10 Sundance Film Festival Movies We Can't Wait For

Get the scoop on 10 fantastic docs and dramas our critic loved

Lisa Kennedy,

AARP

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Published February 04, 2025

Josh O'Connor and Lily LaTorre appear in 'Rebuilding' by Max Walker-Silverman, an official selection of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.

Jesse Hope/Courtesy Sundance Institute

Even though the 2025 Sundance Film Festival felt a bit subdued, haunted by the L.A. fires and the fest’s upcoming move from Park City, Utah, its home for 40 years, it remained the mighty centerpiece of independent cinema. There were gleaming performances, glimmers of new careers being hatched, and much grappling with a complicated world.

Sundance is the marketplace where studios and streamers buy many of the prestige pictures you’ll see on-screen this year and in next year’s awards races. Recent hits Thelma, Hit Man, My Old Ass and Presence came from Sundance, as did all the current Oscar documentary nominees and Oscar-nominated A Real Pain.

Here are ten Sundance movies to look out for in the coming year, with release dates announced so far.

Jimpa

John Lithgow, 79, strikes quite the pose as Jim, an aging gay academic in this story of families birthed and chosen. He left his young children and wife in the ‘70s, and now his grown daughter Hannah (an equally compelling Olivia Colman, 51), a filmmaker, visits him in Amsterdam, bent on making a movie “without conflict,” about her parents’ seemingly accepting and affirming relationship. But conflicts may arise, especially since Hannah’s non-binary child Frances (Aud Mason-Hyde) hopes to remain with Grandpa Jim (“Jimpa” as he likes to be called) in Amsterdam once the parents return home to Australia. It’s a very personal, partly autobiographical work from Sophie Hyde, whose grownup sexual awakening film Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (2022) was such a delight. Jimpa has its over-earnest moments. But Lithgow is so aglow here as a difficult man that, like his friends and family, we make allowances.

Sly Lives! (AKA the Burden of Black Genius) (On Hulu and Disney+ Feb. 13)

In the late sixties and early seventies, Sly Stone (née Sylvester Stewart), 81, and his Family Stone were a comet ablaze. Documentarian Questlove, 54, has thrilling archival footage and savvy interviewees like Living Color guitar maestro Vernon Reid, 66, and D’Angelo, 50 sharing wisdom. The clips of Sly in his Bay area deejay days, at Woodstock, and on The Mike Douglas Show depict an innovator lit from within. In his druggy decline, he was just lit. With his gender-diverse, mixed-race ensemble, and funk-infused anthems of inclusion like “Stand!,” “Family Affair” and “I Want to Take You Higher,” Sly is an obvious precursor to Prince. “Sing a Simple Song,” sang Sly. This is a deep dive into the man — a not-so-simple song.

Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore (tentatively scheduled on PBS late 2025)

Marlee Matlin, 59, the first deaf actor to win an Oscar (best actress for 1986’s Children of a Lesser God), costarred with the second, Troy Kotsur, 56, in 2022’s CODA. The events of her life, told in this engaging PBS American Masters documentary, have a celebrity tell-a-lot familiarity: her affair with Children leading man William Hurt; his alleged abuse; her becoming sober. But it’s striking the way Matlin and director Shoshannah Stern (who is also deaf) relate the actor’s life as a groundbreaker, an accidental and then intentional advocate, shifting between captions, speech and the sounds and potent silences that accompany American Sign Language.

Kiss of the Spider Woman

Manuel Puig’s acclaimed novel about prison cellmates Valentin, a leftist activist, and Molina, a gay man in jail on morals charges, has journeyed from screen to stage and back again. William Hurt and Raul Julia starred in the 1985 film. Now, director Bill Condon (Chicago) gives 1993’s Tony-amassing 1993 stage musical its close-up, with Diego Luna as the revolutionary and Tonatiuh as the cinema-obsessed Molina. But it’s Jennifer Lopez, 55, who holds captive our imaginations as the star of Molina’s movie-spinning fantasies.

The Wedding Banquet (In theaters April 18)

Unbeknownst to his grandparents in Korea, scion Min (Han Gi-Chan) wants to stay in the U.S. with his boyfriend Chris (Bowen Yang). The couple’s dear friends Lee and Angela (Lily Gladstone and Kelly Marie Tran) have been trying to get pregnant, but the IVF treatments are too costly. Min makes a proposal (two, actually) that sends this reprise of Ang Lee’s successful 1993 romantic comedy into a whirlwind of subterfuge, laughs and lunacy. The young actors have an enjoyable chemistry. But the film deepens mightily once Minari’s Oscar-winning Youn Yuh-jung, 77, arrives as Min’s no-nonsense grandmother, proving once again why she’s a legend in Korea and should become one here.

Rebuilding

The audience gave this quiet drama about a rancher who loses all when a Colorado wildfire ravages a wooded valley a sustained standing ovation that got loudest for star Josh O’Connor (Challengers). He plays Dusty, a divorced father living in a small outcrop of FEMA trailers along with other victims of the blaze. Where will they go? Rebuilding unfolds with clear-eyed care, and feels like a rooted rebuff to the sudsy melodrama of Yellowstone.

If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You (At Berlin Film Festival in February, U.S. release coming soon in 2025)

The sick child in this dark comedy-drama has a bleating voice only a mother could love. Even then, Linda is driven to her limits. Rose Byrne gives a performance for the ages as an exhausted mom and cratering therapist who cannot heal herself. Conan O’Brien, 61, portrays Linda’s shrink. What a fine double bill this movie (written and directed by Mary Bronstein) would make with Nightbitch, an equally twisted look at the demands of modern motherhood.

Sally (In theaters in 2025)

This documentary on Sally Ride braids her professional and personal lives with a nuance that wasn’t possible for the astronaut when she entered the first NASA class with women in 1979 and became the first woman to go into space in 1983. Tam O’Shaughnessy, 73, Ride’s life partner for 27 years, along with Ride’s mother and sister, add to our understanding of the late maverick’s sacrifices and successes.

Sorry, Baby

Comedian Eva Victor can be ridiculously funny, and her writer/director debut finesses its sorrowful moods as ably as its amusing notes. She gives a perfectly timed performance as Agnes, a young woman living in the aftermath of a sexual assault. An ace ensemble including John Carroll Lynch, 61, adds to Victor’s quietly triumphant turn in a film that resists trauma to tell a deeper story about trauma.

Come See Me in the Good Light

In this incandescent documentary, comedian Tig Notaro, 53, introduces her friend, the spoken-word star Andrea Gibson, to a sell-out crowd in what is likely to be Gibson’s last performance. Notaro had an outsized role in getting director Ryan White’s documentary made. She knew that the story of Gibson’s diagnosis of ovarian cancer, and the way they and their wife, Megan Falley, were navigating early death, was as affirming as it was rending. Gibson’s wit is dry, incisive and warm-hearted, and the poems woven throughout the film speak to their deep love of this mortal coil.

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Lisa Kennedy, a regular AARP film critic, is a former Village Voice editor (1986-96) and Denver Post film critic (2003-15) who writes on popular culture, race and gender for Variety, The New York Times, Essence, American Theatre, the Denver Post, and others.