Our most anticipated films of Sundance 2025

The penultimate Sundance Film Festival held in Park City, Utah—and the first held since the fest announced that it was shopping around for a new home—2025’s edition begins a two-year farewell to the slopes by rolling out a familiar slate of documentaries, daring NEXT selections, indie dramas with exactly one high-profile star, and international cinema that’s often sold short in favor of the stateside selections. The A.V. Club‘s most anticipated movies of Sundance 2025 span the Midnight and the conventional, the fiction and nonfiction, to find the hidden gems among the 88 feature films selected for the fest.

We’ll be covering Sundance 2025 from the similarly frigid tundra of Chicago, publishing reviews and dispatches over the course of the fest’s run from January 23 to February 2. But ahead of the kickoff, intrepid fest-goers can whet their cinematic appetites with tantalizing teases about sucked-into-a-video-game dramas, warped fairy tales, charming gender-affirming doctor docs, and sun-kissed small-town anthologies with our preview.

April

The female body is the source of sexual and medical transgression in Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili’s harrowing sit-and-stare drama April. A brutal, sometimes literally monstrous tale of an obstetrician (Ia Sukhitashvili) who moonlights as an illegal small-town abortionist, April lingers on images more unrelenting than any horror film—including those of actual childbirth. Its slow pace, quiet perseverance, and unflinching gaze construct an oppressive atmosphere reflective of a woman’s place in this controlling society. Under fire from every corner, Sukhitashvili relishes in small rebellions but rarely lets anything through her steely surface. It’s a tough, lonely film, but April is undeniably powerful.

Brides

Nadia Fall makes the leap from stage to screen by helming Brides, a colorful and disillusioned road trip undertaken by two Muslim schoolgirls as they flee from a prejudiced U.K. to (what they hope is) a more accepting Syria. Ebada Hassan and Safiyya Ingar play the two stubborn girls, at odds with the world and often with each other, each beaten down by their home lives and the discrimination that narrows to a needle’s point in class. As their backgrounds slowly unfold through flashbacks, their reasons for undertaking this misguided journey become more clear and empathy soon follows. Between these revelatory moments, the universal experiences of young women carry the film’s uneasy through line—no matter their optimistic aspirations, they will be stared at and pursued and endangered by the men around them. Clinging to each other is all they have, and that may not be enough.

GEN_

Easily the most charming documentary The A.V. Club got to sneak a peek at from this year’s Sundance, GEN_ lives and dies by its central force: Milan’s fertility and gender-affirming doctor Dr. Maurizio Bini. Shot by Gianluca Matarrese as a fly-on-the-wall film, with close-up frames often obscured and hazy so that viewers can solely focus on the needs of the patients, GEN_ observes the impact of an empathetic caregiver, one willing to stretch the laws of his conservative Catholic country to the breaking point in order to give new life to those who come to him. Dr. Bini is soft-spoken, funny, curious, and compassionate—the way he juggles everyone’s issues day in and day out, including those of the construction workers renovating his office, contains the same eccentric warmth as Orna Guralnik from HBO’s Couples Therapy. And, in a way, Dr. Bini is both therapist and medical doctor to his patients. Filled with warm reassurance for those who need it most, GEN_ is as feel-good as documentaries get.

Life After

Reid Davenport returns to Sundance after his innovative debut I Didn’t See You There showed audiences the world from his point-of-view with a more conventional (and satisfying) documentary about living a disabled life. Life After sees Davenport blend his personal experience as a filmmaker with cerebral palsy into an investigation around the whereabouts of Elizabeth Bouvia, a woman whose legal pursuit of her right to die became a national news sensation. Unpacking the death industry as just another extension of a capitalist system ready and willing to profit off of those in need, Life After complicates an issue often championed by left-leaning advocates. As Davenport interviews those with direct experience with the healthcare systems surrounding assisted suicide, good intentions fall away to reveal yet another way for disabled people to be discarded.

OBEX

Stripping away the garish colors of his earlier Sundance film Strawberry Mansion, director-star  Albert Birney once again dives into a constructed unreality with the black-and-white “go inside the video game” fantasy OBEX. Of course, it’s not as simple as that sounds. Following the contained life of a shut-in ASCII artist (Birney) living in a home populated by countless TV screens and computer monitors, OBEX drifts into a digital dreamscape where synth sounds and cicada songs blur. A Nightmare On Elm Street is heavily namechecked, and the horrors that emerge when the physical and the computational crash into one another are as affecting and disconcerting as that dreamy classic. Isolation and screen worship give the film a bittersweet modernity, though its ’80s setting allows its technologically-driven world an earnestly awkward early-days aesthetic.

Sunfish & Other Stories On Green Lake

Lake folks are a special, specific breed. Whether from the Midwest or South, those who congregate in small communities, generations old and intertwined, around the water rarely escape its pull. Sierra Falconer, in her warm and sharply observed debut, connects four small stories into her community anthology. The first two stories—about a girl learning to sail her grandfather’s boat and a band camp kid struggling with his desires—are strongest and most focused, but the latter two—about a fisherman’s tall tale and the woman who wants to believe it, and two sisters dreaming of the future as they run a bed-and-breakfast—still contain their winning moments. Throughout, though, Falconer finds honesty in her characters. They’re not all hokey feel-good rural saints. Some are stubborn, and stupid, and prejudiced, and downright mean. But that feels right. Just like you want to have the backs of some people, the imaginative and the inspired, you want to roll your eyes at the assholes around them. Sunfish & Other Stories On Green Lake is as bright and varied as a short-story collection centered on a specific town and its unfulfilled inhabitants, and an impressive showcase for a filmmaker operating in multiple impressive modes over the course of a streamlined tour around the lake.

The Things You Kill

A slick, cerebral family drama from Alireza Khatami (Terrestrial Verses), The Things You Kill is dreamy, sexually tense, and obsessed with the parts of us that we don’t want to acknowledge in the cold light of day. A large Turkish cast falls apart when an ailing family matriarch dies in the middle of the night. How did she really die? What can be done about it? Will it change anything at all? As these questions haunt her college professor son (Ekin Koç), he enlists his mysterious hired help (Erkan Kolçak Köstendil) to help answer them. What unfolds is a dense narrative about masculinity, interpretation, and how we perceive ourselves. Khatami shoots it all with restraint, then deploys a few shocking bursts of style to reorient his audience.

The Ugly Stepsister

Turning Cinderella into a Victorian Substance, Emilie Blichfeldt’s first feature The Ugly Stepsister brutalizes its heroine as she pursues the hand of the local prince. Naturally, the stepsister is infatuated with the handsome, poetry-writing royalty, but her cruel gold digger mother is the driving force here, which leads to endless grotesque body modifications as she gets ready for the all-important ball—it’s looksmaxxing at its most horrific. A nasty and mean take on the fairy tale with a stellar lead turn from Lea Myren (who is almost always screaming, vomiting, or on the verge of either), The Ugly Stepsister savages the beauty industry as medieval torture. Brothers Grimm, eat your hearts out.