Sundance 2025 Report II
Reviews of "Train Dreams," "Rebuilding," "The Kiss of the Spider Woman" and "Together."

“Train Dreams” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐, seeking distribution) – That four-star rating is maybe the thin mountain air talking or maybe standard festival inflation, but director Clint Bentley’s aching period epic of one unimportant man’s life is still the best thing I’ve seen at Sundance 2025. It’s based on a novella by the late Denis Johnson that I now want to read, and it stars Joel Edgerton as Robert Grainier, an orphan, a logger, a railway worker and a hermit whose isolation is broken by five years of Edenic bliss with a wife, Gladys (Felicity Jones) and their young daughter Kate (Zoe and Rose Short). The movie spans from World War I to the late 1960s – from the final glimpses of the American frontier to the first glimmers of our modern era – and is narrated by actor Will Patton with a casual declarative grace, and I will say that in its portrayal of a taciturn man and his passage through loneliness, love, despair and endurance “Train Dreams” achieves some of the common poetry of “A River Runs Through It” and other stories of this country’s beauty and imponderable cruelty. Watching Edgerton in this movie reminded me of Kris Kristofferson, saying little and expressing much, and late in the movie there’s an appearance by Kerry Condon (“The Banshees of Inisherin”) as a similarly bereft woman whose scenes with Grainier could edge toward romance but instead become something more soulful and true.

Bentley works in partnership with Greg Kwedar – both write, and they switch off directing and producing duties, with Kwedar helming the recent “Sing Sing” and Bentley’s previous “Jockey” playing at Sundance 2021 – and one of the remarkable tricks of “Train Dreams” is that it acknowledges modern feelings about race and deforestation without ever losing its sense of period. William H. Macy has a few scenes as a loquacious older fellow in the logging camps, and through him, as through Grainier, one feels the loss and resilience of small humans in an immense landscape, and a hard-won awareness of the connections that undergird everything. I can’t wait to see the movie again at a lower altitude.
“Rebuilding” (⭐ ⭐ 1/2) is a movie that a lot of people here love and that I didn’t much like, and I’m still chewing on that one. It matters a lot that I saw it directly after seeing “Train Dreams,” another work of heartland Americana, and where that film is genuinely poetic, “Rebuilding” feels “poetic” – self-conscious, with a talented filmmaker’s thumb on the scale from beginning to end. The performances are fine, especially lead Josh O’Connor (“Challengers,” “The Crown”) as a Colorado rancher whose spread is obliterated in a wildfire after generations in the family. (As with “Train Dreams,” fires play a part in the plot that has made the movie tough viewing for Los Angelenos in the audience.) Relocated to a FEMA trailer, he struggles to recover his dignity and purpose in life while reconnecting with his ex-wife (Meghann Fahy of “The White Lotus”) and young daughter (a charming Lily LaTorre) and bonding with his fellow survivors in the camp.

Sincere to a fault, “Rebuilding” has great love for the vast Colorado panoramas and the people in them, and it brings the same empathy toward the kind of Americans who were once called “little people” (and whom the 21st century has largely thrown under the bus) as “Nomadland” and other works with their roots in John Steinbeck. And while it doesn’t play false at all, I felt those earnest intentions in every shot and line of dialogue, while “Train Dreams,” for me, just … happened. (Or at least gave the illusion of happening; that’s the great con game of the movies, that it hides all those people making it behind a curtain of narrative and suspended disbelief.) The writer-director is Max Walker-Silverman, who's a boyish 32 and whose first film was the simpler and more effective “A Love Song,” one of my favorites from Sundance 2022. He introduced “Rebuilding” on Sunday with a short speech he’d spent a bit of time writing, and it showed: It was lyrical and just this side of precious, and the movie that followed felt like the cinematic version of same. Walker-Silverman by all accounts talks like this in real life, and good for him, but what I heard was a gifted young artist still enraptured with the sound of his own fine thoughts. Yes, I feel like a heel.
(As I write this, Josh O’Connor is being interviewed at a table just behind me in the festival press room, and I pray to God that he can’t read over my shoulder. Anyway, here's some video of him from the post-film Q&A.)
“Kiss of the Spider Woman” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐, seeking distribution) isn’t a remake of the 1985 William Hurt-Raul Julia movie, it’s a film version of the 1992 Broadway musical that was based on the 1985 movie that was based on the 1976 Manuel Puig novel. Still with me? Bill Condon (“Gods and Monsters, “Kinsey,” “Dreamgirls”) directs, with Diego Luna as the imprisoned Argentinian revolutionary Valentin; the young queer actor Tonatiuh as his cellmate Molina, a gay window-dresser; and Jennifer Lopez as the lead in the splashy/trashy Hollywood musical Molina narrates to Valentin to pass the time. That musical within the movie becomes a parallel story of struggle and sacrifice, with the two men taking roles in the narrative unfolding in their heads and within the film’s conceptual picture-in-picture.

I liked it, but I’m an old musicals queen stuck in the body of a heteronormative male, and the way Condon and his collaborators recreate the Technicolor Valhalla of classic Hollywood – referencing at different times Astaire and Rogers, the MGM factory of the Gene Kelly era, Judy Garland, Bob Fosse – just made me immensely happy (especially because “Kiss” apes the wide proscenium shots of those musicals and lets us see the dancers actually dance. How very un-Rob Marshall.) The prison scenes are slightly less inspired, and while Lopez gives a top-tier Jennifer Lopez performance, with phenomenal physical energy, she lacks a certain impossible magnanimousness of camp glory that her role(s) call for. The movie’s genuine discovery is Tonatiuh, a Los Angeles-born actor seen in TV’s “Vida” and “The Promised Land” who recreates Molina in all his complexity as a brutalized gay man and the diva of his fantasies and who sings and dances like one of the old-school demigods. At the end of the day, “Kiss” is a three-star movie that I enjoyed as if it were four stars, but Tonatiuh is the real deal, and I hope the film gets picked up for distribution so their career has the lift-off it deserves.
Here they are at the post-film Q&A, talking with emotion about what the role means to them.
And here’s a bit of JLo, for whom this movie obviously means a lot.

“Together” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐, seeking distribution) – An engagingly, ultimately disposable body-horror comedy and maybe the worst date-night movie ever, this stars real-life marrieds Dave Franco and Alison Brie as a long-time twosome possibly nearing their expiration date around the same time they move to a house in the country. Out in the woods is a sinkhole with a kind of geological sphincter (sorry, that’s what it looks like) filled with water that you probably shouldn’t drink but that Franco’s character predictably does. The pair's mutual attraction that was on the wane starts increasing again in literal, physical, disgustical fashion, and that’s all I’ll say about that, other than to note that there’s a bathroom sex scene that had the Sundance audience shrieking in horrified delight, that writer-director Michael Shanks makes excellent use of the old “Chekhov’s gun” convention, here retooled as “Chekhov’s power-saw” and that a riff on those little magnetic Scottie dogs pays off as a perfect time-release sight gag, dropping like a penny about 30 minutes after you see it. It’s one to see with a packed house, for sure, and the satirical jabs at the way all couples can passive-aggressively address and avoid their relationship issues at the same time are sharp and a little too close for comfort. Or so I hear.
Still to come: Reviews of “The Perfect Neighbor,” “Gen_,” “Peter Hujar’s Day,” “Free Leonard Peltier” and more.
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