…create the slightest cultural tremor, I’ll be hugely surprised. Not that I wouldn’t welcome a new Sundance film that’s as good as, say, last year’s A Real Pain, but what are the odds of a myopic, more-or-less moribund festival like Sundance giving birth to a film that anyone’s going to actually care about or even stream down the road?

By all outward appearances Sundance has no fresh, socially vital cards to play these days — fringe stuff, this or that gay character, gender fluidity, hip horror, this or that form of progressive perversity.

Example #1: Jimpa, a family “dramedy” about a mom (Olivia Colman) and her non-binary teen (Aud Mason-Hyde) traveling to Amsterdam to visit with the kid’s gay grandfather (John Lithgow). Fucking hell!

Max Walker-Silverman‘s Rebuilding, about the aftermath of a forest fire inside a FEMA camp, might add up to something. It’ll surely be interesting to see Josh O’Connor play a hinterland guy in a cowboy hat (i.e., an actual human being). Meghann Fahy, Kali “cheek stud” Reis and Amy Madigan costar. Caveat emptor: Walker-Silverman is a well-educated rich kid who grew up in Telluride, went to Stanford and NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Bill Condon‘s Kiss of the Spider Woman remake….okay, maybe.

Sundance ’25 starts tomorrow (Thursday, 1.23) and wraps 11 days hence (Sunday, 2.2).