, confusing nature of coming-of-age better than most movies that want to play it safe and adhere to the natural world.” I’m thinking more Anita Rocha da Silveira, in the way it encapsulates the bubbling hot rage of young, vengeful Latinas. I feel both seen and glad to have seen it. RSR