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

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. Subscribe here to receive the newsletter in your inbox every other Friday.

Before this month, the last time I went to Sundance in person was January 2020. I clearly remember — and will never forget — standing in the lobby of the festival’s headquarters and reading news reports about the first case of a novel coronavirus being found in the United States; Donald Trump insisted that he had it “completely under control,” so I naturally spent the rest of the festival wondering if we’d all be dead before any of the films that premiered there saw the light of the day (“Save Yourselves!” indeed). To go by the statistics, some of us probably were. It didn’t occur to me that one of the people sitting next to me during “Palm Springs” or “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” might already have COVID, mostly because I didn’t want it to, but when the lights went down for “Minari” — my last screening of the fest — I remember thinking “this better be really fucking good, because it feels like things are about to get really fucking bad.”

Spoiler alert: It was, and they did. 

In hindsight, that might have been the one time in the brief history of the medium when cinema was actually in a more dire state of crisis than people realized at the time, as the “sky is falling” vibe that streamers had already baked into the Sundance experience was about to be compounded by a very different kind of threat. If Sundance’s bold and laudable decision to pivot to a virtual model the following year rather than scrap the festival altogether spoke to its irreplaceable function in the indie film ecosystem, the mad scramble to stay afloat had the unintended effect of codifying how the festival’s energy had changed since the middle had fallen out of the American film business — at some point along the way, Sundance brand had become crisis (even though both versions of “Our Brand Is Crisis” had premiered elsewhere). 

Despite the incredible work that new festival heads Eugene Hernandez and Kim Yutani have done to preserve Sundance’s vitality while steeling it against the future, that brand has only been further reinforced over the last few years. Not only have indie films become even harder to finance, and even harder to sell, they’ve also become too expensive to premiere in Park City, prompting the whole festival to find a new home for the first time since it moved up the mountains from Salt Lake in 1981. 

As someone who incidentally started covering Sundance the same year that KC Green drew his famous “This Is Fine” dog, it felt a little on the nose that the film industry was literally on fire when I finally made it back to Utah in person last week. The place was just like I’d left it, the only difference being that no one could put down their phone and pretend that things were OK — not only because all of the usual hoopla was dampened by the energy of showing up to work on a TV show that’s already been cancelled, but also because the movies themselves wouldn’t let us lower our guards. 

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