Sundance 2025
Five First Looks From the Coldest Queue in Park City
What we caught between the Eccles and the Library — and the two acquisitions that surprised us.
Review · 14 min read
The Quiet Rooms of Halverson's Daughter Are This Year's Most Honest Indie
Maren Halverson builds her debut feature out of pantry light, unanswered phone calls, and the long silences between two sisters who haven't quite forgiven each other. We watched it twice before writing this down — and we'd watch it twice more before recommending anything else this week.
Subscribe to the NewsletterThis week's slate
Latest Reviews
Signed by working critics — not algorithms. Four fresh reads, in order of how much they'll stay with you.
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A House Built From Postcards Never Forgets Its Address
Olufemi's third feature is a chamber piece about a returned emigré and the brother who stayed — patient, devastating, and almost unbearably tender.
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The Last Projectionist in Brno
A documentary that earns its length the way only the best ones can: by making you forget the reel is running out.
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Salt, Static, and Other Small Apparitions
An ambitious, uneven collage film that keeps landing its strangest images — even when the through-line refuses to.
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Nine Windows on a Moving Train
Tahir shoots adolescence as a series of doors left half-open, and finds the genre again in the hinges.
Featured Interview · 38 min read
Maren Halverson on Writing the Sister She Stopped Calling
"I didn't want to write a reconciliation scene. I wanted to write the morning after the phone call that didn't happen. The whole movie lives in that gap."
In her first long-form interview since Halverson's Daughter premiered at Sundance, the Brooklyn-based director talks to Naomi Castellano about silence as a structural choice, why she cast two non-actors who happen to be sisters, and the scene she cut an hour before the festival lock.
Read the full conversationOn the ground
Festival Dispatches
Filed from the venues that matter — by staff who've been accredited since 2011.
Berlinale · Forum
Three Quiet Masterpieces From the Forum Programme
The sidebar that almost always shows us the year's strangest, most patient work.
TIFF · Dispatch
On the Eighth Year of Our Critics' Roundtable
Sixty critics, four days, one very long table. Notes from the room.
SXSW · Preview
What to Watch From the SXSW Midnighters Slate
Our critics' shortlist before the lights go down in Austin.
A note from the editor
Fourteen years on the front lines of independent film — and we're still reading the screenplays, not the press releases.
Independent Film Blog was started in 2010 by Daniel Merritt, a former Variety staff writer who believed the web needed a publication that took small films as seriously as the studios took their tentpoles. Fourteen years and 12,600 articles later, that idea is the only editorial brief we've ever had.
We file from 22 festivals a year. We publish the first review of more breakouts than we can keep count of. We maintain the largest free public index of independent film on the internet — 6,200 titles, every one rated by a working critic, none of them generated by a script. Our team of 11 staff critics and 38 contributing writers has been doing this for, in some cases, longer than this publication has existed.
If a movie matters in indie film, we covered it first. Subscribe, and you'll know when the next one does.
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