Memo to Distributors: Buy These Sundance 2025 Movies

“Come See Me in the Good Light” (dir. Ryan White)

A genderqueer poet and their partner battle advanced ovarian cancer in director Ryan White’s “Come See Me in the Good Light” — a life-affirming documentary that came to Sundance at a critical time for LGBTQ people in American media. This intimate portrait of Andrea Gibson and Megan Falley (also a writer and poet) brings audiences into a soulful romance between two artists grappling with life’s most harrowing questions. The love seen here suggests how you live your life and care for the people in it can be its own kind of art form.

As complex conversations about impermanence spill into increasingly difficult medical appointments, Gibson and Falley engage with each other and White’s lens to challenge how we see identity in the face of an all-consuming and transformative illness. The well-spoken and likable subjects foster a generous tone that could earnestly inspire compassion from some less tolerant viewers, and the project overall helps boost their voices and platform in this difficult cultural moment. It’s easy to imagine the film performing well for any streamer, though we suspect that a boutique label would be rewarded for giving the movie the theatrical push it deserves. —AF

“East of Wall” (dir. Kate Beecroft)

From Vittorio di Sica’s “Bicycle Thieves” to the films of the Safdies and Sean Baker, using non-professional actors has long been a tool filmmakers have employed to add a note of authenticity to their work. And yet, with “East of Wall,” writer/director Kate Beecroft elevates this concept to greater heights, crafting a feature docu-fiction debut that is cinematically and narratively rich, but also takes care to reflect the deeper reality at the heart of its story. Backstopped by familiar faces like Scoot McNairy and Jennifer Ehle, the film stars horse rancher Tabatha Zimiga as a version of herself, and takes place on her singular horse ranch in the Badlands, where she also raises a motley crew of teenagers who have nowhere else to go (in addition to an infant of her own). You’d be hard-pressed to find a stronger woman, but the weight of caring for so many others as she struggles to care for herself still threatens to crush Tabatha into the earth.

In working with non-professional actors, filmmakers like the Safdies and Baker often want to exist within the chaos of these individuals, but Beecroft and DP Austin Shelton’s lens is far more nuanced. It offers grace and sensitivity. It captures beauty and turmoil, sometimes in the same frame. They want you to understand the environs of these characters as much as you understand their souls; fractured and beaten, yet still making space for whoever needs it. “East of Wall” is a vintage Sundance movie — the kind that once commanded a limited summer release before platforming its way to a couple million dollars. With its unique hook and richly cinematic approach, a smart distributor could make that happen again. —HR

“Hal & Harper” (dir. Cooper Raiff)

It’s hard enough to watch a full season of television at Sundance, let alone to sell one, but Cooper Raiff — whose “Cha Cha Real Smooth” was one of the festival’s biggest sales of the pandemic era — had good reason to believe that his deeply affecting grief dramedy would resonate with festival audiences who made the time to see it. Characteristically earnest and charming even as it digs at much rawer wounds than any of Raiff’s previous works, “Hal & Harper” proved to be a major highlight at a Sundance defined by its stagnancy, as its decades-spanning story about a pair of hyper-codependent siblings — stunted as children by their mother’s sudden death — offered a poignant reminder that some things only feel like you’ll never be able to outgrow them. It’s a sensation that Raiff’s show literalizes to great effect, as he and his co-lead Lili Reinhart (extraordinary) don’t just play the title characters as the rudderless adults they are in the present, but also as the emotionally paralyzed elementary schoolers they were in the past. That conceit might sound cloying on paper, but, like so much of this beautiful show, the actual effect resolves into a raw and heartbreaking illustration of what loss can do to a kid, and to the grown-up they’ll eventually become. 

Scripted, independent television is still a novel concept, and I can’t pretend to be an expert on how it works. But it’s almost impossible to imagine that streamers would be unwilling to invest in a singular and hyper-bingeable show of this quality, let alone one that also boasts excellent supporting turns from the likes of Mark Ruffalo, Betty Gilpin, Addison Timlin, and Havana Rose Liu. Fingers crossed that people everywhere will soon get to savor what Sundance’s virtual audiences were able to speed through last weekend. —DE

“Heightened Scrutiny” (dir. Sam Feder)

In an age in which information is weaponized and fact debatable to the point of meaninglessness, media has served as both an indispensable tool and a rallying cry for whichever side you choose to support, a fact that allows journalism to become more about pushing a specific message than actually seeking out the truth. This conflict is at the crux of Sam Feder‘s legal documentary “Heightened Scrutiny,” which captures ACLU attorney and transgender rights activist Chase Strangio as he prepares to argue in front of the Supreme Court in the case of United States v. Skrmetti.

The Skrmetti case originated as a challenge to a Tennessee law prohibiting transgender minors from accessing certain forms of gender-affirming care, including puberty blockers and hormone therapy, but Strangio makes clear throughout the film: If this law is upheld by the Supreme Court, it will lead to a full-out attack on trans identity in America. Not just for children, but adults too who would have to face a legal system that effectively would be giving states the right to take away gender-affirming care based on information that is largely not grounded in fact. Where does this information come from? As “Heightened Scrutiny” takes care to lay out, a great deal of anti-trans bias is circulated through mainstream media, and not just from right-wing sources like Fox News, but in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and many more supposedly liberal publications.

Needless to say, Feder’s documentary is as urgent and timely as it gets. It would be great to see this one get out there as soon and as widely as possible — perhaps a major streamer like Disney or Hulu is willing to heed the call. —HR

“Lurker” (dir. Alex Russell)

“Beef” executive producer Alex Russell makes his feature filmmaking debut with “Lurker,” “an unsettling thriller starring the great rising actor Théodore Pellerin as a young man obsessed with an L.A. pop star, played by talented “Saltburn” breakout Archie Madekwe. Matthew’s (Pellerin) attachment to Oliver (Madekwe) at first seems innocent, even if he’s being exploited by Oliver’s groupies as a photographer who could potentially direct the musician’s videos or a documentary about his career. But the obsession turns dangerous and potentially career-killing in this spare, sharp first film shot on location in Los Angeles and evocative of all the city’s dreamers and hangers-on, in a place where you are defined not by who you are but by what you do. And who, however ruinously, you want to become.

“Lurker” is among the most broadly commercial movies that premiered at Sundance this year, and feels extremely of the moment without overplaying its hand. Any streamer would be lucky to snap it up, but that would be a shame for an indie that boasts a star-making role or two, and seems all but guaranteed to become a word-of-mouth mini-hit at the summer box office. Rough comps like “Emily the Criminal” and “Ingrid Goes West” suggest that an early August release might reward a smaller indie label for having the good sense to invest. —RL 

“Obex” (dir. Albert Birney)

“Eraserhead” meets “The Legend of Zelda” in director Albert Birney’s scrappy sci-fi “OBEX,” which the “Strawberry Mansion” filmmaker co-wrote with Pete Ohs. A kite shaped like a horse, a cicada-filled Baltimore world, and a black-and-white aesthetic almost perversely hooked on its own disaffected weirdness define this movie about a computer programmer (also played by Birney) who retreats from dreary Baltimore into a fantasy video game world. Just as Conor (Birney) is hooked to making dot matrix printer art off his vintage Mac, so “OBEX” too is tapped into the nostalgia we all have for an analog world — the warm yearn for simpler times. The world of “OBEX,” named for the fictional video game world Conor gets sucked into after a newspaper advertisement promises the ultimate escapist experience, is eerily captivating thanks to cinematographer Ohs’ portent-steeped atmosphere. This one feels destined for midnight movie status, making it a plum choice for a genre film boutique that knows how to connect “OBEX” with the right cult-leaning audience. —RL

“The Perfect Neighbor” (dir. Geeta Gandbhir)

Shot almost entirely by police body cams and interrogation room CCTVs, Geeta Gandbhir’s unforgettable documentary crystallizes the horrors of stand-your-ground laws by examining their effects through the lens of a single case — one that harrowingly illustrates the defects of castle doctrines (among other policy failures) by painting a microcosmic portrait of white America’s inability to parse between fear and anger. 

Stand-your-ground laws aren’t even mentioned by name until “The Perfect Neighbor” is more than half over, as Gandbhir elects to work the issue from the inside out, with the you-are-there reality of the footage she uses bringing viewers right into the heart of what’s ultimately a human matter. Indeed, a subjective camera has seldom been more damning than it is here — here, in an American horror story that doesn’t hinge on whether or not white Florida woman Susan Lorincz was actually in danger when she fired on the unarmed neighbor knocking at her front door, but rather on whether or not Susan Lorincz believed she was in danger when the young Black mother from across the street, Ajike Owens, came to retrieve her son’s confiscated tablet. 

Sure to be one of the year’s most viscerally compelling films on the strength of its montage alone, “The Perfect Neighbor” is a political lightning rod in the making, as well as a rallying cry for a country where people feel all too powerless to stop any of the tragedies we’re made to witness. This has the potential to be one of the most impactful documentaries in years, and any distributor would be privileged to help shepherd it into the public eye. —DE

“Predators” (dir. David Osit)

A raw and riveting documentary that skeptically re-examines the appeal, legacy, and ethicality of “To Catch a Predator,” David Osit’s “Predators” certainly doesn’t make the case that the child predators featured on the show were undeserving of scorn (and in profound need of help). And yet, as both a filmmaker whose work (“Mayor,” “Thank You for Playing”) has always been compelled by moral inquiry, as well as a person for whom “To Catch a Predator” triggered a swirl of conflicting emotions, Osit is haunted by his enjoyment of a show that was ultimately less interested in crime than punishment. Hansen’s theatrics helped paved the way for a media landscape driven by humiliation rituals, and “Predators” leverages the success of that NBC program — along with the tragedy of how it ended, and the YouTube vigilantes who’ve iterated on its format with even less oversight than Hansen ever had — into a probing investigation of its own. 

The film’s ultimate conclusion is clear from the start: “To Catch a Predator” was an invitation to see the world in black-and-white, a prospect which has only become more enticing in light of America’s subsequent chaos. It was an invitation to tar and feather people so plainly “evil” that everyone watching along at home couldn’t help but to feel “good” by comparison. And though it sold itself as an invitation to make sense of an inexplicable wrong, the show’s power was rooted in the permission it gave us to ignore why such heinous violations continue to happen.

As “Predators” makes clear, there are very real consequences to presenting dehumanization as a righteous act of public justice. “To Catch a Predator” might seem like the wrong lens through which to make that case, as few people invite less sympathy than the men who found their way into Hansen’s web. But that is exactly what makes Osit’s film such a powerful indictment of the lens through which we’ve since been conditioned to see everything else as well. There’s always some risk in distributing a documentary that threatens to enflame right-wing media, re-activate the remnants of the anti-“Cuties” brigade (remember that?), and/or even just force audiences to question their own mindsets, but “Predators” is plenty strong enough to speak for itself, and it deserves a chance to do so with the benefit of the biggest platform it can find. —DE

“Rebuilding” (dir. Max Walker-Silverman)

Loath as I am to label anything as “the movie people need right now,” it’s hard to think of Max Walker-Silverman’s “Rebuilding” in any other terms at the moment. A spare but deeply felt sketch of a drama about a divorced Colorado rancher (a hangdog Josh O’Connor) trying to make sense of what he’s got left in the wake of a devastating wildfire, the story is every bit as gentle as the rest of Walker-Silverman’s work (i.e. 2022’s “A Love Song”), and yet still honest enough to reckon with the heartache of losing one’s home. In fact, it’s only because “Rebuilding” is so raw in its pain that it’s able to resolve into such an effectively comforting balm; the film begins with generations of memory smoldering into 1,000 acres of scorched earth, and from the ashes rescues a new foundation on which its characters might credibly be able to create the next iteration of their lives. 

How do you build something that lasts in a world where climate change can, has, and will continue to wipe centuries of history right off the map? When the threat of another tragic wildfire is not a matter of “if,” but “when?” “It’s funny,” someone says, “the things you pack and the things you leave.” This quietly affecting little movie finds real poignancy in paying attention to what those things are, and — ultimately — in forging them together so that someone else might have the gift of mourning these ruins one day.

“Rebuilding” is a small and delicate film that might default to a streamer for those reasons, but it rewards the undivided attention of the big screen experience, and O’Connor’s presence should be enough to tempt a theatrical distributor; it would certainly be a great opportunity for one of the older-skewing labels to work with one of today’s brightest younger stars. —DE

“Seeds” (dir. Brittany Shyne)

In Brittany Shyne’s gorgeous documentary “Seeds” the camera often captures parts of her subjects others might ignore. 

Shyne, who also serves as cinematographer, focuses on hands, weathered with creases. She looks at hair, washed in a sink. She lovingly lingers on ash dangling off a cigarette and the worn toes of boots. Shyne’s powerful eye is one of the reasons “Seeds,” a lyrical portrait of Black farmers in the American South, is one of the must-see documentaries at Sundance, and will continue to be vital once released for a broader audience. 

Captured in exquisite black and white, Shyne creates a moving testament to a dwindling population. The world of these landowners is threatened by discrimination and government ignorance. But “Seeds” is not all that concerned with statistics, though they are shared in passing. Shyne makes a forceful argument through just letting the audience be absorbed with a way of life. “Seeds” requires patience; you have to orient yourself to the slow rhythms of the piece, which encourage you to relish in these quiet moments. But it’s an incredibly rewarding journey, a film indebted to the past that feels brilliantly alive. It’s also a film that demands being seen on the big screen, and one that would benefit from the bespoke attention that a small theatrical distributor could provide it. An Oscar nomination would seem very possible if nurtured correctly, and so we hope that’s incentive enough for this special movie to end up in the right hands. —EZ

“Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake)”

A little flash goes a long way at Sundance, where young and emerging filmmakers hope to wow the whole American movie industry in one fell swoop and be labeled “the next big thing” on the strength of a single screening. In that context, the poise and modesty of Sierra Falconer’s feature-length debut was always going to make “Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake)” feel like something of an anomaly in the Competition line-up, but it’s Falconer’s confidence — expressed through, but not entirely defined by her complete refusal to capitulate to modern tastes and attention spans — that made it into a standout as well.

An original anthology consisting of four wistfully effervescent vignettes set on the shores of the northern Michigan lake that lend the film its literary title, “Sunfish” resists the unevenness endemic to its format by drawing a gentle power from the stillness of the water that runs through it. Falconer’s characters (a teenage girl ditched at her grandparents’ lake house, a young music prodigy, a barback in for the shift of her life, and two sisters on the verge of splitting up) don’t overlap in any literal respect, but they’re so bound together by a shared sense of place that it seems like they’re all bound up together, especially when they feel at their most alone. Falconer’s Cheever-esque writing and smartly unfussy direction help bring this world right out of her bones, and I suspect that the film’s calmingly evocative sense of place might be enough to make it a word-of-mouth hit for any distributor patient enough to platform it over the summer (last year’s “Good One” feels like a decent comp, though Andrew Ahn’s lovely “Driveways” would have made an even better one if not for being shuffled to VOD because of the pandemic). —DE

“The Things You Kill” (dir. Alireza Khatami)

The existential apocalypse of a Turkish literature professor gets an oblique and chilling study in “The Things You Kill.” On its surface, this disquieting diptych about male anxiety has the feel of, say, an Asghar Farhadi movie, a moral dilemma urging forth a thriller plot. But that’s precisely the sort of bait-and-switch Iranian writer/director Alireza Khatami is operating on here, until his tense and nightmarish film starts to resemble more something like David Lynch’s “Lost Highway” as directed by Abbas Kiarostami. Khatami (“Terrestrial Verses”), who lives in Canada, relocated the setting from Iran to Turkey to evade censorship in his native country — a censorship of patriarchal violence that the film itself also rings upon like a warning bell of a bleak future. “The Things You Kill” is like a bad, sweat-breaking dream that leaves you dazed and feverish — and a black-hearted gaze into the poison patriarchy oozing into men’s veins just as much as women. 

Khatami’s film may not have the instant hook capable of luring Neon and its ilk, but it would be a shame to see this movie slip through the cracks only to wind up on a random streaming service in a year or two. If framed correctly, its Lynchian energy and genre appeal should be enough to reward any of the smaller theatrical labels the film might able to lure. —RL