The 2025 edition of the Sundance Film Festival—poised to run from January 23 to February 2 in Park City and Salt Lake City, Utah—finds the beloved mountainside showcase at its most idiosyncratic: starry, of course, but also independently minded, irreverent, and often delightfully weird. From a hair-raising horror film centered on Ayo Edebiri to a rambunctious musical featuring J Lo, these are the 12 releases not to miss this time around.
Peter Hujar’s Day
After the immense success of Passages, Ira Sachs is back with an atmospheric portrait of New York’s downtown art scene in the 1970s, with Ben Whishaw as the titular pioneering photographer and Rebecca Hall as author Linda Rosenkrantz. Over the course of 24 hours, the pair discuss fellow luminaries, navigate existential fears, and reflect on the joys and struggles of being an artist.
Jimpa
Sundance regular Sophie Hyde (Animals; Good Luck to You, Leo Grande) tells a touchingly personal story in this family drama, casting her own child, Aud Mason-Hyde, as a nonbinary teen taken to Amsterdam by their mother (Olivia Colman) to visit their hedonistic gay grandfather (John Lithgow). A fascinating examination of intergenerational tensions and LGBTQ+ solidarity.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
With its hilariously Sundance-y title, Josh Safdie among its producers, and an onscreen ensemble including everyone from Rose Byrne and Conan O’Brien to A$AP Rocky, Mary Bronstein’s A24-produced pitch-black comedy is a must-see: a surreal account of juggling health scares, a home renovation, and solo parenting that looks set to give Nightbitch a run for its money.
Rebuilding
A tale likely to resonate with many amid Hollywood’s current crisis, Max Walker-Silverman’s gentle drama transports you to the American West, as a raging wildfire destroys a precious family farm and ravages a struggling small town. As those affected—Josh O’Connor, The White Lotus’s Meghann Fahy, and True Detective: Night Country’s Kali Reis—begin to pick up the pieces, their local community rallies behind them, too.
Opus
When a soft-spoken but ambitious journalist (Ayo Edebiri) is invited, along with a smattering of other writers and fans, to the remote desert home of a pop legend (John Malkovich) who mysteriously disappeared decades ago, she gets much more than she bargained for in Mark Anthony Green’s A24 chiller. Expect bizarre musical numbers, a disturbing game of cat and mouse, a repudiation of celebrity worship, and a supporting cast including Juliette Lewis, The Last of Us’s Murray Bartlett, and Prey’s Amber Midthunder.
Rabbit Trap
Also playing in the festival’s revered Midnight section—which has featured everything from The Blair Witch Project to Hereditary and The Babadook—is this ’70s-set folk horror from Bryn Chainey. It follows an avant-garde musician (Blue Jean’s Rosy McEwen) living with her husband (Dev Patel) in a cottage in a dense Welsh forest, where their quiet existence is suddenly interrupted by a nameless child who turns up on their doorstep. Cue utter pandemonium.
Atropia
Actor Hailey Gates (Uncut Gems, Challengers) makes her feature directorial debut with this inventive rom-com. It unfolds in a military role-playing facility on the edge of LA (yes, really), where a performer who dreams of being a real actor (Alia Shawkat) falls for a soldier (Dua Lipa’s beau, Callum Turner) cast as an insurgent. Add Chloë Sevigny in a supporting role and Luca Guadagnino as a producer, and you have what feels like a cult classic in the making.
Kiss of the Spider Woman
Stepping into Chita Rivera’s feathered headdress for this lavish big-screen reimagining of the flamboyant, Tony-sweeping musical of the same name—about prisoners in 1980s Argentina who fondly remember a legendary silver screen diva—is none other than Jennifer Lopez. With Diego Luna as her co-star and Bill Condon (who adapted the screenplay for 2002’s Chicago and directed 2006’s Dreamgirls) at the helm, if it lives up to expectations, it should see the Oscar nominations rolling in.
Ricky
Stephan James, who dazzled in If Beale Street Could Talk and Homecoming, and Sheryl Lee Ralph, who always charms in Abbott Elementary, are the duo at the heart of Rashad Frett’s portrayal of a misunderstood 30-something trying to adjust to civilian life after more than a decade in prison, and his tough but big-hearted parole officer determined to keep him on the straight and narrow. It promises to be both eye-opening and life-affirming.
By Design
The pithy logline for Amanda Kramer’s kooky satire—a takedown of the overused social scripts we rely on to convince ourselves that our lives have purpose—starring Juliette Lewis, Melanie Griffith, and Kinds of Kindness’s Mamoudou Athie reads: “A woman swaps bodies with a chair, and everyone likes her better as a chair.” It just doesn’t get more Sundance than that.
The Thing with Feathers
Hot on the heels of Netflix’s Eric, Benedict Cumberbatch plays yet another tormented father in Dylan Southern’s hallucinatory take on Max Porter’s profoundly moving novella Grief Is the Thing with Feathers. Devastated by the unexpected death of his wife and grappling with the realization that he’ll now have to raise his two young sons alone, he slowly loses his grip on reality and becomes convinced that he’s being stalked by a malevolent presence.
Train Dreams
In this epic but intimate period piece helmed by Sing Sing’s co-writer, Clint Bentley, Joel Edgerton takes the lead as a laborer constructing railroads in the vast American wilderness at the very start of the 20th century. Joined by the likes of Felicity Jones, The Banshees of Inisherin’s Kerry Condon, and William H. Macy, our hero is haunted by his past and bewildered by the rapidly changing world around him, attempting to make sense of the age of the locomotive—and his unique position within it.
This article was originally published on Vogue.com.
