The Sundance Team on 2025 Standouts and a Few Likely Hot Buys, from ‘Spider Woman’ Jennifer Lopez to a ‘High-Octane’ Rose Byrne

Bring on the discoveries. Look back at last year’s Sundance program and a number of once-unidentifiable titles morphed, after upbeat reviews and publicity and box-office or streaming, into high-profile breakouts and Oscar contenders — from “Love Lies Bleeding,” “Kneecap,” “A Different Man,” “Thelma,” and “A Real Pain” to “Sugarcane,” “Will & Harper,” and “Black Box Diaries.”

That’s why agents, casting directors, producers, filmmakers, and executives attend the annual January festival: to be there when new talent pops up. Or, when they pop up again: Bill Condon debuted “Gods and Monsters” in 1998, and he’s back this year with his musical adaptation of “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” starring Jennifer Lopez and Diego Luna. That means we’ll be seeing Lopez descend upon Park City with her entourage. She was at the festival in 2015 for “Lila & Eve.” This year’s edition is lighter on A-list names than years past, leaving more opportunities for rising talent to nab prime Q&A and studio interview spots.

Also returning is veteran writer-producer James Schamus with a new Korean take on “The Wedding Banquet” (Bleecker Street), co-written and directed by Andrew Ahn and starring Lily Gladstone, Joel Edgerton, and Bowen Yang. “It’s a funny film,” said Sundance director of programming Kim Yutani in an IndieWire interview alongside festival director Eugene Hernandez. “There’s a warmth to it that is based around how people form queer families. It has incredible performances by the two matriarchs of the film, Joan Chen and the grandmother from ‘Minari,’ Yuh-jung Youn. It’s lovely.” “The Wedding Banquet,” one of a handful of movies heading into the festival with distribution, is a reimagining of Ang Lee’s New Queer Cinema classic from 1993, which Schamus wrote.

The Sundance Film Festival will open on Thursday, January 23 with 16 world premieres screening through the first day, and run through February 2, 2025 in Park City and Salt Lake City, Utah. “We’re diving in with films from all parts of the program,” said Yutani. “It’s just like any other day of the festival, but it’s more exciting because it’s the very beginning.”

‘The Wedding Banquet’Luka Cyprian

Salt Lake is one of three city candidates for the new Sundance location for 2027. (Boulder, Colorado and Cincinnati, Ohio are also under consideration). Sundance will make the announcement in a few months. For now, “the breakdown these next two years in Park City will be pretty similar,” said Hernandez. “A larger footprint in Park City, smaller one in Salt Lake. Then, when we make the decision, if we end up choosing Salt Lake, it would be a Salt Lake-based festival with a small portion in Park City.”

As usual, acquisition titles will front-load opening week as streaming and theatrical buyers pile into the Eccles Theatre to check out this year’s offerings. “Our entire U.S. Dramatic Competition is looking for buyers, basically,” said Yutani. “There’s nothing that has distribution. And that is exciting. There’s a lot in that 10-film selection that is going to catch people’s eyes, and within our Premieres section, too.”

The festival is prioritizing the in-person experience as it premieres 87 features from 33 countries (with 96 percent of them world premieres), with 41 percent from first-time filmmakers, including 10 backed by the Sundance labs, during the first week — all before putting the Dramatic, Documentary, and World Cinema Competition titles online for a wider public around the country. Online availability of titles in Premieres and other sections will be up to the distributors and sellers. More than 50 percent of the total Sundance titles will be available to couch surfers online. Online press and industry will get a one-day jump.

There’s no shortage of indie output: 4,138 features were submitted from 156 countries. Getting them into the festival is step one on the long journey toward release. Like last year, documentaries dot the various sections, making up 12 of the 26-title Premieres section, for example, which was once devoted to narrative films.

“This program is rooted in discovery,” said Hernandez. “There are films that are going to play, whether some of the familiar names you see under the Premieres section, with some notable alumni returning, but there’s a lot of new faces. There’s adventure in the program, there’s adventure in the filmmaking, and there’s adventurousness on screen, and how stories are being told.”

‘If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’Courtesy Sundance Film Festival

Among possible breakouts are “The Thing with Feathers,” starring Benedict Cumberbatch, who gives a “soulful performance,” said Yutani, “as he plays a father dealing with grief and having to take care of his young sons.” She also cites Rose Byrne as a Long Island therapist whose life comes crashing down in “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” — “a great actor who has almost never had this kind of opportunity to dig into a character. It’s one of these high-octane films where that little tension valve is never released throughout the entire film. And people will be intrigued by Grace Glowicki, who is the star and writer and director of ‘Dead Lover,’ which is in our Midnight section. It’s one of these committed, bizarre performances.” (The latter two films were on IndieWire’s 2025 Sundance Wish List and already come highly recommended from sources.)

Sundance perennial (and 2005 Grand Jury Prize winner for “Forty Shades of Blue”) Ira Sachs returns for his first feature since “Passages” seduced Sundance 2023, “Peter Hujar’s Day,” about a 1970s day in the life of the gay photographer, played by Ben Whishaw. Rebecca Hall stars opposite as the book’s writer, New Yorker Linda Rosenkrantz, in what IndieWire hears is a moving two-hander.

Sundance films showcase actors who stretch, said Hernandez. “It’s a place for artists to expand their reach or lead a film in a way that maybe they wouldn’t be trusted in the same way in a more traditional system. André Holland is terrific in ‘Love, Brooklyn.’ And watching Ayo Edebiri alongside a well-established John Malkovich in [horror entry ‘Opus’] is great, because you have someone who’s at the top of his talents in that role, and then Ayo, who’s younger, is formidable.”

‘The Thing with Feathers’Courtesy Sundance Institute

Among the many nonfiction titles, Yutani was moved by “Andre Is an Idiot” in the U.S. Documentary Competition. “You see a man who has been diagnosed with cancer basically re-evaluate his life as he goes through the final stages of of his life. It’s this incredible experience watching somebody and his family go through something so intense,” she said.

Hernandez points to the episodic entry from Barry Levinson and Robert May, “Bucks County,” which “looks at two young women whose families are on either side of the red/blue divide in this important county in the important state of Pennsylvania,” he said. “It’s a great way to frame or contextualize, not just the recent election, but differences in our country. And when you look at a film like ‘Heightened Scrutiny,’ Sam Fader’s doc profiling ACLU Attorney Chase Strangio, who’s a trans man, suddenly you have a film that is just being finished, but a key part of this film is what happened last week at the Supreme Court. You have films that are grappling with issues and questions in our country or in our world right now, as you always do at Sundance.”

Yutani admitted to doing a lot of weeping throughout the programming process. “The movies are emotional,” she said. “They’re intense, but then they’re also balanced by those films that are lighter, like [Carey Mulligan-starrer] ‘The Ballad of Wallis Island.’ So it’s always looking at what we have and creating the balance through a curated program.”

See the full 2025 Sundance Film Festival lineup on IndieWire right here.