Sundance 2025 Report III

I’m sitting in the Salt Lake City airport about to fly home after a week of a Sundance Film Festival that has felt like the start of something ending. As I mentioned in a previous post, the festival has announced it will move in 2027 to a new host city, and much of the conversation this week in movie lines and around restaurant tables was about whether you could take Sundance out of Park City to Cincinnati or Boulder or Salt Lake City and still have it be ... Sundance. However you define what that is. Is this festival’s essence so embedded in location and a nearly 50-year history of upending the film industry that to take it out of its setting is to kill it? And in a country wobbling so severely on its axis, does it even matter?

Sundance 2025 has had a lot of decent films and no real breakout hit. That happens. It’s also been a Sundance without a single deal announced in the first seven days. That never happens. The sense is that the usual players, the big streamers and boutique distributors, are holding their cards to their chests and side-eyeing everyone else at the table. I expect that to change over the next week or so, but the era of the record-breaking payday for a lucky independent filmmaker appears to be over, at least until the industry regroups and figures out what people want and where they want it.

A lot of West Coasters stayed home to recover from the fires. A lot of people who did come went home early, leaving the back end of the festival even more underpopulated than usual. The online viewing platform that starts today and continues through Feb. 2 has given many the excuse to leave town and watch the rest from their couches, or not show up at all. And there’s this: I’m 67 years old and have been coming to Park City since the 1990s, and in a news and entertainment media landscape that seems to have profoundly and perhaps permanently lost its way over the past decade, I’m starting to eye the exits. Where I once pounded five or six Sundance movies a day on the regular, I’m averaging a leisurely four now, and this year I’m coming home with 20 movies under my belt, possibly a career low. (I do hope to add another five or so through the online platform.) So maybe it’s just me.

Probably is. Did I tell you about the kids I sat next to at a number of Park City screenings? Post-collegiate movie folk in their mid- or late-20s, coming to the festival for the first or second time and thrilled to be part of a business they don’t yet realize they’ll be revolutionizing? I talked to a young critic, a young photographer, a young publicist, a young documentarian getting her first project off the ground, and their energy and idealism, tempered by the enormity of the work ahead, was a balm to an old man’s soul.

Silly me: Sundance has never been in Park City. It’s been in them.

Some highlights of my last few days of screenings, starting with the documentaries: 

“The Perfect Neighbor” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐, seeking distribution, available for online viewing) – The incredibly sad tale of a Florida neighborhood calamity, as told almost entirely through police dashboard and body cams. On June 2, 2023, Susan Lorincz, who had been calling the police for months about children and teenagers playing noisily in the field next to her house, shot and killed Ajike Owens, one of the kids’ mothers, through the closed door of her house. The murder became national news in part because of the state’s Stand Your Ground law, and a case that ultimately went before a jury was resolved just in time for the film to resolve its legal narrative, if not its human tragedy. I’d love to hear the story of how filmmaker Geeta Gandbhir was granted access to the police footage, which shows law enforcement in a largely positive light and which documents a slow-motion disaster in which a local Karen nursed her grievances until they turned lethal. Inevitably? In a culture that encourages you to buy a gun and then tells you to be scared of other people – especially people of color – almost certainly. I don’t know that I’ve been more struck by a single Sundance scene than the one in which Lorincz is told she’s under arrest and refuses to acknowledge the reality of a situation that simply isn’t supposed to happen to people like her.

“Zodiac Killer Project” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2, seeking distribution, available for online viewing) – Charlie Shackleton tried to make a documentary about a police detective who spent years on the trail of California’s infamous serial killer, but then he lost the rights to the detective’s story and instead decided to make a movie about the movie he wasn’t able to make. In the process, he eviscerates with wit and onscreen receipts the conventions of the true-crime genre that have been hammered into cliché over the past decades, using clips from every HBO murder doc and basic cable special to deconstruct a genre that’s become a Pavlovian cultural addiction and an excuse to exploit misery for ratings.

“Gen_”  (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2, seeking distribution, available for online viewing) – A portrait of a saint. In Milan, Italy, the Niguarda public hospital hosts a clinic that offers both IVF and gender transition, providing free services in a country that is tilting sharply to the political and religious right. The head of the clinic, Dr. Maurizio Bini, listens to everyone and judges no one, and “Gen_” – a title prefix that can be completed as “gen-der,” “gen-eration,” “gen-itals” and so on – simply parks its camera in his office as patients exchange years of unhappiness for the possibility of hope. (Remember hope?) Even better, in his empathy, his humor and his stated intention to do what’s right rather than what’s legal, the good doctor gives U.S. audiences a prescription for resistance that will surely need to be filled in coming days.

“Free Leonard Peltier”(⭐ ⭐ ⭐, seeking distribution) – A solid, stirring account of the fight to release Peltier, in his 80s and ailing, after five decades in prison for a crime everyone but the FBI believes he didn’t commit. (And even the FBI is probably hedging its bets.) Jesse Short Bull and David France's film doubles as an essential history lesson in the rise of the American Indian Movement and the 1975 Pine Ridge shootings, and while the documentary doesn’t give us any time with Peltier today, that may change given Biden’s commutation of his sentence with 30 minutes remaining in the President’s administration. Expect this movie to get a re-edit before its theatrical release or airing, and expect Peltier and his supporters to get the happy ending they deserve.

“Peter Hujar’s Day” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐, seeking distribution) – Everybody has a cultural scene that they just missed being at (and thus worship with the force of unconsummated nostalgia), and for me it’s downtown New York in the 1960s and early 1970s – the clubs, the lofts, the art, the music. Director Ira Sachs (“Passengers”) captures two lightning bugs in a bottle with this recreation of a day-long 1974 conversation between Hujar (Ben Wishaw), a photographer with one foot in the downtown demimonde and the other in uptown magazine assignments, and writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall), who was working on a never-completed project in which artists reconstructed a single day in their working lives. The result is more anti-movie than movie, bristling with name-drops that have been lost to most people’s cultural memories (if they were ever there at all) and hewing closely to the typed transcript that was the only surviving document of the project. But the two pitch-perfect leads breathe a lovely, intimate banality into the proceedings, and the movie is lit with the glow of a New York moment that flickered and was gone. I quite liked it; another friend thought it was "like a painfully abridged version of Andy Warhol's diaries."

Here's Sachs and Wishaw discussing how the actor found his character, with the 90-year-old Rosenkrantz standing on the left.

And here's Rebecca Hall discussing same.

“The Wedding Banquet” (⭐ ⭐, in theaters April 18) – An unnecessary but pleasant remake of Ang Lee’s 1999 comedy about a gay Asian couple, their lesbian friends and the straight wedding they put on to make the families happy. It’s writer-director Andrew Ahn’s play for the big leagues after three small, winsome indies – the first, “Driveways,” with Brian Dennehy and Hong Chau, is the best – and a way for SNL’s Bowen Yang to prove his box-office wattage. Han Gi-Chan is his opposite number, and the ladies next door are Kelly Marie Tran (Rose in the most recent “Star Wars” cycle) and Lily Gladstone (“Killers of the Flower Moon”), with Joan Chen as Tran's mother, throwing herself into PFLAG and other vocally supportive activism to her daughter's chagrin. There are a lot of farcical developments and a lot of speeches where the characters tell each other exactly what they’re feeling at that precise moment, which is not how people work, really, but I guess is how some of us would like them to work. It’s painless and cute enough to charm everyone but the worst homophobes, but the only time “Wedding Banquet” actually feels like something is when Gladstone is onscreen or Youn Yuh-jung as the traditional yet open-minded Korean grandmother whose perceived expectations set the complicated plot in motion. Youn won an Oscar as the feisty grandma in “Minari,” and here she reminds audiences, as does Gladstone, that some performers are simply incapable of a dishonest or unoriginal moment.

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