The last grains of January are draining from 2025’s hourglass, and that can only mean one thing: It’s time for the Sundance Film Festival, once again taking place in lovely Park City, Utah, for the next 10 days (specifically, from January 23 to February 2). It’s a decently weird festival year, to be perfectly frank.
First, the industry is still reeling from the LA fires, which directly impacted enough festivalgoers that there was some conversation about potentially delaying and/or canceling the fest. Second, there’s everything else going on in the world right now, which has folks feeling strange yet… muted — the incandescent rage of 2016 was still burning nice and hot in 2018, when Jane Fonda led a Women’s March in Park City, but the vibe has changed in ways difficult to quantify in the seven years since we, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, went to our very first fest. Third, this may be the last Sundance in Utah, which is hard to believe. The fest’s contract with the city is up next year, and for whatever reason, they’re thinking of moving to Boulder or Cincinnati. Talk about hardball negotiation — giving up premium skiing for a plate of Skyline Chili.
Yet if one fest embodies the ethos of “Fuck it, we ball,” it’s Sundance. They got hit with a pandemic that pushed the fest online for two straight years, and they made that shit work in ways that seemed impossible. They brought the fest back in person when the time was right — immediately after one of their premieres won Best Picture — and put on two killer fests.
This year’s line-up is looking to be another all-star roster: Incisive documentaries about icons, boundary-pushing biopics, and the kind of good genre shit you can only get from the programmers in Park City. Out of all the great stuff we’ll be checking out this year, here are five features (well, technically, they’re four features and one two-part HBO documentary) that we’re hyped for.
Last Days
Sure, you may like Justin Lin’s work when he’s filming Vin Diesel driving a vintage Challenger into the heart of an active volcano to save an ex-girlfriend’s brother’s nephew in the name of family. Still, he’s more than the Fast and Furious pictures, and you’ll probably like Last Days even more. Lin’s electric 2002 feature Better Luck Tomorrow remains a cornerstone of independent Asian-American cinema, and Star Trek Beyond is better than both of the JJ Abrams movies that came before it (we’re not sorry) — this is why it’s so exciting that, following his exit from Fast X, he chose to make this biopic about missionary John Allen Chau and his ill-fated attempts to reach the isolated natives of North Sentinel Island in the Indian Ocean. It’s one hell of a fascinating story, and Lin might just be the director to do his story justice in all of its bizarre, tragic complexity.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
Know who’s great? Rose Byrne, that’s who. If you don’t believe there are second acts in American lives — and yes, you pedantic fucks out there, we know that’s not what Fitzgerald meant, but let the punchline get here before you crack your knuckles and get to typing — Byrne’s second act as an absurdly-gifted screen comedian may make you believe in Australian ones. Yet that kind of post-Apatow transcendental work has eluded her even as she turns in scene-stealing performance after performance (think Uncut Gems or Can You Ever Forgive Me?). This black comedy from Yeast director Mary Bronstein about a mom navigating a series of crises — a sick kid, a vanishing husband, a nutty therapist — might be it. If nothing else, watching her spar with Conan O’Brien and, for some reason, A$AP Rocky will be fantastic.
Opus
Upon reading the synopsis, we had to imagine that Mark Anthony Green somehow had a direct feed into the nightmares of our colleagues in the music world. A bad profile experience is every writer’s greatest fear (and, ironically enough, the best thing that could happen to us, should we make out alive to cash in on that book deal), and it’s even worse when you’re a true newbie, subject to all of the pressure campaigns from peers and publicists. That’s the situation that Ariel (Boston legend Ayo Edebiri) finds herself in when she’s asked to cover the return of Moretti (Cambridge legend John Malkovich), a pop icon who vanished 30 years before the film’s start and is now mounting a massive comeback. Shit goes sideways, lives are changed, and people learn the hard way that, sometimes, there is such a thing as bad press.
Pee-Wee as Himself
We typically don’t write about television much in these parts (unless it’s, say, Twin Peaks coming back or The Mandalorian amid a global pandemic), but Matt Wolf is a filmmaker worth paying attention to no matter what screen size he’s working with. If you’ve seen Recorder or Spaceship Earth, you know the kind of care that Wolf gives his subjects, and it’s all the more fascinating that he made a documentary about the one and only Paul Reubens before he passed away in 2023. The pair had a contentious yet fascinating relationship throughout production, given that Reubens was, to say the least, hesitant about Wolf prying into his personal life following everything that happened to him. Yet Reubens — one of the most underrated comedic and artistic talents of the back half of the 20th century — is an icon worthy of interrogation and understanding, at least so that, when the time comes, there’ll be enough scholarship to demonstrate that Pee-Wee Herman should be the fifth face on Mount Rushmore.
SLY LIVES! (aka The Burden of Black Genius)
Even if you got caught up in the controversy surrounding Summer of Soul back in 2021, there’s no denying that Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson can direct the hell out of a documentary — the rest of that “undiscovered footage” stuff is just marketing, honestly, and had he abandoned that frame, it wouldn’t have hurt the movie any. So it’s exciting that, for his latest project, Questlove turned his gaze toward the legend of Sly Stone, charting his rise, reign, and fall while considering the toll that Black genius takes on those burdened with its greatness. Get ready to be bumping There’s a Riot Goin’ On for the next year, friends: This will likely make Sly appreciation a family affair. Dammit, we’re sorry for that one.
