Pop Culture Happy Hour - 2025 Sundance Film Festival: Best Movies

Episode Date: February 4, 2025

We watched many films at this year's Sundance Film Festival. Today, we're recommending some of the best things we saw, including a thrilling debut from a writer on The Bear, a timely doc about the wave of book bans across America, and a bizarro horror comedy starring Alison Brie and Dave Franco.For a complete list of the movies we loved at Sundance, Pop Culture Happy Hour on LetterboxdSee pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

We watched many films at the Sundance Film Festival, and we're recommending some of the best things we saw this year. They include a thrilling debut from a writer on The Bear, a timely doc about the wave of book bands across America, and a bizarre horror comedy starring Alison Brie and Dave Franco. I'm Aisha Harris, and joining me today on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour is film critic and senior film programmer at the Jacob Burns Film Center, Monica Kastio. Welcome back, Monica. Glad to be here. Great to have you. And also here is entertainment journalist Christina Escobar.

She's the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Latina Media Pinto Co. Welcome back to you to Christina. Thanks for having me. Awesome. Great to have you here. So Christina, Monica, and I all went out to Snowy Park City, Utah to cover the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. I ran into both of you there. It was great seeing you both.

And now we're all back. And we're going to share some of the films that are worth keeping an eye out for as they hopefully, fingers crossed, get wider release in the coming months. So let's get into it. Monica, I'm going to start with you. This is a movie that we actually sat next to each other for. Tell me more about it. Yeah, and it's a perfectly named together. Yes. It was one of the, maybe one of the breakouts that people are going to hear out of this year's Sundance. It also just got picked up by Neon, which is super exciting. So there will be an opportunity for people to check this out. But this is a feature film debut from Michael Shanks and it stars Dave Franco and Alison Brie as a couple who might be at the end of their relationship. but they decide to move to the country for her new job. And of course, they come across a mysterious cave with some mysterious things, and things get, oh, so weird. I love how this movie uses body horror as a sort of metaphor for toxic codependency

and how messy everything gets. It reminded me of the thing and of this movie called Honeymoon. I had so much fun with it. I was afraid I was having maybe too much fun and maybe, you know, shrieking a little too loud. But that's the kind of fun movie this is. So I really enjoyed it. This was one of the highlights of my Sundance this year. Yeah, I thought this is really fun as well.

And, you know, Alison Bree and Dave Franco are, of course, married in real life. So you kind of get that peak, perhaps, or not, into their relationship, probably less so because this is a really dark movie. It gets really weird. I also really appreciated the special effects here were pretty top-notch. Yeah, they're pretty gnarly. Yeah, it's pretty gnarly. I mean, this has been like quite a few years for body horror between this and the substance. I don't think it's quite as difficult to watch as the substance.

It's still out there, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But also still really, really funny and really enjoyable as well. So I also really liked watching this. And the audience that we saw it with was very into it, it seems. Like this felt like one of the crowd pleasers, just like a really weird movie. And yeah, it's just pretty fun. And this is going to be released.

It looks like sometime in August. So that's together directed by Michael Shanks. Christina, let's go with your first pick here, which is the Virgin of the Quarry Lake. Tell us about it. Yeah, my first pick is another horror film. To me, this is like why you go to Sundance is to see films like this where there's nobody you recognize, like a true indie film. And it's a really dynamic way to play with the genre because while it is, yes, a horror film and it's a young girl coming to age. horror film, it really does something a little bit different. So I think whenever you have those

basic plot points, you're going to start thinking of movies like Carrie. The protagonist is oppressed and she strikes out, which is basically what happens in this film, but it feels so very different because while there is oppression, it's largely political oppression. Their teens growing up in Argentina, there's a big political situation in the early 2000s there that they're facing and our main character is growing in her power in a way that is perhaps evil, but also really easy to root for? I was like, get them, which felt a little bit different than perhaps some of the other things you felt. I really love this film. I had a chance to interview the director, Laura Casabay, and she mentioned that the true demon she thought was the political

situation, which I thought was just so smart for how it played out in the film. Yeah, this is one I got to catch up with as well. It is pretty gruesome. There's a lot of blood in this movie. I also like the way this film plays with the idea of the lead character, you know, like a teenage girl being evil and not really wavering from that. Also, I love that it's set, you know, in the early 2000. So you've got like this sort of, there's a lot of moments where we're talking online on, you know, aim or whatever in an internet cafe. remember those? What a time. And the way that like it has a really unique sense of time and place and what it's what it was like to be perhaps a teenage girl in that era, which I was at that time, not in, not in Argentina. But like there was a lot that I could sort of pick out from that character who's played by Dolores Oliveiro. I saw so much of myself and her even though, you know, I don't think I was a bad teenager. But but but this idea of like jealousy and and wanting to lose your virgin. like all these things were very, very relatable, even amongst all the horror tropes. Yeah, I think that was really the trick of the film where it's like in some ways a descent into darkness,

but in other ways it felt like her stepping into her power. And because she was so relatable, it was easy to root for her even when she's, I mean, blowing the whole thing up going south. And it was really bloody and like interesting the interplay of like what it was to be a teenager back then, but also then layering on the political situation and how that might affect somebody growing up in their sense of self and their sense of justice. And also just like regular teenage girl emotion stuff. Like what does it mean to be passed over? How does that feel? It's not good.

Yeah, absolutely. So that is the Virgin of the Coray Lake. And it's directed by Laura Casa Bay. It sounds like it has a distribution from a Spanish studio called Phil Max, but no release date as of this taping. So we'll have to keep an eye out to see whether or not. that gets picked up at some point, but it sounds like me and Christina both really enjoyed it. So you should definitely keep an eye out. Now, we're going to stay in evil, weird, quirky territory from my first pick, which is Lurker,

directed by Alex Russell. This is the feature of film debut for him. He's written for The Bear and Beef. So if you've seen either of those shows, you might know where this is going. I think it might have been like my favorite narrative film out of the entire festival. It's kind of like All About Eve meets Ingrid Goes West, meets the other two. It's this really sharp take on paris social relationships and standum. It stars Theodore Pellarin as a retail worker who kind of worms his way into the inner circle of this

on the rise pop star who's played by Archie Medecki, who you might recognize as Farley from Saltburn. He is great here. They both are great here. And what I love about it is that, you know, Pellerin plays the sort of. of like starstruck barnacle. And then Medekwe is playing like this very self-serious pop star who's always aiming to like he's trying to be the best that he can be. But then he also just like is so insecure and has all of these like his entire inner circle is just people who are yes people. They do whatever he wants. One of them is Zach Fox who is being Zach Fox. If you are familiar

with him, he played Janine's ex-boyfriend, the crazy ex-boyfriend from Abbott Elementary. So as soon as he pops up, you know what you're getting yourself into. I just really thought that it handles familiar themes in a really clever way. It's smart. It's funny. And it's very, very dark all the way to the end. And I really loved it. And I think just Russell, the director, has such a keen eye for this sort of Gen Z social media take on celebrity that I think shows, like I already mentioned the other two.

but like it feels very of that piece, dark, funny, and I just loved it. So that for me was one of my favorites. It's Lurker directed by Alex Russell. And we're going to take a quick break before we get into our second and final picks of Sundance, so don't go away. All right, we are back and the three of us are going to continue talking about our favorite things out of Sundance. Monica, give us your second pick. My next pick is the movie Omaha, which is also a feature film debut from Cole Webley. It follows a dad who takes his two kids and hits the road as quickly as possible after an eviction.

And we don't quite know where they're headed or what's going on. Things come together kind of piecemeal. And when things really come together, whoa, hold on, bring the tissues. It's going to pull out the heartstrings. It was a really tough watch, but it's really. gorgeous. I loved, love, love, love the performances of everyone in the cast. I mean, that was the thing that stood out to me was that I believed every single one of the actors here, and two of them are children. They're babies, and they're so good. John McGarro, who you might have seen in movies like

First Cow and Past Lives, plays The Father. And in this one, he's trying to restrain his emotion so, so much that it feels like you're starting to see the cracks little by little as you go further along in the road trip. And it's just heartbreaking. But he does such a beautiful job and he does such a beautiful job with the two young actors who are Wyatt Salis and Molly Bellwright. I mean, just incredible jaw-dropping work from everybody. Yeah, I think this is the one pick that all three of us have seen. Christina, your thoughts? I did not love this movie. I had a hard time with it. I agree the acting was beautiful. The shots were beautiful. I predicted the ending a little bit, which hearts were there.

But I guess I just felt like this was a film about a person making an impossible decision. And I felt like I had no window in to why he made that decision. I think I felt somewhere in the middle between both of you. This movie definitely felt like the theme for it was withholding to a fault maybe. But I also think there were just so many moments, especially the performance by Molly Bell Wright, who I think is just, you know, child actors. I have mixed thoughts about it, especially concerning all we know about what that world is like for them behind the scenes or can be like for them behind the scenes. If you put all that away and you look at what's on the screen here, she is giving such a devastating performance. She has to play a character, a child who, like, is both old enough to sort of know that something's wrong, but not.

old enough to be able to really do anything about it or even just like fully grasp what the possibility could be. This felt very sun-dancy, like prototypical sun dance movie for me for better and for worse. But overall, I think it's definitely something worth watching. And I agree with Monica completely that like you might need some tissues. You might need, you might be bawling and taking off your glasses or whatever. It's that kind of movie. I wish I could have found mine in the dark. I kind of regretted that. I was like, oh, it's just happening. All right. Yeah. The story was so interesting to me because, yes, it does feel sundancey, but in like a good, in the best possible, a better possible way of what we think of of a sundance movie because it is a little different.

They don't tell you everything that's happening. And that's why you're also figuring this out as an adult. And then she doesn't have all the information because she's a child. So you're appreciating her perspective and how scary and confusing this all is for her. But also, I, you know, kind of saw it from the dad's perspective as well where he can't tell these kids what's going to happen next. It's really, like you said, Christina, an impossible situation. So, yeah, heartbreaks all around, but I enjoyed the movie and I enjoyed those performances quite a bit. So that is Omaha directed by Cole Webley. Christina, give us your next pick. Yeah. So my next pick is the librarians, which is a documentary film that I thought was

absolutely stellar, evocative, strong perspective. I saw the press screening of it at Sundance, and it had the most reaction of anything that I saw. And I saw like Selena and Los Dinos in a theater filled with Latinos. I saw kids with the Spider Woman. J.Lo was there. And like literally everyone was reacting so, so strongly to the librarians. So it follows librarians over the course of years as they encounter and grapple with requests to take books out of their libraries. And in political documentaries, there's kind of like two different types, right? There's the ones that feel partisan and really have a strong perspective. And then there are the ones that try to like make both sides equal. Yeah. This one is definitely has a strong perspective. It is clear that book banning is

wrong and these librarians are heroes. However, how it shows that and the like, librarians, the filmmaker Kim A Snyder picked is very strategic. So she focuses on a set of librarians who are in these southern states. They talk about being veterans, about the churches they're a part of. Like, they're not the stereotypical left-wing person. They're just like women who want to help kids, which feels very sympathetic, no matter sort of where you are on the spectrum. And then they face this really extreme consequences for doing what is in the librarian code, which the film references over and over again. I think the documentary succeeds in explaining both the consequences to the librarians themselves, but it also goes into and really shows what happens when people

don't have access, when young people in particular don't have access to books that represent them. And the stakes are just so clear and so heavy. And it all combines to create this story that feels visceral, even about something perhaps not everybody finds super sexy, which is libraries and librarians. But it does this sort of amazing switch that I felt was very, very powerful and very of this moment. I'm sad that I missed this at Sundance because every year at Sundance, there's always the sort of splashier celebrity documentaries. And this year, you know, we had Slystone one directed by Questlove, which I, which I enjoyed. And you also had, so as you mentioned already, Christina Selina I Los Dinos, there was one about Pee-Herman. But I always tend to gravitate towards the ones that are more subject or thematic as opposed to focused on one person.

And this one just sounds also just super of the moment timely, like urgent. And it looks like it's going to air on PPS as part of independent lens. So I definitely look forward to checking that one out. That is the librarians directed by Kim A. Snyder. And for my last pick, I'm actually going to stay in the documentary realm. This is probably the first movie that I watched at Sundance that just kind of blew me away. And that is Zodiac Killer Project. How do we describe this one?

So it's directed by Charlie Shackleton. And the premise of this doc is that he wanted to make a documentary about this book called The Zodiac. killer cover-up, the silenced badge by Lyndon E. Lafferty, which was published back in 2012. And Lafferty was this California Highway Patrolman who became convinced that he encountered the Zodiac Killer sometime in the late 60s or early 70s, and then spent decades trying to bring him to justice and failed. And so Shackleton wanted to get the rights to this, but Lafferty's family wouldn't grant him the rights. So instead, the director decided to turn this into a movie about what he would have made. And basically it's him narrating, like shot by shot, beat by beat,

the sort of documentary he would tell, but then it turns into this deconstruction and critique of the entire true crime documentary genre. It's very self-aware. Like, Shackleton clearly is, like, drawn to this subject, just like so many of us are, but he's also very, very pointed in his critique. You know, he calls out making a murderer, the jinx, like all of these different, the things that we have goveled up as a society over the last like 10 years or so, 10, 15 years. About a third of the way through it, I was like, I wonder how he's going to sustain this. Like, it's short. It's only like 90 minutes long. Is he going to stick the landing? And in my opinion, he absolutely sticks the landing. Christina, I know you also saw it. Do you have thoughts? Do you feel similar?

I really liked it. I really liked it. And I had that same thought. I was like, is this going to keep going like this? Is it going to change? Is it going to go different? And no, they really stuck to their concept. And I thought it worked because the director clearly is a fan of true crime, but also his eyes are open to the genre's beats, you know, like even how he describes the footage that they would use and like how there's always like birds taking off in an opening sequence. Like some of the stuff is so good. And it's such an interesting meta textual analysis. while he's doing the thing that he's talking about. I thought it was really fun.

And even though I was a little bit like, is this going to keep going like this? I'm glad it did. And it kept me sort of looped in to be like, how are we going to go? Where is it going to end? And it felt like, yeah, there's a movie within a movie, within a movie.

And yet somehow it is both intellectually interesting. And the plot keeps us going through in a way that was arty and different, but not alienating like maybe some of the other artie. films I saw it Sundance. I really like this one. The thing is, like, all of these critiques that he's making in the movie aren't new. Like, we've heard it in podcasts. We've seen the parodies. But this just felt different. I do wonder, again, this does not currently have distribution at the time of us recording this. I do wonder if it, what will pick it up, who will pick it up? Just because, again, he calls out Netflix and HBO and, you know, there are clips from

making a murder in here. There's a jinx. Like, it's there. But I do think this is such a great experiment and project and a new way of thinking about the true crime genre that I'm just so glad exists. Well, and it was fun to hear the critiques from an insider, right? Like somebody who wants to make a true crime film who is invested in the format professionally. So it's like he critiques Dahmer pretty hard. But then he also goes, but it was great. And he means it. He means both things.

And I think that approach is like. a fan and a filmmaker really makes it unique and fun to watch, kind of wherever you fall on the true crime spectrum reaction situation. And so it works and is fun. Also, it just was like a lot of fun for just like a talking head movie with like building shots. You know, it was good. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that is Zodiac Killer Project directed by Charlie Shackleton. Hopefully at some point, everyone else will get a chance to see it too. There's a lot going on and a lot to discuss when comes to true crime and this is a great way of doing it. Well, we saw so many more great movies. We obviously couldn't get to all of them here. So we will have a list on our letterbox account at letterbox.com slash NPR pot culture. We'll have a link to that in our episode description. And that brings us to the end of our show, Monica Castile, Christina Escobar. Thanks so much for being here. Thanks for having us. Thank you. This episode was produced by Hefza Fathema and Lenin Sherburn and edited by Mike Katzen. Our supervising producer is Jessica Reedy, and Hello, Kamen provides our theme music.

Thanks so much for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Aisha Harris, and we'll see you all tomorrow.