Everything You Missed at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival

The city on everybody’s lips at this year’s Sundance Film Festival was…Cincinnati. Countless festival guests whispered about the festival’s potential move to the Ohio city, one of three finalists in its search for a new home. The resounding consensus? “Please, not there.”

This year saw a slightly subdued Sundance with more first-time directors, resulting in slightly less star power on Main Street—until Sunday, at least, when Jennifer Lopez arrived for the premiere of Kiss of the Spider Woman. “I’ve been waiting for this moment my whole life,” Lopez told the packed crowd after being asked why it had taken her so long to do a musical. Director Bill Condon got political in his opening remarks for the film, addressing the inauguration speech in which Donald Trump proclaimed the United States would only acknowledge two genders moving forward. “That’s a sentiment I think you’ll see the movie has a different point of view on,” Condon said, receiving cheers from the audience. As Lopez added in the Q&A that followed the film, “Love can shorten the gap of any divide between people.”

Dylan O’Brien was out in full force to support his film Twinless alongside his director and costar, James Sweeney. “We’ve been on the journey together for five years,” O’Brien said. “We’re all so close to [this movie]. It’s very dear to us.” The festival’s opening night film was received enthusiastically by audiences and critics, and it remains one of the most talked-about titles at the festival.

All That’s Left of You, a film that centers on the intergenerational story of a Palestinian family forced to relocate from their home, received multiple standing ovations after its premiere. Director, writer, producer, and star Cherien Dabis held back tears while introducing the film, which she called “a love letter to my family and my people.” The project was set to begin shooting shortly before the October 7 attack on Israel; afterward, its crew had to evacuate to Jordan. The film is deeply personal for Dabis, inspired in part by her childhood experience traveling between Jordan and the West Bank with her family. “We were held at the border…for 12 hours. The contents of our suitcases were picked through,” she told the premiere’s audience. “The soldiers ordered all of us to be strip-searched, including my baby sisters, ages three and one, and my father.”

There was comedy to be found at Sundance as well. Oh, Hi!, starring Molly Gordon, who also cowrote the film, premiered to big laughs, with Gordon praising costar Logan Lerman for enduring an uncomfortable shoot: “It takes an incredible man to do this role and be tied up for an entire film.” The body-horror film Together premiered on Sunday night to screams and laughter, as real-life couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie physically become one in filmmaker Michael Shanks’s feature directorial debut. “We were going to the bathroom together,” Franco joked. “We have some photos of that that we would send to friends,” Brie added. At the very sweet premiere of The Wedding Banquet, actor Joan Chen championed the cast’s camaraderie. “These great young people…were having so much fun on set…. They were having gummies,” she said. “They were Haribo packaged gummies,” costar Bowen Yang chimed in. “Joan heard us laugh. She assumed they were edibles!”

One of the most anticipated movies at the festival, Opus, drew a packed house for its premiere on Monday night. The film, directed by former GQ editor Mark Anthony Green and set to be released in March, is part of the A24 pantheon of “new horror.” Star Ayo Edebiri plays Ariel, who wears a Radiohead shirt in the movie; when an audience member asked her to name her favorite Radiohead song, the Emmy winner, after much thought, went with “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi.”

The festival hosted its annual fundraising gala for the Sundance Institute on Friday, with honors given to Michelle Satter, founding senior director of artist programs at the Sundance Institute, and recent Academy Award nominee Cynthia Erivo, among others. “So many of us artists only have the drive of a wish, or a dream, to point us in the right direction,” Erivo said at the event. “The rest is sheer will to keep following those wishes and dreams, as though they were the North Stars of our personal skies—and if that makes me a visionary, then I have been, and am, surrounded by visionaries constantly, and I’m lucky and grateful for it.”

On Monday, Quentin Tarantino sat down for an exclusive talk with Elvis Mitchell. When Vanity Fair asked the director what he thought about the festival’s possible move to another location, Tarantino had a few suggestions: “They should find a small town with at least two hotels, enough mom-and-pop places to sustain a lot of people coming in, and a used-record store. Somewhere with a cool vibe that needs invigorating.”

The vibes felt fine at this year’s parties, though the 2025 festival was lighter on big studio events than the typical Sundance. Vibe and Onyx Collective held a post-premiere celebration for Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius), which featured a Questlove DJ set that got the crowd dancing. Cinetic held its annual Monday-night party at High West Saloon, where much of the industry reconvened to discuss the sales prospects of this year’s festival. UTA hosted its annual house, holding a filmmakers brunch with director Sweeney, Benedict Cumberbatch, and jury member Arian Moayed. And of course the club Tao took part in Sundance by playing host to an impromptu performance from Lopez on Saturday night that consisted of her standing at the DJ booth and singing along to her most famous songs. Real Housewives stars Heather Gay and Whitney Rose were also in attendance. Baby gorgeous, indeed!

For all of Sundance’s logistical gymnastics—the snow, the pilgrimages from Main Street to the Eccles—it remains American independent cinema’s holy grail. Once again, a crop of hopeful filmmakers descended upon Park City in hopes of following in the footsteps of recent festival darlings whose projects sparked bidding wars. Maybe one of them will find that their film becomes the next CODA, The Big Sick, or It’s What’s Inside. And at the very least, everyone can rest easy knowing that they weren’t attending a festival in Cincinnati.