Best Movies of 2025 Sundance: Twinless, Lurker and More

A singularly powerful exposé of the inhumanity of the American prison system. Directed by Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman, the film looks at life inside several Alabama facilities, where it captures not just a culture of chronic abuse but of sanctified lawlessness. The incarcerated men deliver their eyewitness accounts through contraband cellphones, revealing the cover-up of one prisoner’s hideous murder at the hands of a guard. We’re confronted at every turn by the prisoners’ stubborn humanity, as the nightmare they’re caught up in gathers the force of a thriller. (Read the full review by Owen Gleiberman.)

Tim Key affably plays a two-time lottery winner who would do anything to bring together his favorite band, McGwyer-Mortimer, a folksy duo who have long since split up, both as musical and romantic partners — including spending a good chunk of his winnings on a private concert. As writers, Key and his comedy partner Tom Basden avoid toothless syrupy sentiments and handle the melancholic resolution of the couple’s story in a masterful and realistic way that rings true to the heart. (Read the full review by Tomris Laffly.)

Director Khalil Joseph radically reimagines the world through a Black lens, while self-reflexively observing the difficulties of doing so. The film is a pulsing, essayistic docu-fiction piece that defies categorization. It unfolds partially on a futuristic, polygonal transatlantic vessel boarded by a journalist and an arts academic. However, this narrative framing device — which often loops back on itself, as a dreamlike film within the film — is merely an anchor for a more elliptical, esoteric narrative about personal and political history. (Read the full review by Siddhant Adlakha.)

Utilizing one of Noam Shuster Eliassi’s uproarious stand-up routines as its narrative spine, Amber Fares’s urgent, eye-opening and enormously compassionate documentary takes its name from the comedy show that she developed at Harvard University upon an invitation. As we learn throughout the film, Eliassi owes much of her progressive worldview to her upbringing in the only village in Israel where the Palestinian and Jewish people live together. The film does the impossible and delivers radical ideas through humor. Rarely has comedy felt this serious and urgent. (Read the full review by Tomris Laffly.)

Set in a remote North Macedonian village, Georgi M. Unkovski’s music-soaked, delightfully humorous and unpretentiously stylish debut tells the story of a teenage boy defying his traditional community. Neither saccharine nor emotionally slight, “DJ Ahmet” is grounded on the bruising realities of life in patriarchal societies where there’s little space for men to engage with their emotions or for women to have full agency over their lives. The wondrous drama seamlessly straddles the line between laugh-out-loud crowd-pleaser and art-house gem. (Read the full review by Carlos Aguilar.)

Delivering a feverish, raw-nerve performance, Rose Byrne drives a virtuosic portrait of mental unraveling that uses every tool in Mary Bronstein’s arsenal to re-create an end-of-the-world feeling on the most intimate scale. With her husband away and her daughter hooked up to a constantly beeping medical device, Byrne’s exasperated Linda may be going out of her mind, but Bronstein puts us squarely inside it, as the walls close in, the ceiling collapses and the floor buckles beneath her. (Read the full review by Peter Debruge.)

Jeff Buckley had a voice that was so breathtaking, so ethereally soaring, he sounded like Nina Simone crossed with Robert Plant crossed with the most impassioned angel God had ever gifted. Amy Berg’s rapturous documentary follows Buckley’s extraordinary rise in the ’90s and his tragically cut-short life. The film captures how Buckley was on his way to becoming a staggeringly huge star. But it also charts his demons, and the way that his accidental death by drowning in 1997 had an eerie outline to it. (Read the full review by Owen Gleiberman.)

A nifty and unsettling parable of the pathology of fame in our time. It tells the story of Matthew (Théodore Pellerin), a nobody who works in one of those bare-bones L.A. clothing boutiques, and how he insinuates himself into the inner circle of Oliver (Archie Madekwe), a budding pop star who has legions of screaming fans but is trying to leap to the next level. Matthew becomes Oliver’s bro, his hanger-on, his social media camera buddy. And Matthew is grateful for the attention — so grateful, in fact, that he’ll do anything, and stop at nothing, to keep it coming. The writer-director, Alex Russell, works with a highly accomplished jittery cellphone-camera aesthetic that makes the entire movie a mirror of what it’s about: the fleeting I-shoot-a-video-of-myself-therefore-I-am celebrity that’s become the coin of the realm in the Instagram era. Pellerin turns Matthew the geek into a character of startlingly subtle and unnerving calculation. (Read the full review by Owen Gleiberman.)

Both formally innovative and philosophically necessary, Geeta Gandbhir’s tense true-crime documentary reconstructs a dispute that ended in tragedy — from the very first 911 call to the final courtroom verdict — almost entirely from official footage. The resulting thriller unfolds like a cross between “Paranormal Activity” and “End of Watch,” leaving audiences free to draw their own conclusions. Bodycam footage reveals shooter Susan Lorincz’s most insidious tool: the way she misrepresented the situation and tried to manipulate the authority figures when they arrived. (Read the full review by Peter Debruge.)

Ira Sachs’ magical time capsule of a movie consists entirely of Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw), the noted New York photographer of the 1970s and ’80s, having a rambling conversation with his friend, Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall), in which he recounts everything he did the day before. Whishaw is astonishing as the sweet, morose, gay, chain-smoking, furtively sincere, faraway-eyed Hujar. Even when what he’s talking about is quite ordinary, the film salutes the hidden transcendence of the everyday. (Read the full review by Owen Gleiberman.)

Between 2004 and 2007, NBC’s pedophile-baiting “To Catch a Predator” captured the public’s imagination, announcing itself as not just reality-based entertainment but a protective public service. The show delivered justice as the people preferred to see it: visibly, ruthlessly and on television. David Osit was among the many who were hooked; 20 years on, his measured, nuanced and finally gut-punching documentary wonders why. His brilliant, subtly needling film leaves us unnerved and alert, but not certain of our convictions. (Read the full review by Guy Lodge.)

Stephan James, with a pensive baby face and a moodiness torn from the depths, plays Ricky, a young man from East Hartford, Connecticut, who has just gotten out of prison (after spending half his 30 years there) and is struggling to find his way in a world that seems booby-trapped. He doesn’t want to go back. But why does he keep making it more difficult for himself? The writer-director, Rashad Frett, has a gift for pace and tension and mood, as he tells this story with lacerating honesty, dramatizing how the system’s road blocks mingle with Ricky’s self-sabotage. (Read the full review by Owen Gleiberman.)

A dazzling and definitive funk-pop documentary. Questlove, in his second feature (after “Summer of Soul”), confronts the life and legacy of Sly Stone, investigates it, holds it up to the light, tears it apart, and puts it back together like the bravura mixmaster he is. Jammed with penetrating interviews and extraordinary archival footage, the film flashes by in a kaleidoscopic way that tickles our eyes and ears. Yet Questlove takes the time to meditate on what he’s showing you — how Sly and the Family Stone took funk and gave it wings, smashing down walls and categories, elevating joy into an ideology. The movie also documents Sly’s descent, which was severe. It was fueled by his cocaine addiction, though as the film’s subtitle suggests, he’d achieved a new kind of Black fame that the system fed on and on some level didn’t trust. (Read the full review by Owen Gleiberman.)

A standout of the U.S. dramatic competition, Eva Victor’s disarmingly funny, slow-to-unfold debut is less a film about sexual assault than it is a serious look at the process of rebuilding after such an experience. As sympathy merges with satire, and acceptance leads to questions (rather than the other way around), the film works because the writer-director-star strikes such a tricky tone: Her debut is warm and compassionate, advancing a conversation for which we’re still trying to find the words. (Read the full review by Peter Debruge.)

Joel Edgerton channels the spirit of the men who tamed the American Cascades, chopping down trees and laying track. Somewhere between an elegy and an anthem, “Jockey” director Clint Bentley’s gorgeous, almost century-spanning film takes its inspiration from a slender, evocative novella by Denis Johnson that honors the manual laborers who built this country, focusing on one in particular, Robert Grainier, who carved out a window of happiness for a time. Just because Terrence Malick’s influence can be felt doesn’t mean that Bentley hasn’t found his own vocabulary. “Train Dreams” feels almost quilt-like in the way its pieces fit together, with certain sounds and images flickering briefly, almost subliminally, across our consciousness, often to echo further on. The film’s overarching design follows meaningful encounters, many of them with people Grainier meets just once or twice, but whose words shape his understanding of the world. (Read the full review by Peter Debruge.)

In James Sweeney’s disarmingly funny second feature, two men meet in an emotional support group for those who’ve lost an identical sibling. That seems as good a place as any to talk about codependency, although it’s the even more universal subject of loneliness that animates the insightful coping comedy. “Twinless” treats bereavement with utmost sincerity, allowing Dylan O’Brien (in an impressive dual role) to play the tears and ensuing numbness as realistically as possible, while Sweeney plays a cringey, more complicated character. It’s a tonal tightwire act, as the writer-director-star balances unconscionable behavior with an earnest look at bereavement, anxiety and anger management. (Read the full review by Peter Debruge.)