20 Most Anticipated Movies of Sundance 2025

Somewhere a few hours outside of Los Angeles, there’s a faux-city named Atropia constructed and designed for military exercises. It resembles a generic Middle Eastern village, and is populated by performers who live onsite fulltime and rotate playing different parts. This is where an aspiring actor (Alia Shawkat) is stuck plying her trade, but hey — it beats waiting tables while waiting for her big break! Then she falls in love with a soldier (Callum Turner) who’s cast as an insurgent, and the lines between real and fake get even blurrier for this would-be Meryl Streep. Writer-director Hailey Gates uses her extraordinary 2019 short Shako Mako as a jumping-off point for what sounds like one of the more intriguing entries in this year’s U.S. Dramatic Competition lineup. Chloe Sevigny and Tim Heidecker costar.

Meet Declan (Station Eleven‘s Himesh Patel) and Dolores (Barry‘s Sarah Goldberg), a married couple on vacation in an unnamed foreign country. They’re not just seeing the sites and hitting the tourist traps, however; the duo is also trying to smuggle goods across its borders. Specifically, the highly illegal, region-specific contraband of [checks notes] cabbage. Yes, that type of cabbage. And when they’re busted by an extremely zealous customs enforcer (Matt Berry), the ensuing disaster tests their already shaky bond. Playwright-turned-filmmaker Evan Twohy’s debut sounds like just the kind of paranoid, absurdist rom-com that the present moment needs. Steven Yeun and Dave Franco costar.

From the moment she sets eyes on the sturdy wooden chair sitting in the middle of a posh downtown shop, Camille (Juliette Lewis) simply must own it. Yes, it’s somewhat expensive, but what does something as crass as a price tag mean when such a beautiful object beguiles you?! When she returns to the store the next day, alas, a “Sold” tag is attached to its arm. Camille cannot purchase it. So she does the next best thing, by becoming one with the chair and, having fused with the furniture, finally feels like she will be loved and appreciated the way she truly deserves. You can thank filmmaker Amanda Kramer (Please Baby Please) for this bit of art-deco absurdism, which stacks its supporting casts with an eclectic ensemble: Mamoudou Athie, Robin Tunney, Udo Kier, Samantha Mathis, Betty Buckley, Clifton Collins Jr. and Melanie Griffith as “the Narrator.”

There are numerous ways to deal with the inevitable mass zombie attack — trust us, it’s coming, people! — and for Vinita (Kiran Deol), her coping strategy is to host a popular postapocalyptic podcast that addresses life under a constant walking-dead siege. Now that she’s hitting her 100th episode, Vinita returns to her hometown to celebrate with a live recording. Unfortunately, it’s also the exact same moment that those hungry corpses have begun to mutate in disturbing ways. Filmed in grainy black-and-white, writer-director Meera Menon’s tweak on the zombie thriller dares to ask: What if Night of the Living Dead was crossed with This American Life? Ok, we’ll bite.

You think you get it tough? Talk to Linda, the protagonist of writer-director Mary Bronstein’s sophomore film who’s played by Rose Byrne: Her kid is sick, her husband is AWOL, she’s pretty sure her therapist is out to get her and she can’t find parking anywhere. A colleague compared this nerve-jangling ode to the pressures of motherhood and everyday living to “Nightbitch crossed with Uncut Gems,” which has our curiosity piqued, to say the least. All this, plus Conan O’Brien and A$AP Rocky in major supporting roles.

Say the name “Jeff Buckley,” and folks immediately think of two things: That once-in-a-generation voice, so prevalent on his instant classic of a debut album, 1994’s Grace; and his untimely death in 1997. Amy Berg’s portrait aims to fill in the gaps about this beloved cult singer with the four-octave range, shedding light on his early years, his first forays into music, his brief but still highly influential professional career and how his songwriting reflected his personal spiritual growth. Expect a lot of interviews with friends, family and band members, along with — God willing — a good deal of rare live footage.

Bill Condon has directed everything from the James Whale biopic Gods and Monsters to the Oscar-winning Dreamgirls — which could very well make him the ideal filmmaker to tackle this adaptation of the Broadway musical, based on Hector Babenco’s 1985 movie of the same name, in which a political prisoner (Y Tu Mama Tabien/Andor star Diego Luna) and his cellmate (Tonatiuh) fall in love after bonding over their fandom for an actress. Cast in the part of the star they both admire — previously played by Sônia Braga onscreen and Chita Rivera onstage — is no less than Ms. Jennifer Lopez. This promises to be one of the flashier premieres at this year’s festival, to say the least.

It’s been 23 years since Justin Lin brought his breakout movie Better Luck Tomorrow to Sundance, kickstarting his Hollywood career and giving Roger Ebert one of his finest “go fuck yourself” moments. Now the writer-director returns to the festival with this story of a 26-year-old Christian missionary named John Chau (Sky Yang), who’s decided that he’s going to the remote North Sentinel Island to convert the local tribesman. It’s both illegal and dangerous to travel there, but Chau believes that God is on his side. Spoiler: It does not end well. (Should this real-life cautionary tale sound familiar, it’s because it’s also the basis for the NatGeo documentary The Mission.) Meanwhile, a police officer (Radhika Apte) from India’s Port Blair region is trying to locate the M.I.A. American before it’s too late.

In his wildest dreams, Matthew (Théodore Pellerin) never would have believed that he’d befriend Oliver (Archie Madekwe), a pop star who’s about to blow up, after the singer ducks into the normie’s job to avoid rabid fans. Soon, the former retail grunt finds himself part of his famous new pal’s entourage. The thing about the inner circles around celebrities, however, is that there’s always someone on deck ready to take your spot if you slip down the pecking order. We’re going to take a wild guess and say that desperate times give way to desperate measures in writer-director Alex Russell’s thriller. Call it a hunch.

On July 12th, 1979, thousands of people rushed on to the field at Chicago’s Comiskey Park after a local D.J. blew up crates of disco records — it would later be known as “Disco Demolition Night” and is considered a low point in modern musical history. Vince Lawrence happened to be working as an usher at the ballpark that night; thanks to a court settlement, he’d later purchase a synthesizer and began playing with like-minded musicians who were also interested in making a different kind of club groove. Lawrence would end becoming one of house music’s key innovators and helped perfect a style that revolutionized way more than just the dance floor. Director Elegance Bratton (The Investigation) digs into the man, the myth, and the history of dance-music genre that still goes on and on to this day.

Paul Reubens was a struggling actor who’d drifted into comedy via the legendary Los Angeles improvisers known as The Groundlings. He had a knack for developing characters, including this nasal-voiced stand-up comic with a horrible act. Reubens would eventually name the manchild Pee-wee Herman and, out of frustration, crafted his own show that revolved around his fictional creation. The rest… well, you know the rest. Or do you? Matt Wolf (Wild Combination, Spaceship Earth) logged in 40 hours of interviews with Reubens a year before his death in 2023, and the resulting two-part documentary sheds light on the artist, his need for an alter ego, the movies, the God-tier kids show, the scandals — the whole nine.

The year is 1974. The place is downtown New York City. The interviewer is the writer Linda Rosenkrantz, and the interviewee is photographer Peter Hujar, who’s agreed to tell his close friend all about his day as part of a book project she’s working on. Filmmaker and Sundance’s favorite son Ira Sachs (Forty Shades of Blue, Keep the Lights On, Passages) turns their conversations into a two-hander for Rebecca Hall and Ben Whishaw, all in an attempt to conjure up a long-lost Bohemia filled with cigarette smoke, intellectual banter, gossip and mash notes from the underground.

From its inception as part of Dateline NBC, Chris Hansen’s To Catch a Predator segments exposed and busted online sexual predators chatting up underage kids via elaborate sting operations. (Jimmy Kimmel once dubbed it “Punk’d for pedophiles.) It’s also became synonymous with a certain type of queasy, car-wreck programming operating in the gray area between true crime and reality TV. But how has this popular series and its copycat offspring changed the way we think of bringing these deviants to justice? And has turning these stakeouts into pop entertainment actually done more harm than good in the long run? These are the questions that documentarian David Osit (Mayor) wants to ask, and we’re extremely curious as to what he’s come up with.

Some 30 years ago, a massive pop star named Moretti (John Malkovich) disappeared from the public eye. Now, he’s organizing a comeback from his remote desert compound filled with hangers-on and a cult of fans to do his bidding. The star has also invited a young journalist named Ariel (Ayo Edebiri) — feel free to break out your copies of The Tempest now, folks — to document the process as he mounts his second chance at stardom. Let’s just say things get complicated in director Mark Anthony Green’s feature debut, and that next to John Malkovich in Being John Malkovich, this may be the role that John Malkovich was born to play.

A musician (Blue Jean‘s Rosy McEwen) and her field-recording husband (Dev Patel) are holed up in a cottage deep in the woods of Wales circa 1976, working on using found natural sounds for a new project. One day, he stumbles across a makeshift circle in the middle of the forest, picks up an odd frequency and loses consciousness. Once the man awakes, a mysterious boy (Jade Croot) starts showing up at their house, insinuating himself into the life in the most menacing of ways. Bring on the U.K. folk-horror!

We’ve been anxious to see what filmmaker Max Walker-Silverman would do to follow-up his wonderful feature debut A Love Song, one of the highlights of Sundance 2022. The answer: a drama about a rancher who must start over after a devastating fire forces him to look for another way to take care of his family. (Editor’s note: Considering the situation in Los Angles, how viewers will feel watching the movie at this particular moment is anyone’s guess.) To be honest, this had us at “Max Walker-Silverman’s new film,” but when you consider that the rancher is played by Josh O’Connor — who, after last year’s one-two punch of La Chimera and Challengers, is one of the most compelling screen actors working right now — it’s not surprising that this is one of the fest’s more sought-after screening tickets this year.

Filmmaker/bandleader/human-music-encyclopedia Ahmir Thompson — you know him as Questlove — follows up his invaluable 2021 documentary Summer of Soul with this deep-dive portrait of Sylvester Stewart, the ex-radio D.J. who turned Sly & the Family Stone into one of the most groundbreaking bands of all time. Then he hit a rocky patch in the mid-1970s and never fully recovered. Expect loads of vintage live footage that attests to what a dynamite band they were and why Stone was considered such a revolutionary breaker of musical boundaries, but the doc’s subtitle — “The Burden of Black Genius” — suggests Questlove is also going after bigger cultural game as well.

A widower (Benedict Cumberbatch) dealing the recent death of his wife tries to protect his two young sons, keep the overwhelming grief at bay and not lose his grasp on reality, in that order. That last part proves to be quite the task, given that there seems to be something supernatural stalking him and the kids in their apartment. It might just be a figment of his imagination, or it could be something far more malevolent and all too real. If you’ve read Max Porter’s novella Grief is the Thing With Feathers, then you know the deal. We can only assume that director Dylan Southern’s adaptation is just as bone-chilling.

Andrew Ahn (Driveways, Fire Island) directs this remake of Ang Lee’s 1993 romantic comedy in which a young man (Bowen Yang) in need of a green card marries his friend (Kelly Marie Tran). It’s a completely transactional union, until his grandmother (Oscar-winner and Pachinko MVP Youn Yuh-jung) decides to throw him an extravagant, traditional wedding. She also does not know he’s got a long-term boyfriend as well. Lily Gladstone and Joan Chen costar.

Director Charlie Shackleton allegedly had the rights to adapt Lyndon E. Lafferty’s book The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up — in which the retired California Highway Patrol officer claimed that he knew the real identity of the serial killer who plagued the Bay Area in the 1970s — into a docuseries. Then, for reasons that remain murky, the author’s estate pulled out of the deal. So rather than presenting a deep dive into one man’s quest to solve that case, Shackleton describes what he would have done if had he gone through with the project. And quicker than you can say “give me the next Making a Murderer,” this meta-documentary skewers the clichés so beloved by the modern True-Crime Entertainment Complex while showing you exactly how this brand of nonfiction sausage gets made.