THR Critics Pick the 15 Best Films of Sundance 2025
The Alabama Solution
Relying heavily on footage shot by inmates on prohibited cellphones, Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman’s powerful and gripping documentary isn’t an easy watch, but it’s a crucial one. The film’s focus is on corruption and abuses of power specific to Alabama’s prisons — and the heroism of the men who have found ways to evolve within a system that has no interest in participating in their rehabilitation and denies their basic humanity in every way. — DANIEL FIENBERG
BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions
Before his death in 1963, scholar W.E.B. Du Bois spent decades trying to publish an encyclopedia about people of African descent. That mission propels Kahlil Joseph’s hypnotic debut feature — a kinetic video essay blending Afro-futurist narrative, archival footage and memoir — that’s like an index of Black culture from the past 50 years. Joseph animates the fictional story of a journalist reporting on a transatlantic curatorial project with voiceover, captions and a style inspired by auteurs from Jean-Luc Godard to Garrett Bradley. — LOVIA GYARKYE
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The Librarians
The recent banning of books in school libraries — particularly those with LGBTQ- or race-related themes — may no longer feature highly in the headlines given the new president’s tsunami of rights-snuffing executive orders. But it’s still going on. That makes this scrupulously assembled doc from Kim A. Snyder all the more welcome. Seamlessly interweaving vintage film snippets with archival and original footage, the film observes a clutch of educators, almost all women, fighting the bans. It’s an essential chronicle full of drama and despair but also small glimmers of hope. — LESLIE FELPERIN
Pee-Wee as Himself
Culled from 40 hours of interviews and thousands of hours of archival footage, Matt Wolf’s HBO two-parter gives Paul Reubens a posthumous spotlight. By making the most of his time with his subject and refusing to sanitize the tone of their interactions, Wolf has created an enlightening and enjoyably confounding portrait of an enjoyably confounding artist. The result stands up well alongside HBO’s recent run of “Difficult Funny Men” documentaries focused on the likes of Garry Shandling and George Carlin. — D.F.
The Perfect Neighbor
In June 2023, Susan Lorincz, a white Floridian, fired a single fatal shot at her Black neighbor Ajike Owens, a mother of four, while the latter was knocking on her front door. Relying on police body camera footage, filmmaker Geeta Gandbhir reconstructs a timeline of the events that led to that day, observing a quiet community torn apart by a festering feud. It’s a propulsive account of racist paranoia, police inertia and the consequences of America’s Stand Your Ground laws. — L.G.
Peter Hujar’s Day
A uniquely beautiful experiment in big-screen biography, Ira Sachs’ character study is constructed from rediscovered tapes of a 1974 conversation between gay photographer Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw) and his friend Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall) for a book project. Led by Whishaw’s transfixing performance, the diaristic film spins compacted time into something free- flowing, expansive, illuminating and emotionally resonant, all of it achieved with elegant restraint. — DAVID ROONEY
Plainclothes
A movie palpably real for those of us who can remember years of shame, fear and secrecy, first-time writer-director Carmen Emmi’s ’90s-set thriller follows a cop assigned to a sting operation, arresting gay men cruising for sex in a Syracuse mall. His willingness to pose as bait dissolves when he starts facing his own sexual identity while getting obsessive about a similarly closeted hookup. Strong turns by Tom Blyth and Russell Tovey keep you glued to this sexy, sad, authentically gritty drama. — D.R.
Prime Minister
Directors Lindsay Utz and Michelle Walshe’s doc about Jacinda Ardern is a timely and bracingly intimate portrait of a woman in power, examining the left-wing prime minister’s work and life choices during her five-year term as New Zealand’s galvanizing head of government. Deftly editing together home videos, candid contemporaneous interviews and archival news clips, the film offers a rare firsthand look at the toll and demands on politicians when crises come flying at them. — CARYN JAMES
Rebuilding
Working in his native Colorado, as he did in his debut, A Love Song, Max Walker-Silverman again conjures a potent visual language from the landscape. This time, though, the vista is scarred by a devastating wildfire that leaves a rancher named Dusty without a home. The wrenching heart of this quiet drama, he’s played with eloquent understatement by Josh O’Connor, delivering the latest in a remarkable string of performances — and one matched beat for poignant beat by the other members of the cast. — SHERI LINDEN
Sally
Cristina Costantini’s eye-opening documentary about astronaut Sally Ride beautifully weaves together her personal story, told by the woman who was her partner for 27 years, and a detailed account of the jaw-dropping sexism Ride encountered as the first American woman in space. Affecting and socially relevant, it’s the rare film that is deeply sympathetic but doesn’t sugar-coat its heroine’s sometimes prickly personality. — C.J.
Seeds
Brittany Shyne’s quietly stunning doc observes two Black farmers in the contemporary American South, constructing an empathetic portrait of agrarian life while also revealing threats to its survival. Using a black-and-white palette to gorgeous, pointed effect — a scene of tractors plowing cotton conjures memories of a fraught history because of its resemblance to archival imagery — this is not a journalistic investigation but a poetic contemplation that recalls Garrett Bradley’s indelible Time. — L.G.
Sorry, Baby
Eva Victor directs, writes and stars in her big-screen debut, about a young New England academic gradually recovering from a sexual assault. It’s a disarmingly frank, intimate spin on the female “traumedy” — perceptive, funny and buoyed by soulful supporting turns from Naomi Ackie as the protagonist’s best friend and Lucas Hedges as her neighbor turned suitor. The film positions Victor as a triple threat, with a specific, fully formed voice blending irony and earnestness to beguiling effect. — JON FROSCH
The Stringer
How do you unravel a lie and, harder yet, the official story that’s been built up around it? That’s the question propelling Bao Nguyen’s quiet bombshell of a documentary. At its center is a famous 1972 photo (known as “Napalm Girl”) that became a shot heard round the world during the Vietnam War, and the small team of journalists that set out, 50 years later, to determine whether it was attributed to the wrong photographer. A chronicle of globe-trotting gumshoe reporting, it’s a stirring film less about geopolitics than workplace politics — and ultimately about the knotty bond between the two. — S.L.
Train Dreams
Clint Bentley’s soulful drama about an early 20th century logger in the Pacific Northwest has been beautifully adapted from Denis Johnson’s novella. Never page-bound, the story is shaped by superb acting and finely etched characters — lead Joel Edgerton gives perhaps the best performance of his career, and co-star Felicity Jones is luminous — that seem to have been lifted from a long-ago time, with faces right out of a Walker Evans catalog. It’s a ravishing, perfectly formed film that elevates Bentley (Jockey) into the league of essential American filmmakers. — D.R.
Twinless
A high-wire act of humor and compassion, James Sweeney’s sly and stirring charmer revolves around two young men (played by Dylan O’Brien and Sweeney himself) who form an unusual friendship at a twin bereavement support group. O’Brien does impressive double duty as the irascible protagonist and, in flashbacks, his extroverted gay brother, and the gripping screenplay is pocked with withering observations on grief and loneliness as well as a handful of clever twists. — L.G.
This story appeared in the Jan. 29 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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