At this time next week, I’ll (hopefully) be in the air heading to another year on the ground at the Sundance Film Festival — my fourth.
I can hear your eyes rolling back in your head as I wind up to share why, actually, it’s about this time of the year when I ask why exactly I go back to Park City for this festival. It’s miserably cold. The venues are far apart, and the ability to easily get between them is basically non-existent. It’s obscenely expensive (so maybe upgrade your subscription?) in everything from lodging to transit. Finding food is next to impossible.

And yet, as I told friend of the newsletter
, writing for FilmFreeway:“There’s a sense of ownership that Sundance instills for those first crowds at the films selected to play at the festival. It’s your discovery in a way that is unique in comparison to other events at the world-premiere tier. There’s no better festival for amassing a fan base of people willing to fight for a film to be seen as hard as its production team fought for it to get made. Sundance makes its audiences feel like a part of a movie’s story, and that sense of connection lasts long after the snow melts in Park City.”
There’s simply nothing like catching that Sundance premiere that gives you a real sense that you were there from the beginning. I’ve been lucky enough to feel that with Other People, Call Me By Your Name, Mudbound, and A Different Man. But as with many Sundance titles, the signs are there for those willing to look. A festival sensation does not just fall out of a coconut tree. (Too soon?)
If you’re not heading to Sundance in person, here are some ideas for 10 films from directors who could be breaking out big from 2025’s festival edition. Once they come down off the slopes and onto screens for wider audiences, you can say you saw it coming just a little bit earlier.
Amreeka, available online through link on Oregon State’s website
Cherien Dabis’ Amreeka, a tale of Palestinian-American families trying to regrow their roots in different soil, is way too new a film to require an archeological dig to find. This movie came out in 2009, for heaven’s sake! It’s bizarrely unavailable to stream, save for an upload (presumptively legal?) on an educational site, but it’s worth the effort. What sets Amreeka apart from a boilerplate yarn about immigrants coming to America is that this mother and son don’t feel like there’s much of a home for them anywhere, as Dabis’ crucial expository sequences highlight the pains of their life under Israeli military occupation. The film nimbly balances many different attitudes toward assimilation inside the multifamily household in suburban Illinois. That capacity for harmonizing ought to be useful for Dabis’ upcoming Sundance premiere All That’s Left of You, which traces intergenerational trauma passed through a Palestinian family.
Better Luck Tomorrow, available to rent from various digital platforms
Justin Lin will have quite the narrative built in for his return to Sundance. In many ways, he’s an embodiment of what the festival promises to young filmmakers: a launchpad into the industry. Since breaking out of the 2002 festival with Better Luck Tomorrow, he’s since gone on to lead major franchises like Star Trek and The Fast and the Furious. After bombing out of Fast X spectacularly, he’s now back to his roots with Last Days, a smaller-scale story of an Asian-American missionary intent on converting a remote population to Christianity. I’ll be curious to see if he can recapture some of the magic of Better Luck Tomorrow, a teen adventure saga that stems from the collision of Asian-American achievement culture against the low ceiling of affirmative action. With these communities being cynically mobilized as foot soldiers against racial equity, it’s a film whose take on the makeshift nature of ethnic consciousness as a model minority is worth revisiting.
Driveways, Amazon Prime Video
Teamwork and cooperation amidst adversity are at the heart of the masterwork that is Andrew Ahn’s Driveways. He establishes the film’s tender, understated compassion within minutes (wordlessly, too) and maintains his hold on the heartstrings until the end. He lets go after only 83 minutes with 8-year-old Cody (Lucas Jaye) and his grouchy octogenarian neighbor (Brian Dennehy) — a complete experience, to be clear, but one that could easily have sustained a longer runtime without breaking the film’s gentle spell. Ahn leveled up in scale with 2022’s Fire Island, an uproarious queer reimagining of Pride & Prejudice, and I’m eagerly anticipating his update of Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet at Sundance with Bowen Yang and Lily Gladstone in tow.
Lemonade, YouTube (various music videos)
One name caught many people’s eyes in the Sundance lineup announcement: Khalil Joseph, the music video director best known for his collaborations with Beyoncé. While Lemonade had many credited directors trying their hand at different songs, Joseph was the first creative that the artist approached — and capped the visual album off emphatically with “All Night,” something of a thesis statement for the whole project. His BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions, premiering in Sundance’s boundary-pushing NEXT section, is one of the most exciting question marks for the festival as Joseph adapts his video installation into a feature format.
A Love Song, Hulu
The surprise sensation of Sundance 2022 for me was Max Walker-Silverman’s plaintive A Love Song, which elevates character actress Dale Dickey into the spotlight. Whether it’s Winter’s Bone, Iron Man 3, Hell or High Water or Palm Springs you recognize her from, it’s likely you responded to the way her face feels like it tells a story. Most other movies aren’t interested in exploring that … and A Love Song isn’t most movies. This is a modest film of just 80 minutes that is often content to sit with Dickey’s stoic Faye, a woman living in a mobile home with her memories and her solitude, as she reconnects with her childhood sweetheart (West Studi). One of my most anticipated sights of the upcoming festival is Rebuilding because I can’t wait to see how he’ll find mountains inside the crevasses of star Josh O’Connor’s visage.
Mayor, available to rent from various digital platforms
Several films about the Israel-Palestine conflict will be playing in this year’s festival, although one of them won’t be from David Osit. The documentarian who released Mayor, one of the great non-fiction works about the geopolitical situation, will instead be premiering Predators about the history and legacy of the show To Catch a Predator. Osit’s chronicle of Musa Hadid, the mayor of Palestine’s de facto capital Ramallah, is a modest monument to continuing human decency and diplomacy in the face of continued challenges. It’s a film able to pinpoint a wide range of emotions within the fraught situation with a tactile quality that lesser filmmakers only give lip service to providing.
Personal Truth, YouTube
You can’t help but form a connection to a filmmaker’s work when they quite literally perform one of their films to you in a 1:1 setting, so of course I’m in the bag for whatever Charlie Shackleton has in store with Zodiac Killer Project in the NEXT section. (Necessary disclosure: one of the film’s producers, Catherine Bray, is a friend through the film festival circuit.) The spirit of interrogating truth and narrative within the true crime genre in Zodiac Killer Project has been alive and well in Shackleton’s short work for years, most notably in Personal Truth. I can promise this investigation into the Pizzagate saga of 2016 is not the documentary you’d expect on the subject … in the best possible way.
Terrestrial Verses, Criterion Channel
Sometimes, a stylistic straight-jacket is a blessing for an emerging filmmaker. That certainly proved the case for Alireza Khatami, who co-directed Terrestrial Verses alongside Ali Asgari. This slender 77-minute collection of vignettes features nine single scenes, all captured with a fixed camera in a single shot focused on one individual as they barter with Iran’s Kafkaesque bureaucracy (only heard off-screen). Khatami and Asgari know exactly how long they can stretch this conceit to maximize the impact of the seriousness and silliness of the unseen authority. Though Khatami is breaking out on his own for the Sundance premiere The Things You Kill (and moving the action to Turkey), I can’t help but see it as an extension of Terrestrial Verses. The logline for Khatami’s new film promises a revenge tale set off by the mysterious death of a university professor’s wife … what is that if not the logical next step (cinematically speaking) to forces that feel out of one’s control?
Tito, available to rent from various digital platforms
Having minimal resources can often result in some of the most fascinating stylistic choices. Grace Glowicki’s odd debut feature Tito is one such feature, taking bizarre and disorienting swings in a way that one would only do on a budget of $23,000. This slender 70-minute portrait of its cloistered titular character pulls out all the stops in the sound design in particular to help the audience enter Tito’s unusual headspace. It’s a disorienting, and often jarring, cinematic experience. I’ll be eager to see if Glowicki can keep that same edge in her sophomore feature Dead Lover, which premieres at Sundance.
20 Days in Mariupol, available to rent from various digital platforms
“Not to criticize anyone, it’s a stylistic choice, but very often I see war documentaries being too distant from the people whose stories they’re telling,” Mstyslav Chernov told me last year shortly before he won the Oscar. “Therefore, they lose the strength of their emotion.” I can’t say I’m excited to see how he follows up 20 Days in Mariupol with his latest update from the war in Ukraine, 2000 Meters to Andriivka, but I know it will be among the most vital films that the festival will show.
If you enjoyed this post, you might enjoy upgrading your subscription to the paid tier of Marshall and the Movies where you’d get to read conversations like the one below that dives into the art of film festival programming!
One more Decider list update for good measure: my A24 rankings got an update through their 150th release, Babygirl.
You can keep track of all the freelance writing I’ve done this year through this list on Letterboxd.
Also, a yearly highlight: David Ehrlich’s video countdown of his top 25 movies of the year has just dropped and is worth your full attention.
You can always keep up with my film-watching in real-time on the app Letterboxd. I’ve also compiled every movie I’ve ever recommended through this newsletter via a list on the platform as well.
If you’ve ever wanted to get a good sense of what makes British humanist filmmaker Mike Leigh such a singular talent, here’s a great dive into his unique methodology with Marc Maron. (And go see Hard Truths, which was just on the outside of my top 10 list!)
This sweeping overview of the Netflix film business model at n+1 will take you some time, but it’s very much worth the investment if you care about the future of the business. (Of course, the great business-knower
makes a few appearances.)Here’s a nice and digestible readout from The New York Times (gift article) on what movie producers do and why they win the Oscar for Best Picture.
I loved this postmortem from Joe Reid at Vulture on the six-movie year that abruptly halted Jude Law’s rise two decades ago.
Back to you on Monday.
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall