Does Sundance Still Matter?

At the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, there were movies that provoked their share of buzz and chatter and official breathless enthusiasm. But it’s fair to say that no movie this year generated half the conversation that Sundance did about itself. The buzz was all about the festival — which city it would move to in 2027 (Cincinnati or Boulder? The smart money is now on Cincinnati), as well as the question that’s been the backdrop of that move: Can Sundance, a festival that in the ’90s altered the very landscape of cinema, find a way to sustain its relevance into the 21st century?

The jury is very much out on that. Sundance still generates excitement and headlines, as well as a small handful of films that will have a chance to make an impact. But as much as I remain a Sundance believer, the festival’s mojo is increasingly shrouded in a fuzzy “We’re still here!” blitz of incandescent self-adoration.

Even the reasons that Sundance is pulling up stakes are not all that widely understood. After 40 years, many of the denizens of Park City have grown weary of the festival. And the phenomenon of high-end skiing — vacation jaunts for the one percent — now actively competes with Sundance financially. Yet the meme that took hold, the one that I kept encountering in articles about Sundance, is that the festival has “outgrown” Park City. Really? That sounds to me like wish-fulfillment. And if Sundance has outgrown Park City, you would never know it from the diminishing vibes the festival generated this year.

In 2023, when Sundance first returned as an in-person event after the onset of the pandemic, it felt like a shadow of itself: a thinned-down, scaled-back festival. And a lingering vestige of that reality has persisted. I didn’t see the crowds on Main Street, the stalled traffic throughout Park City over the opening weekend, that I used to in the ’90s and 2000s. During the pandemic, the festival carried on by making its films available online, and that situation has continued in a modified version, with an online showcase of Sundance movies that’s made available starting midweek. So now, you can actually experience Sundance without attending it.     

I watched several of the festival’s most talked-about movies this year online, after I’d returned home, and while that was certainly a convenience, what I didn’t expect, given how much I prize the theatrical experience, is how poetically right it felt. Of all the people who will ever watch any of the 100 or so features programmed at Sundance this year, the overwhelming majority will see them at home. And the truth is that most of the films fit all too snugly into the small screen.

What really struck me, though, is that in the age of streaming, when even the two or three most celebrated American independent films of the year — the ones that get nominated for multiple Oscars, like “The Brutalist” and “Anora” — have to work overtime to win a quarter-of-the-way decent-size audience in theaters, there are now, more than ever, two Sundance Film Festivals. There’s the one that takes place in Park City and will for one more year, where every film is greeted by audiences as if it were a life-changing event (the ovations, the reverence, the momentousness). And there’s the one beyond the Sundance bubble, where a handful of these movies will actually head out into the world and do…what? Fight for their lives as pieces of entertainment.

I’ve long been a religious believer in the Sundance Film Festival, but the yardstick of my devotion has been my conviction that the best films that emerge from Sundance matter because they’re able to find a real place in the real world. We saw that last year, I think, with “A Real Pain,” Jesse Eisenberg’s revelatory buddy movie. This year, there were a couple of times when I felt the old Sundance tingle, when I saw a movie so exceptional that I thought, “This has to work in the real world. It’s just too good to be ignored.”

One of those rare Sundance films this year was “Twinless,” the tale of a kinky and devious bromance-turned-love-triangle, and a comedy crafted with so much scalding, blissed-out, puckish delight that every scene in it feels like a gift. The film’s writer, director and co-star, James Sweeney, is a major talent who knows how to keep surprising the audience. And Dylan O’Brien, who plays both a swaggering gay lothario and his lunkish straight twin brother, emerges as a splendid actor and a total movie star. So does Aisling Franciosi, as the Christian receptionist who becomes the film’s surprise romantic foil. Sweeney, given the right resources, could make a rom-com that would have mainstream audiences lining up to see it. And maybe “Twinless” already is that movie.

There were three other dramatic features I saw that leapt out. “Lurker,” Alex Russell’s hypnotic tale of a geek who infiltrates the inner circle of a pop star, is a movie organized around the addictive lure of bad behavior. The title character, played by Théodore Pellerin, is a parasite for our time who will stop at nothing in his quest to stay close to fame. “Lurker” is super-charged and rivetingly suspenseful, a tasty parable of celebrity dreams in the age of social media.

Then there was “Ricky,” directed with blistering authenticity by Rashad Frett. The tale of a young man in East Hartford (the mesmerizing Stephan James) who gets out of prison after having spent half his 30 years there, it may be the most wrenching drama about an ex-offender trying to walk the line that I’ve seen since Dustin Hoffman in “Straight Time.” And “Peter Hujar’s Day” is Ira Sachs’ minimal but magical time-capsule leap back into the scruffy bohemian utopia of art, conversation and the meaning of life without technology.

But to return, for a moment, to my feeling that these movies are too good to be ignored: Is that a reality? A hope? Or a grand illusion? The great films of the 1970s, to invoke the period that the independent film revolution was in many ways a sequel to, were astonishing works of art, but they were not “message movies.” They embodied a social vision without preaching. And that’s true, for the most part, of what I think of as the great Sundance films — movies like “Reservoir Dogs” and “Memento” and “In the Bedroom” and “The Blair Witch Project” and “Welcome to the Dollhouse” and “Big Night” and “Chuck & Buck” and “I Shot Andy Warhol” and “Napoleon Dynamite” and “Secretary” and “Whiplash” and “Manchester by the Sea.” These were movies that didn’t make you feel like you had to be a responsible citizen to sit through them.

Too many of the Sundance films now fall into the trap of leading with their Big Message, which neuters their sense of dramatic danger. The filmmaking has become more insular, more preaching to the choir of social justice, in a way that one can totally agree with on a moral level yet still feel is overly earnest and limiting. I think you could sense the festival’s underlying anxiety about this phenomenon in its decision to program “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” Bill Condon’s big-ticket adaptation of the 1992 stage musical, based on Manuel Puig’s novel (but really a variation on the famous 1985 movie). I had very mixed feelings about this film. It’s well-acted (by Diego Luna and Tonatiuh), with crisply deluxe neo-1950s musical numbers featuring Jennifer Lopez…until it descends into the endless muddle of its second half.

But the real question is: What was “Kiss of the Spider Woman” doing at Sundance? With a budget that, I’m guessing, exceeded $50 million, it has to have cost 12 times as much as just about any film there. It’s really an awards-bait movie. But the reason it was at Sundance was so that the festival could advertise its own relevance. It was the exception that proved the rule.

As a vehicle for launching independent films into the universe, Sundance remains the beautiful apparatus it always was. And I don’t expect that to change when it moves to a new city. Having voiced my own trepidation early on about this move, I now think — or at least a part of me does — that it could revitalize Sundance. (But oh, will I miss the thin-crust pizza at Davanza’s.) Moving forward, though, if Sundance is to remain relevant, both the programming and the movies that get made need to embrace a certain reality: that moviegoers today, maybe more than ever, want to be enthralled more than they want to be “enlightened.” There hardly needs to be a contradiction between those two things. But for Sundance to thrive into the future, it can’t just be the festival of films that are good for you that almost no one ends up seeing.