Read Our 20 Most Popular Sundance 2025 Stories and Catch Up on All the Big Festival Obsessions
Lights out: It’s time to call a wrap on our 2025 Sundance Film Festival coverage. But while the annual festival has now ended, that doesn’t mean our work has quite concluded just yet. If nothing else, a review of our top stories from the annual event feel like a road map for the cinematic year to come, a quick trip into the obsessions and interests that guided 11 days in snowy Park City, Utah and seem destined to carry over throughout the rest of 2025.
Check out our full critics survey to see which films over 175 (!!) critics deemed the best of the fest, watch our full run of in-studio interviews with some of the biggest names of festival, and check out every piece of key Sundance news (from reviews to interviews and so much more) right here. Until next year!
From the start, IndieWire readers wanted to bone up on what to expect from this year’s festival. Even before the fest kicked off, our preview pieces were winners. You wanted to know which films and shows to be most excited for (we picked 24 of them) and which were likely to sell big (and thus presumably land on a screen near you).
At the festival, reviews of some of those same titles were — understandably enough — the big ticket reads. It’s always interesting to see which titles break through, even for those readers who aren’t in Utah with a ticket in their hot little hands, and this year provided plenty of food for thought. You wanted to read about narrative picks like “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” “Sorry, Baby,” “Twinless,” and “Together” (incidentally, some of our favorite films of the festival). Documentaries like “Predators” and “Selena y Los Dinos” were also of big interest, plus TV series “Hal & Harper” and “Bucks County, USA.” Such range!
As ever, readers also wanted to know more about how the films at the festival were made, and we delivered, care of both our narrative feature camera survey and our documentary camera survey. (Even for film fans who aren’t in the market for their own lenses and cameras, these surveys are filled with compelling and distinct information about the films and how they were made.)
Sundance, of course, is still of interest and import to those who cannot attend, and readers were eager to get a sense of the on-the-ground experience even without forking over the price of admission. You-are-there stories that tracked audience response to big films (like Rose Byrne’s incredible performance in “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”) were a hit, and so were stories that tracked star response to said big films (like Jennifer Lopez getting teary at the premiere of “Kiss of the Spider Woman”). Another popular way to soak up the vibes? A journey through our own IndieWire studio and all the big names who stopped by to talk.
When the festival concluded over the weekend, stories contextualizing it were hot, including a preview of David Ehrlich’s newsletter (the latest issue of which functioned as a critic’s notebook), a ranking of those Sundance stars and films (maybe) headed for Oscar glory, and our roundup of the new names and projects we expect to break big out of the festival.
And, what could possibly be more top of mind than the question on everyone’s: Where is the festival heading in 2027? We’ve got some ideas there. For now, we’re looking forward to 2026, and beyond.
