The Best Movies of Sundance 2025 Reminded Us That Nothing Good Lasts Forever — In Review

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The following article is an excerpt from the new edition of “In Review by David Ehrlich,” a biweekly newsletter in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the site’s latest reviews and muses about current events in the movie world.
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Before this month, the last time I went to Sundance in person was January 2020.
To go by the statistics, some of us probably were.
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POSITIVE

I hadn’t visited Sundance in person since January 2020 until this month. Standing in the lobby of the festival’s headquarters, I vividly recall—and will never forget—reading news reports about the first instance of a novel coronavirus being discovered in the United States. Donald Trump claimed to have it “completely under control,” so I naturally spent the remainder of the festival wondering if we would all perish before any of the films that had their premieres there saw the light of day (“Save Yourselves!” actually). Based on the data, it is likely that some of us were. I didn’t think that anyone sitting next to me during “Palm Springs” or “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” might already have COVID, mainly because I didn’t want it to. However, when the lights went down for “Minari,” which was my final screening of the festival, I recall thinking, “This better be really fucking good, because it feels like things are about to get really fucking bad.”. “”.

Warning: They did, and it was.

In retrospect, that may have been the only instance in the short history of the medium when the “sky is falling” feeling that streamers had already ingrained in the Sundance experience was about to be exacerbated by a completely different kind of threat, making cinema genuinely in a more serious crisis than people realized at the time. If Sundance’s audacious and admirable choice to switch to a virtual model the following year instead of canceling the festival entirely demonstrated its indispensable role in the independent film industry, the desperate attempt to survive had the unintended consequence of formalizing how the festival’s spirit had evolved since the middle had left the American film industry — at some point, the Sundance brand had become crisis (despite the fact that both versions of “Our Brand Is Crisis” had debuted elsewhere).

The last few years have only served to strengthen that brand, even with the amazing efforts of new festival directors Kim Yutani and Eugene Hernandez to maintain Sundance’s vitality while fortifying it against the future. In addition to being more difficult to sell and finance, independent films have also grown too costly to debut in Park City, forcing the festival to relocate for the first time since it relocated from Salt Lake to the mountains in 1981.

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The most inspirational thing I saw from this year’s lineup was a documentary about a man who is dying of colon cancer. Sundance may be a little too well-known for its consistent lineup of crowd-pleasing charms, which tend to overshadow the more radical and carefully chosen films that fill the festival’s sidebars. That’s a great tribute to the late subject of “André Is an Idiot,” whose charisma and outlook make you want to live life to the fullest (even if that means getting a camera stuck in your ass every few years), but it’s also a testament to a Sundance where even the sentimental movies made sure to warn us that nothing lasts forever.

I started covering Sundance the same year that KC Green drew his iconic “This Is Fine” dog, so when I finally returned to Utah last week, it felt a little surreal that the film industry was literally on fire. The place was exactly as I had left it, with the exception that nobody could put down their phones and act as though nothing was wrong. This was due to the fact that the energy of working on a cancelled TV show dampened the usual hoopla, but it was also because the movies themselves made us maintain our composure.

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