The Sundance Film Festival received more 2,390 narrative feature submissions this year, and narrowed them down to 50 projects that it showed from January 23 to February 2 in Park City, Utah. With the recent announcement that its 2026 dates will be “no doubt an unforgettable experience,” it’s looking like this may have been the festival’s penultimate year in Park City. Here is a mostly spoiler-free baker’s dozen plus one of my 2025 favorites. Write these down in your diary and keep your eyes glued to your local film festival, art-house theaters and online streaming sites to see them soon. Check out Part 1: Documentaries here.
Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams (US)
The hands-down-best film of 2025’s Sundance Film Festival follows an incredibly nuanced performance by Joel Edgerton as a humble day laborer who must repeatedly leave his wife and child to help build America’s railroads at the start of the 20th century. As he helps to transform the wilderness of the American West, his brief encounters with other fading nomads (including a grizzled William H. Macy) left me speechless for days.
This lyrical follow up to writer-director Clint Bentley’s understated debut feature Jockey (2021) feels like a throwback to Terrence Mallick’s Days of Heaven (1978). The haunting cinematography by Adolpho Veloso, laced with a gorgeous musical score by composer Bryce Dessner, gives the film an epic intimacy. It’s important to also mention co-star Felicity Jones, who is quite memorable as an isolated woman carrying the weight of world. The film was one of only a few from this year’s fest to be picked up so far and will be released by Netflix later on in 2025. Do what you can to see this masterpiece on the biggest screen possible.
Justin Lin‘s Last Days (US)
This fascinating true story of doomed 26-year-old Christian missionary John Allen Chau as he attempts to convert a previously uncontacted tribe of the North Sentinel Island to Christianity was one of the most debated films at Sundance this year. Channeling Clint Eastwood’s complex accounts of real-life enigmas Richard Jewel (2019) and American Sniper (2014) combined with a Bollywood aesthetic, Lin has melded his indie beginnings of Better Luck Tomorrow (2002) with his blockbuster Fast and Furious films, delivering a truly bizarre, action-packed melodrama that has to be seen to be believed.
Newcomer Sky Yang is hypnotic as its idealistic dreamer, driven by an overzealous faith. Of the many wild subplots, my two favorites have to do with the Indian detective (Radhika Apte) who is racing to stop the missionary before he does harm to himself or the tribe and Ken Leung’s portrayal as the missionary’s father, whose psychic link to his son’s reckless desire for solace is still giving me the chills, even as I write these words. The film is seeking distribution.
Kate Beecroft‘s East of Wall (US)
The winner of this year’s Audience Award in the NEXT category (created in 2010 to showcase innovative films that are able to transcend the confines of an independent budget) is an absolutely authentic and astounding revisionist Western that combines David Gordon Green’s George Washington (2000), Chloe Zhao’s Songs My Brother Taught Me (2015), and Mary Pickford’s Sparrows (1926).
Promotional materials share that “a chance encounter brought together writer-director Kate Beecroft and her subject and lead, Tabatha Zimiga. A wrong turn down an unnamed road led to years of cohabitation on Zimiga’s unusual ranch, where she and her band of teenage girls reinvent the American West, the nuclear family, and the place of women within both. In this creative work of hybridity, first-time feature director Beecroft collaborates with the actual individuals who inspired this project and a cast that includes Scoot McNairy and Jennifer Ehle.” The film is seeking distribution.
Isaiah Saxon’s The Legend of Ochi (US/Romania)
This adorable A24 family-friendly adventure flies high in its first half as it follows a farm girl who discovers a wounded baby primate who was left behind by its pack. 16-year-old German actor Helena Zengel packs an extraordinary emotional punch as she makes the trek through the forests of Carpathia in Romania, with hopes to return Ochi back to its family.
While the second half of the film loses its initial momentum, the incredible animatronic puppetry (à la Gizmo) and the implementation of a curious musical technique called “hocketing,” which involves alternating notes or chords between different voices or instruments, helps carry it all the way to its family-friendly crescendo co-starring Willem Dafoe, Emily Watson, and Finn Wolfhard (Stranger Things). The director shared that his father took him to see 2001: A Space Odyssey in 70mm at the Castro Theater as a kid, a key stop on his way to becoming a filmmaker. A24 is releasing the movie theatrically on April 25 in select theaters.
Cooper Raiff‘s Hal and Harper: Episodes 01-08 (US)
The director and star of the wonderful award-winning Cha Cha Real Smooth (2022) wrote, directed, edited, and stars as the eponymous Hal in this humorous-yet-heartfelt eight-episode epic. It follows two siblings and their father as they weave through a lifetime of inside jokes, shared trauma, and similar coping mechanisms with depression. Both the brother and sister roles are uniquely portrayed via frenetic flashbacks with the stunningly subdued Lili Reinhart and an anxious-filled Raiff performing their elementary school selves at their present age. Mark Ruffalo is also devastating as their emo-forlorn father. This highly recommended series plays more like a five-hour film and could easily be binge-watched in two parts. The film is seeking distribution. In the meantime, seek out Raiff’s hilarious debut feature Shithouse (2020), which won the grand prize at SXSW and is about an alienated college freshman who finds solace in his RA during an all-night fraternity party.
Emilie Blichfeldt‘s The Ugly Stepsister (Norway)
An outrageously harsh tongue-in-cheek body horror deliciously retells Cinderella by shifting the focus to stepsister Elvira and her very Cronenberg-esque pursuit of beauty at all costs. Writer-director Emilie Blichfeldt stated at Sundance that the film’s 19th century surgical makeover “was inspired by the Brothers Grimm version and by my own struggles with body image,” and hopes “to provoke both empathy, discomfort, and perhaps even reflection upon [viewers’] perceptions of beauty.” The film is definitely for horror fans who may have wished that Coralie Fargeat‘s The Substance (2024) had been less silly and more focused.
Michael Shanks’ Together (US)
Another film that should draw comparisons to Coralie Fargeat‘s “messterpiece” The Substance (2024) is Michael Shanks’ quite enjoyable gross-out body horror that locates Dave Franco and Alison Brie in a dysfunctional couple’s big move from the city and into an isolated lifestyle. Confusing tonal shifts, baffling plot points, and bewildering gender dynamics are almost fully realized as the two struggle to uncover the side effects of a supernatural twist. NEON snagged the rights to the film and will be releasing the film in August.
Alireza Khatami‘s The Things You Kill (Iran/Turkey/US)
Winner of the festival’s Directing Award in the World Cinema Dramatic category is this absolutely stunning psychological slow burn that follows a struggling university professor who is haunted by the suspicious death of his ailing mother. Set in present-day Turkey, lead actor Ekin Koç is mesmerizing as a man slowly slipping into darkness. Director Alireza Khatmai mentioned that David Lynch, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, and Abbas Kiarostami all inspired him, yet I am betting that the monumental Iranian queer-gothic-horror gem Chess of the Wind (1976) did as well. On all accounts, this was a deeply unsettling experience (in all the best ways) that was impossible for me to shake for days after. Do not read spoiler reviews. This is one of the best films of 2025, not to mention of Sundance 2025.
Bryn Chainey‘s Rabbit Trap (UK/Wales)
Set in 1976, this eerie UK folk-horror entry conjures up a Tarkovsky-esque stew of supernatural Welsh myths. It showcases an obsessive avant-garde electronic musician (à la Delia Derbyshire and Suzanne Ciani) who spirals into her reel-to-reel tape machines and oscillators while her withdrawn husband (played whole-heartedly by Dev Patel) collects field recordings in the nearby woods by their cottage. The film leans heavily into an abstract style, as opposed to delivering any kind of straight-forward narrative, and I personally would have loved to sit in the theater to take another of its 100 minutes as soon as it ended. It is seeking distribution.
Meera Menon’s Didn’t Die (US)
Do not be dissuaded by its clunky beginning—this extraordinary low-budget horror film creates incredible characters that you genuinely feel for, and was one of the best films at Sundance this year. Comedian Kiran Deol (of Hulu’s Sunnyside) is unstoppably funny as a podcast host who is desperately clinging to an ever-shrinking audience during a zombie apocalypse. With some very well-earned tributes to George Romero and James Cameron, this “little film that could” should be sought out at all costs. Its profound parallels to the present-day had more than a few audience members audibly affected. The film is seeking distribution.
Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (US)
Brace yourself for this unstoppable anxiety-core masterpiece that is perfectly presented by A24 and produced by Josh Safdie (of Uncut Gems). It showcases an exhaustive and delirious masterclass in chaos parenting by Rose Byrne, who plays a therapist attempting to care for her mysteriously ill child, her absent husband, a missing mental patient, a curious neighbor (played by A$AP Rocky), and navigate an increasingly hostile relationship with her therapist (Conan O’Brien). The film is also a spot-on counter balance to the frenetic Frownland (2007) by Ronald Bronstein, who is Mary’s longtime creative partner and husband. A24 is set to release the film later on in 2025.
Grace Glowicki‘s Dead Lover (Canada)
Every Sundance there are a few films that are so visionary, so fully realized from start to finish, that I find myself getting completely teleported into them. Last year, it was Jane Schoenbrun’s ethereal I Saw the TV Glow, Rose Glass’ Love Lies Bleeding, and Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man. This year, I completely lost myself in the non-stop laugh-out-loud, lo-fi horror camp-fest entitled Dead Lover.
Inspired by Mary Shelley, German Expressionism, and seemingly, The Kuchar Brothers, writer-director-producer-star Grace Glowicki is absurdly unhinged as she inhabits a lonely gravedigger who stinks of corpses and is desperate to find a man of her dreams. Playing four separate characters, she is somehow magically matched by co-stars Leah Doz, Lowen Morrow, and Ben Petrie, who are just as bizarre as she.
Glowicki won a Special Jury Award for Outstanding Performance at Sundance in 2016 for her incredible work in Her Friend Adam, a gripping 17-minute film inspired (and directed) by Glowicki’s partner-in-crime (on and off-camera), Ben Petrie. The project was also named to Canada’s Top Ten list for 2016 by the Toronto Film Festival. The two have worked on a handful of other projects together, including Glowicki’s uniquely baffling stoner directorial debut Tito (2019) and The Heirloom (2024), which is based on their own relationship during the beginning of COVID-19 lockdown. Also noteworthy is Glowicki’s stunning work as TONY (2018), a character she created for CFC Actors Conservatory’s CLOSE-UP project (and one that I hope she’ll expand into a longer format.)
Dead Lover was gorgeously shot on 16mm by Rhayne Vermette using both an Arri SR3 & a Bolex camera, and this transgressive tour-de-force is a homemade homage to avant-garde cinema, managing to justify its very own placement alongside the films it is honoring. Not a single sequence is mundane and as soon as it ended, I wanted to start it all over again (and again and again.) Throw in a brand-new soundtrack of killer songs by legendary Toronto pop project U.S. Girls (aka Meghan Remy) and you’ve got one of the best films at Sundance 2025—my personal overall favorite. Yellow Veil Pictures is the sales agent for the film, so hopefully a release date will be announced ASAP.
