Sundance 2025 wrap-up plus February special screenings 

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• Train Dreams

There was a weird vibe, at both Park City and Salt Lake City venues, for much of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. And perhaps that was because people were talking a lot about stuff besides the actual movies.

Certainly, given the generally-left-leaning demographic of the festival crowd, a lot of that weirdness had to do with the chaos emanating from the White House during the first weeks of the new/old administration. But it was also the ongoing sense of uncertainty over the future of the festival, as the question of whether it would remain in Utah beyond 2026—or end up moving to either Colorado or Ohio—was left unanswered. In nearly any other year, the first thing someone would ask when striking up a conversation in a pre-screening line would be, "So what have you seen that's good?" In 2025, that question tended to be, "So what do you think will happen with the location?"

There wasn't even the usual industry news to chatter about, as the prospect of several multi-million-dollar distribution deals being announced during the festival felt like an artifact of another, pre-COVID time. Among the only major acquisitions announced during festival week was Train Dreams, a period epic purchased by Netflix. The adaptation of a novella by Denis Johnson from director Clint Bentley and his co-writer Greg Kwedar followed Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton), a traveling laborer and logger in the early-20th-century Pacific Northwest, and told a beautiful story about discovering connections in life. It was also the kind of epic, gloriously photographed by Adolpho Veloso, that seemed ideal for a theatrical experience. While Netflix has certainly chosen to go theatrical with some of its higher-profile features, it felt likely that it would mostly end up showing on small screens.

Still, people did ultimately talk about movies as well—and in the traditional way of festivals, a lot of that talk was about the crowd-pleasers. In the U.S. Dramatic Competition, that meant Twinless, an affecting oddball comedy about two men meeting in a bereavement support group for people who have lost twin siblings; in the U.S. Documentary Competition, it was André Is an Idiot, a wonderfully eccentric character study about a man trying to show the world the importance of getting your colonoscopy screening after his own likely-terminal cancer diagnosis.

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• The Ballad of Wallis Island

And then there was The Ballad of Wallis Island, a quirky British comedy where you could feel nearly every beat coming from a mile away, but nevertheless managed to squeeze every drop of potential out of its premise and its cast. Adapting their 2007 short film, director James Griffiths and co-writers Tom Basden & Tim Key set up a terrific idea: Eccentric millionaire Charles Heath (Key) hires fading folk-music star Herb McGwyer (Basden) for a private concert on the remote island where he lives, the latter being unaware that it's also going to be a reunion with his one-time professional (and personal) partner Nell Mortimer (Carey Mulligan). The bulk of the humor is built on the awkward interactions between Charles and Herb—and between Charles and literally everybody else, as it turns out, as though he needs to use every syllable he's had bottled up with nobody else around, usually to make absurdly strained attempts at wordplay. That delightful performance anchors something that turns into a wildly entertaining intersection between Plains, Trains & Automobiles and Inside Llewyn Davis.

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• Predators

In one interesting thematic development, many of the festival's best films turned out to be meta-narratives, playing with the idea of how storytellers can manipulate you. On the documentary side, that notion was found in the fantastic Zodiac Killer Project, British filmmaker Charlie Shackleton's video-essay chronicle not just of his own failed attempt to adapt a law-enforcement officer's memoir about investigating California's notorious serial killer, but of all the now-cliché trappings of the "true-crime" documentary genre. It was also on display in Predators, which addressed the legacy of NBC's To Catch a Predator series about sting operations catching prospective pedophiles, and asking what it is audiences actually got from the experience, as opposed to the high-minded claims of the show's creators.

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• Peter Hujar’s Day

Perhaps most effective at applying layers of storytelling was Peter Hujar's Day, from Sundance veteran writer/director Ira Sachs. He adapts the transcript of an interview conducted on Dec. 19, 1974 in New York, when photographer Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw) followed up on the request of his friend, writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall), to chronicle in detail what he did the previous day, The conversation itself is lively and frequently amusing, performed with a wonderful familiarity by Whishaw and Hall, but Sachs frequently inserts reminders that this is a filmed re-interpretation, adding to the distance and artifice already present in a transcript of a recording of a memory, with Hujar himself noting his tendency to lie. And there's something particularly thrilling about Sachs' use of Mozart's Requiem in D minor, which somehow gives an epic, Ulysses-like feel to the idea of one day in any human life. It's history, it's character study, it's 100 percent cinema, and it's so much more than two actors reading a transcript.

Perhaps fitting for a festival taking place during a tense moment, some of the best films were also filled with tension. That was certainly true of If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, Mary Bronstein's darkly comic psychodrama about a mother named Linda (Rose Byrne) whose life is a whirlwind of colliding crises: dealing with her daughter's mysterious gastrointestinal illness without any help from her husband; living out of a hotel room after the roof of their apartment caves in; coping with the drama in the lives of her patients as a therapist. Byrne's performance makes the most of all her skills, as both dramatic and comedic actor, finding the places where every parent falls short and taking them to pitches that often inspires cringes. But the neatest filmmaking trick involves the way Bronstein opts to portray Linda's daughter—or more specifically, not portray her, keeping the child's face hidden in a way that captures how Linda's own problems make it impossible for her to see her daughter as a person, rather than just one more problem to be solved.

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• The Things You Kill

And then there's the greatness on display in the Iranian/Turkish psychological thriller The Things You Kill, which manages to combine tension with that aforementioned sense of meta-narrative. Writer/director Alireza Khatami follows a Turkish academic named Ali (Ekin Koç) who begins to suspect that his mother's death, seemingly the result of a household accident, could have been caused by his father. Along the way, Ali befriends Reza (Erkan Kolçak Köstendil), the new worker on his small farm plot, and it's no coincidence that those two names together make up the filmmaker's name; trying to reconcile dueling parts of your psyche is a lot of what's going on here. But Khatami ties that in to cultural ideas of manhood, their accumulated impact over generations, and how terrifying it can be to wonder if you'll become the same kind of person your parent was. In a Sundance year that left fans with unanswered questions, it was fitting that its best feature was tied up with the idea of uncertainty.

FEBRUARY SPECIAL SCREENINGS

Salt Lake Film Society "Presenting Black Cinema": As part of Black History Month, the Broadway Centre Cinemas (111 E. 300 South) offers three special titles, with each one running Sundays, Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. Beginning Feb. 9 is Basquiat, the 1996 film biography of celebrated artist Jean-Michel Basquiat; Feb. 16 brings the previously-unreleased 1999 Annihilation of Fish by independent filmmaking pioneer Charles Burnett, starring the late James Earl Jones; and Feb. 23 is a return of the Oscar-nominated 2024 drama Sing Sing. slfs.org

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• Sign o’ the Times

Sign o' the Times: The 1987 concert film by Prince—directed by Prince, David Hogan and Purple Rain's Albert Magnoli—celebrates the Purple One with concert footage from his 1987 European concert tour, intermixed with music videos and other curiosities. The screening at Brewvies Cinema Pub (677 S. 200 West, Suite D) is part of KRCL's "Music Meets Movies" series, with the screening on Thursday, Feb. 13 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $10 at the door, 21+ only. brewvies.com

The Inn Between: Sundance stalwart documentary director Ondi Timoner (DIG!, We Live in Public) took as her latest subject the Salt Lake City-based facility providing hospice care for the unhoused. The Utah premiere of the film will also feature a moderated Q&A featuring KUER's Doug Fabrizio, staff from The Inn Between and remote participation by Timoner and producer Morgan Doctor. The screening takes place Wednesday, Feb. 12 at 7 p.m. at the Salt Lake City Main Library's Tessman Auditorium (210 E. 400 South), free to the public with RSVP. utahfilmcenter.org