Twinless (dir, James Sweeney)

Twinless finds writer-director James Sweeney & Dylan O’Brien as fast-friends who fill the voids in each others’ lives upon bonding in a bereavement group for surviving twins. Both are absolutely terrific — including brief dual roles from O’Brien who portrays both the grieving twin (simpler, small town straight bro) and the swishier urbane one who reinvented himself in Portland. Poignant yet prickly, the wry gay-straight bromance never settles for quirk or easy sentimentality. With smart cinematography and a clever story structure, Sweeney’s film repeatedly recontextualizes, deepens, and darkens the storytelling making for a electrifying watch. It also features a few shots of Seattle’s own Kraken and Climate Pledge Arena. Best of Sundance so far!

Twinless played as an official selection of the U.S. Dramatic Competition at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. It is available for online viewing from January 30-February 2.

Jimpa (dir, Sophie Hyde)

Taking its title from an affectionate nickname for their grandfather, Jimpa is an extremely personal recollection populated by a spectrum of magic pixies who, through the power of memory, are always at their kindest & most correct. John Lithgow is a charmer in the title role of an ever-provocative gay man who left his family behind in Australia to advance his career in Amsterdam. The movie finds him reuniting with his daughter and “grandthing” (a non-binary teen played by the director’s own child) who’s also dreaming of a gap year of reinvention. Although it loses itself in multi-generational representation, Olivia Colman always finds interesting notes in the sea of nice.

Jimpa played as an official selection of the Premieres section at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. It is only available in person.

LUZ (dir, Flora Lau)

From the neon glow of Chongqing to the art galleries of Paris, LUZ strains to connect disparate stories of lonely fathers & daughters through a stag hunt in the virtual realm. Intentional or not, the online game seems incredibly dull, a multiplayer game where nothing seems to happen yet everyone emerges breathless. Fittingly, then, its most compelling images are of Isabelle Huppert making a case for being alive in the real world: vaping, dancing, capering, and charging headlong into an icy sea.

Luz played an official selection of the World Cinema Dramatic Competition at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. After additional screenings in-person, it is also available online for the public from January 30–February 2.

By Design (dir, Amanda Kramer)

Impossibly, this movie about Juliette Lewis turning into a “stunning” wood chair and everyone liking her better that way is even stupider and less watchable than the logline suggests! It’s as if The Substance was just the stultifying footage of the lifeless one’s inanimate body’s off-week, gratingly by Melanie Griffith, and also with dance sequences. After about 45 minutes I felt like I’d taken enough punishment, so this was a Sundance walk-out for me.

By Design played as an official selection of the NEXT program at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. It is available for online viewing from January 30-February 2.

André is an Idiot (dir, Tony Benna)

The title refers to San Francisco advertising executive Andre Ricciardi whose idiocy is brushing off his 50th birthday colonoscopy (even after his best friend suggested they do theirs together as a spa day). For him, the consequence of an eighteen-month delay is that by the time his colon cancer is detected, it’s a stage four, almost certainly terminal. A lifelong creative and screwball, he turns this dire diagnosis into a headlong life-affirming irreverent documentary, in which he shows his version of facing cancer on his own terms. Like its subject, whose instincts for perpetual humor serve as a self-defense mechanism for himself and the people around him, the film refuses to wallow. A funny, clear eyed, and movingly personal view of living the last year’s of one’s life, even in the face of the ultimate unbeatability of death.

André is an Idiot played as an official selection of the US Documentary Competition at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. It is available for online viewing from January 30-February 2.

Rabbit Trap (dir, Bryn Chainey)

Set in 1976, this story of an avant garde composer and her field-recordist husband warns of the mossy horrors that can be awakened by making sensual electronic music from the sounds of the the remote Welsh countryside. From their cozy cottage whose basement is stacked with classic analog recording, Bryn Chainey’s folklore inspired slow-boiling creeper pits a soulful Dev Patel and witchy Rosy McEwen against an emotionally needy emissary from beyond the faerie veil. For much of its runtime, the woodsy melancholycore builds its mood from impeccable sound design, spare glimpses at nightmares, and patient observation of the natural world, which makes the third act’s swerve into literal horror tropes a bit jarring and not entirely successful.

Rabbit Trap played as an official selection of the Midnights program at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. It has additional screenings in Park City and Salt Lake City throughout the festival.

GEN_ (dir., Gianluca Matarrese)

Like the indefatigable Dr. Bini whose remarkable Milan clinic it portrays, GEN_ is a perpetually upbeat, accepting, and pragmatic collage of the vast spectrum of transformational care it provides. Ranging from fertility treatments to gender-affirming services, the clinic’s patients represent a disparate collection of people whose lives are profoundly changed by powerful hormones, dispensed with decades of expertise and compassionate care. While both are under different forms of assault from conservative laws and attitudes, the documentary holds much of the controversy on the periphery and instead remains a refreshingly candid reflection on the practicalities of each doctor-patient interaction, each striving to bring the most harmony in the least unpleasant way possible. The film is a welcome oasis and a stirring portrait of doing the right thing and handing the torch to the next generation of caregivers so you can retire to forage mushrooms in the forest.

GEN_ played as an official selection of the World Documentary Cinema Competition at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. It has additional screenings in Park City and Salt Lake City throughout the festival and is also available online for the public (January 30–February 2).

All That’s Left of You [اللي باقي منك] (dir, Cherien Dabis)

A kinetic opening sequence begins with two teens in friendly pursuit through the roofs and alleys of the occupied West Bank in 1988 and ends with the shattering shock of a stray bullet through a street protest. Writer/director Cherien Dabis (who also stars in the film) takes this tragedy as inciting motivation to delve into decades of Palestinian forced migration, indignities, resilience, and compassion through the lens of one family. She traces their journey through pivotal time points: a businessman’s expulsion from Jaffa an internment in a forced labor camp in 1948, his son’s life as an idealistic teacher in a refugee camp in 1978, the teen’s life a decade later in 1988, and beyond. While there is some reliance on make-up to capture the sweep of history, Dabis benefits greatly from casting a trio of related actors to portray key characters at different timepoints. Adam Bakri portrays the paterfamilias in 1948; his father Mohammad Bakri takes on the role as an influential grandfather, broken by time and experience; and brother Saleh inhabits the lead role as as his son across multiple time periods. Although the historical elements can feel like ever-so-slightly didactic flashbacks, when the film returns to its present day and the title’s meaning becomes apparent, the epic scope collapses to something powerfully personal, intimate, and illuminating.

All That’s Left of You (اللي باقي منك) played as an official selection of the Premieres section at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. It has additional screenings in Park City and Salt Lake City throughout the festival.