My second dispatch from the 2025 Sundance Film Festival includes capsule reviews of Hailey Gates’ Atropia, Charlie Shackleton’s Zodiac Killer Project and Sierra Falconer’s Sunfish (& Other Stories From Green Lake).

ATROPIA

dir. Hailey Gates, U.S. Dramatic Competition, 103 minutes.

During the nine years I worked at Sundance there began a tradition of the buzziest, most beloved movie playing to packed crowds at the 1,500-seat Eccles theater while I sat there scowling with my arms folded. (I squirmed in my seat throughout premieres of Palm Springs, Whiplash and The Big Sick, among others.) This tradition has continued in my living room for the festival’s online incarnation, where I hated CODA long before that became a cool thing to do. So I guess it makes sense that the only real stinker I saw this year went home with the biggest prize. Set in 2006, writer-director Hailey Gates’ U.S. Dramatic Competition winner Atropia takes aim at an Army training operation in Barstow, California, where green recruits role-play in a phony Middle Eastern village before being deployed to the real deal. Arrested Development scene-stealer Alia Shawkat stars as a shallow, Iraqi-American actress trying to turn this gig into her big Hollywood break. The surreal obscenity of our Gulf Wars could probably only make sense through an absurdist, acerbic lens — I’m thinking of the “Are we shooting?” scene that starts David O. Russell’s Three Kings — but it requires more than a bunch of smug actor-brain jokes recycled from Barry and Tropic Thunder. Worse is when the film ditches the comic angle and tries to tug on our heartstrings with a turn into schmaltzy melodrama. Just what we needed: an earnest satire. I’m told that writer-director Gates is the granddaughter of Nashville screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury, in which case the apple has fallen extremely far from the tree.

ZODIAC KILLER PROJECT

dir. Charlie Shackleton, NEXT, 92 minutes.

Jean-Luc Godard once said the best way to criticize a movie is by making another movie. Director Charlie Shackleton takes on a whole genre in this wryly funny deconstruction that doubles as the finest work of criticism I’ve encountered in some time. The conceit is that the filmmaker originally wanted to make a documentary out of a goofy, 1970s Zodiac paperback he’d discovered that detailed an amateur investigation into the killings by some conspiracy nutter you’ve probably never heard of. But after a deal to acquire the rights fell through, Shackleton was left to sit in front of a microphone and tell us how he would have made the movie, had he been allowed to — detailing every tacky trope and hackneyed technique of the insidiously popular true crime phenomenon. His takedown of murky opening credits sequences alone is worth the price of admission, but Zodiac Killer Project only gets more delicious from there, detailing the sneaky tricks of the trade and “evocative B-roll” that directors use to make what’s often obvious bunk appear more plausible, or at least more easily digestible. Bringing receipts in the form of fair use clips from streaming series, Shackleton lays out how you can wallow in gore and dismemberment for ten hours just so long as you show a somber grid with pictures of the victims for ninety seconds at the end. Like a cheeky cousin to Predators — which I can’t stop thinking about — Zodiac Killer Project smartly skewers an industry crassly packaging real-life horrors for our fun and entertainment.

SUNFISH (& OTHER STORIES ON GREEN LAKE)

dir. Sierra Falconer, U.S. Dramatic Competition, 87 minutes.

This is said to be Sundance’s second-to-last year in Park City, and with the festival’s future prospects very much unclear at the moment — the reports I’ve been getting from the ground don’t sound too promising — there’s something especially comforting about writer-director Sierra Falconer’s debut feature, a throwback to the gentle, pre-Tarantino American indies Sundance specialized in during its early years. Critics used to condescendingly refer to this kind of thing as “regional filmmaking,” and Falconer’s film takes place on a Michigan lake where four self-contained slices of life, roughly twenty minutes in length, capture fleeting moments and minor-key epiphanies. It’s worth noting that the onscreen title of Sunfish (& Other Stories On Green Lake) has none of the parenthetical mishegoss found in the catalog, and the film itself boasts the same refreshing directness of purpose. These are simple stories of human connection, the sort of brief encounters that take root in the memory over time, with one low-key tall tale tossed into the mix for good measure. It’s notable that nobody here seems to own a cellphone, and the lake’s bucolic environs can feel like a tonic. Ditto for Falconer’s unshowy direction. (The first story’s foregone conclusion of a resolution is filmed from a distance with the sound muted, and I haven’t felt so respected by a filmmaker in some time.) It’s quaint without being cloying, the kind of promising first feature that reminds us what festivals like this are supposed to be for.