Best Indie Movies Overlooked in 2025

“The Balconettes”

From IndieWire’s review by David Ehrlich:

“It’s hard to remember the last time a director prominently displayed their own vagina onscreen. Statistically speaking, most of them wouldn’t be able to do it if they tried. But Noémie Merlant has never shied away from an opportunity to redefine how female bodies are depicted on film, and ‘The Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ star’s recent pivot behind the camera has only emboldened her efforts to reject the male gaze by inviting her characters to reclaim its oppressive hyper-sexualization on their own terms. 

“Needless to say, she’s happy to lead by example in her poisoned but delicious midnight snack of a second feature. Playing Élise, a C-list starlet who’s recently been cast as Marilyn Monroe in a TV movie (only to steal her boyfriend’s car and flee the set in a panic), Merlant crashes into ‘The Balconettes‘ dolled up to look like a cheap synonym for male desire. It’s a costume that Élise will strip away over the course of the physically uninhibited and formally unbound rape-revenge horror-comedy that follows, until — at her lowest moment — the actress’ pursuit of an abortion leads her to the world’s most apathetic gynecologist, who instructs Élise to place her feet in the stirrups and point her body towards the audience as she waits and waits and waits to be examined.”

“The Baltimorons”

From IndieWire’s review by Christian Zilko:

“If you find yourself feeling down on your luck this holiday season, it might be time to ask yourself a simple question. Do you really need all 32 of your teeth? Couldn’t you spare one or two in exchange for a potential lifetime of happiness?

“That’s more or less the takeaway from ‘The Baltimorons,’ though Jay Duplass’ bittersweet holiday romance takes a few detours on its way there. Co-writer and star Michael Strassner gives himself a tailor-made breakout role as Cliff, a sad sack Baltimore native who can’t properly celebrate his six-month sobriety milestone because he’s mourning an unsuccessful suicide attempt and his depressing (and in all likelihood, depressingly common) improv-comic-to-mortgage-broker career path. His struggles with addiction clearly took a toll on his fiancé Brittany (Olivia Luccardi), and their relationship has evolved into something more resembling a caregiver and patient than a romantic partnership (with all the resentment that accompanies that, of course). And these days, she seems more concerned about him relapsing into comedy than having a drink.”

“Boys Go to Jupiter”

From IndieWire’s review by Christian Zilko:

“Perhaps the secret to making a great coming-of-age movie in 2025 is making everything look like it’s happening in a mobile game. As early adolescence becomes an increasingly online experience — sure, kids still play sports and go outside, but the kind of unsupervised exploration captured in films like ‘Stand by Me’ is now far more likely to happen in open world games than on bikes without a parent in sight — it helps to meet dejected youngsters on their own hyper-colorful, overstimulating level.

“Not that Julian Glander’s delightful debut feature ‘Boys Go to Jupiter‘ ever acknowledges its digital sheen. The 3D animator, who branches out into filmmaking after a career spent making graphics for everyone from The New York Times to The New Yorker and short films for Adult Swim, immerses us in a world that appears to be constructed out of virtual Play-Doh, with candy-colored blobs forming a whimsical backdrop for characters with endearingly simple faces who run around discussing hot dog philosophy, magical sentient lemons, and whether the defective golf balls from a local miniature golf course are actually eggs.”

“Cactus Pears”

From IndieWire’s review by Ritesh Mehta:

“A queer Marathi language romantic drama with the mottled, lingering emotional punctuation if not always the verbal pithiness of a haiku, Rohan Parashuram Kanawade’s narrative feature debut ‘Sabar Bonda‘ (‘Cactus Pears’) brings to earth its gay protagonist’s existential limbo by resorting to a perennially reliable inciting incident: the death of the patriarch, followed by a period of culturally specific mourning.”

“Diciannove”

From IndieWire’s review by Kate Erbland:

“First-time feature filmmaker Giovanni Tortorici throws a lot at the screen in his “Diciannove“: animated sequences, jump cuts galore, Dutch angles to spare, zippy zoom-ins, freeze frames, the whole lot of it, a showy way to tout his prodigious skills, most of them unnervingly funny and a touch out of place. That trick, however, is one of many ways Tortorici keeps his audience off-kilter while spinning a coming-of-age tale that feels all too familiar until, wham! (points to the filmmaker for avoiding comic book-styled action words), ‘Diciannove’ and its inscrutable protagonist finally snap into place. And while that particular ‘place’ is much darker than this sly, slippery film initially lets on, it ultimately proves to be far more thrilling.”

“Dreams (Sex Love)”

From IndieWire’s review by Harrison Richlin:

The “conflict of parsing the interior elements of the human experience is what’s at the crux of Dag Johan Haugerud’s Golden Bear-winning drama, ‘Dreams (Sex Love).’ Serving both as a living portrait and past reflection of teenage sexual awakening, Haugerud utilizes various storytelling tools to draw viewers in, from extensive voiceover narration detailing the thoughts and feelings of the film’s central character, Johanne (Ella Øverbye), and a symphonic score by Anna Berg that elevates our sense of her emotional journey to poetic imagery that amplifies how one dream can influence the dreams of others. In truth, one of the deep studies Haugerud seems to explore in his work is how dreams aren’t just held while one is sleeping, but as a function of our daily lives.”

“Drowning Dry”

From IndieWire’s review by Ryan Lattanzio:

“A family tragedy is examined from all sides, sifted through, considered, in Laurynas Bareiša’s skillfully directed and wounding ‘Drowning Dry.’ The title comes from an expression meaning that just enough water has entered your lungs to arrest your breathing, but it’s not enough to kill you. With a Michael Haneke-esque impassive glaze and a Ruben Östlund-level satire of manners and emotional stuntedness in adults, the film acquires a quiet power as it plays out all possible permutations of a swimming accident that may or may not have ruined the lives of at least two families. It’s one of those movies where the ground is ever shifting beneath you, as Bareiša replays scenes you thought you understood and recontextualizes them to suggest you perhaps never did.”

“East of Wall”

From IndieWire’s review by Harrison Richlin:

“From Vittorio di Sica’s ‘Bicycle Thieves’ to the films of the Safdies and Sean Baker, using non-professional actors has long been a tool filmmakers have employed to add a note of authenticity to their work. And yet, with ‘East of Wall,’ writer/director Kate Beecroft elevates this concept to greater heights, crafting a feature docu-fiction debut that is cinematically and narratively rich, but also takes care to reflect the deeper reality at the heart of its story.”

“Dracula”

From IndieWire’s review by David Ehrlich:

“It’s fitting that the first good movie to meaningfully incorporate AI into its aesthetic should be about an undead bloodsucker that feeds on humanity in order to seem alive. And yet, for a three-hour film that opens with a chorus of computer-generated Vlad the Impalers staring into camera and demanding that we suck their cocks, Radu Jude’s gleefully stupid ‘Dracula‘ proves much too expansive — and much too invested in the centuries of barbarism that paved the way toward Silicon Valley — to be misunderstood as a simple rebuke against the grotesqueries of algorithmic image-making.”

“Happyend”

From IndieWire’s review by David Ehrlich:

“Set at a strictly monitored Japanese high school at some point in the near future, Neo Sora’s ‘Happyend‘ might be a low-key drama about a group of friends as they steel themselves (and each other) against tomorrow in the weeks before they graduate and scatter to the winds. Yet this coming-of-age story — however pensive and hushed the rest of it might be — begins with an ominous blast of text that wouldn’t be out of place at the start of a violent sci-fi epic like Katsuhiro Otomo’s ‘Akira.’ ‘Weather buildings creak louder,’ read the words on the screen. ‘The systems that define people are crumbling in Tokyo. Something big is about to change.’”

“The Ice Tower”

From IndieWire’s review by Ryan Lattanzio:

“Gorgeous and glacial in equally frosty measure, Lucile Hadžihalilović’s ‘The Ice Tower’ is all art-film-only vibes, a wintry 1970s fairy tale about a screen actress who casts a potentially dangerous spell. It’s anchored by an actress, Marion Cotillard, who has one of the great faces, and a classical sophistication with a glamorous, out-of-reach noirish beauty that pairs wonderfully with a creature cut out of Hans Christian Andersen: amorous, elusive, but wounded.”

“Invention”

From IndieWire’s review by Josh Slater-Williams:

“’Invention’ fictionalizes the immediate aftermath of [star/co-writer Callie] Hernandez’s own father’s death, which happened in the fall of 2021 – one line alluding to Covid skepticism suggests a similar date for the film’s narrative. Hernandez’s dad, an alternative health doctor, made several TV appearances in the 90s through to as late as 2020, with VHS recordings of these broadcasts making their way into “Invention” from the very start. Hernandez stars as a woman – amusingly named Carrie Fernandez – coping with the death of her estranged inventor father, who’s only ever glimpsed through the aforementioned archive footage.”

“A Little Prayer”

“Junebug” screenwriter and “Abundant Acreage Available” writer/director Angus MacLachlan returned to Sundance — nearly three years ago in 2023! — for another low-simmer character study grounded in faith and family with “A Little Prayer.” Facing a tough acquisitions market overall, this critics’ favorite starring David Strathairn and an Independent Spirit Award-nominated Jane Levy did not reach theaters until fall 2025, and it deserved a louder release. Ever capable of summoning an entire inner life within a compact running time, Strathairn stars as a Vietnam veteran trying to protect his daughter-in-law (Levy) from his son’s (Will Pullen) affair. MacLachlan brings his intimate sensibilities as a playwright back to the screen here, and he’s been rigorously campaigning for the film this fall on his own; it ended up with two Independent Spirit Award nominations, including one for MacLachlan, Best Screenplay. —RL

“On Becoming a Guinea Fowl”

From IndieWire’s review by David Ehrlich:

“Decades of mediocre Sundance movies — and some very good ones, too — have conditioned us to expect certain things from culturally specific dramas about young people who return home from the big city and find themselves struggling to reconcile modern identity with family tradition. These characters invariably feel at odds with the heritage that forged them, only to discover something vital and profound about the past they were so quick to leave behind. At the end of the story, they return to their fast-paced lives in London or L.A. or wherever with a new sense of self-possession — one that reflects the grace and strength they’ve inherited from the generations who came before them. 

“Rungano Nyoni’s lucid and incandescently furious ‘On Becoming a Guinea Fowl’ is a stiff middle finger to such wishful thinking. Set in a middle-class Zambian suburb that’s located at a well-trafficked but poorly maintained intersection between global influences and Bemba mores, the ‘I Am Not a Witch’ filmmaker’s second feature tells the story of a Westernized young woman who’s forced to hold her extended family tree together by its roots during a crisis that leaves her wanting to rip the whole thing out of the earth with her bare hands.”

“Pavements”

From IndieWire’s review by Adam Solomons:

“The question Alex Ross Perry asked himself before embarking on the mad, four-faced project that is ‘Pavements’ was: ‘What if Pavement was the most important band of all time?’ It’s a fun idea, and Perry’s commitment to the bit cannot be questioned. An off-Broadway jukebox musical named after their breakthrough debut studio album ‘Slanted and Enchanted,’ a fake ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’-style biopic starring Joe Keery and Jason Schwartzman, a museum exhibition Perry helped devise and that brims with mostly unimportant memorabilia, and an actual documentary all exist in service of ‘Pavements.’ If the assignment in making a film about Pavement was part sincere, part fuck-you, a dash of incoherent anti-establishment thought and a tablespoon of self-indulgence, ‘Pavements’ understands it perfectly. Making a film about the band any other way seems like a complete waste of time.”

“Reflection in a Dead Diamond”

“If ‘Tenet‘ was some kind of definitive arabesque on the spy movie, it would make a fine double bill at a classy cinematheque with ‘Reflection in a Dead Diamond,’ which has just premiered in competition at the Berlinale. Co-directed by the artsy genre specialists Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, the film shuffles a myriad of spy thriller trademarks, like a particularly deft croupier, whereas ‘Tenet’ would arrange them like tidy, brutalist blocks that could be recombined at will. If these Nolan cross-references are pushing it, Cattet and Forzani indeed show themselves as up to date with newer manifestations of this sub-genre (although thankfully not with ‘Kingsman’): its first shot of waves violently crashing a pearlescent beach is nearly identical to the opening imagery of ‘Inception.’”

“Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass”

Identical twin brothers and stop-motion animators Stephen and Timothy Quay bring their dreamlike, transhistorical, hybrid visual style to an adaptation of a 1937 novel by Bruno Schulz. The brothers are best known for the 2005 feature “The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes” and the 1986 short “Street of Crocodiles.” In “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass,” stop-motion puppetry and live-action follow a man named Josef, looking for his dying father. He discovers within the sanatorium a labyrinth in which time moves at its own pace compared to the rest of the world, and where his father’s death has not yet occurred. Seven chapters bend time and dimensions, fantasy and reality, for this ghostly, hypnotic dream of a film that premiered at Venice last year but played Film Forum in 2025. —RL

“Souleymane’s Story”

From IndieWire’s review by Christian Zilko:

“Everybody that Souleymane (Abou Sangare) encounters has an angle. The Guinean immigrant is nothing if not a hustler, zipping through the streets of Paris on his bicycle making food deliveries at all hours of the night in order to scrape together the funds to buy some asylum papers to present to OFPRA (the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons). But while he has surrounded himself with a community of African immigrants who are theoretically willing to guide him through the process, everybody’s service comes with a price. And the services themselves are nothing to brag about.”

“Stranger Eyes”

From IndieWire’s review by Sophie Monks Kaufman:

“What it means to see and be seen within an era of mass surveillance is the slippery subject of Yeo Siew Hua’s ‘Stranger Eyes‘ — the first film from Singapore to compete for the Golden Lion in Venice Film Festival’s 81-year history. What begins as a crime thriller ends as a transfixing meditation on our personal need for recognition and the difficulty of finding this for ourselves or providing that for others. 

“The film begins with a man poring over video footage of a family picnic, looking for clues to the whereabouts of his kidnapped baby. The film ends with him standing outside an apartment looking up at the unit where he no longer belongs. How he moves from dealing with loss to being the lost one is chronicled using an elliptical visual language that takes its cue from security footage tapes. In theory, this provides almost total coverage, yet it does so without ever closing in on its human subjects in all their existential mystery and misery.”

“Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake)”

From IndieWire’s review by David Ehrlich:

“The great frustration with anthology films — and the reason I sink a little deeper into my seat every time I sit down to watch a new one — is that even the best of them tend to be wildly uneven, the whole seldom greater than the sum of a few select parts. Enter: Sierra Falconer’s light and languid ‘Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake),’ a collection of wistfully effervescent vignettes that resists the usual highs and lows of its format by drawing a gentle power from the stillness of the water that runs through it.”

“Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted”

From IndieWire’s review by Christian Zilko:

“In Isaac Gale and Ryan Olson’s new documentary, Swamp Dogg’s life of achievements takes a backseat to a more pressing matter: getting his pool painted. In an unspecified location in the San Fernando Valley, Swamp Dogg lives in a suburban enclave of creativity. His house is filled with loving freeloaders, primarily musician friends like Guitar Shorty, who asked to crash with him at one point or another and ended up staying for decades. The house is a hotbed for jam sessions and barbecues, but Swamp Dogg thinks it’s missing one thing. He wants a picture of himself riding a rodent painted on the bottom of his pool so that it can be seen from the sky.

“The Things You Kill”

From IndieWire’s review by Ryan Lattanzio:

“The existential apocalypse of a Turkish literature professor gets an oblique and chilling study in ‘The Things You Kill.’ On its surface, this disquieting diptych about male anxiety has the feel of, say, an Asghar Farhadi movie, a moral dilemma urging forth a thriller plot. But that’s precisely the sort of bait-and-switch Iranian writer/director Alireza Khatami is operating on here, until his tense and nightmarish film starts to resemble more something like David Lynch’s “Lost Highway” as directed by Abbas Kiarostami. Khatami (‘Terrestrial Verses‘), who lives in Canada, relocated the setting from Iran to Turkey to evade censorship in his native country — a censorship of patriarchal violence that the film itself also rings upon like a warning bell of a bleak future.”

“To a Land Unknown”

From IndieWire’s review by Sophie Monks Kaufman:

“The film opens with a quote from the celebrated Palestinian scholar, Edward Said: ‘In a way, it’s a sort of fate of Palestinians not to end up where they started, but somewhere unexpected and far away.’ These words have been cutting since the moment they were first spoken years ago, but released into the world now during the horrific genocide in Gaza, they have an extra, desperate bite, as another generation is forced to seek displacement as the only alternative to violent death. Premiering at Cannes in this climate, Fleifel’s portrait of two individual characters asks questions that cannot be confined to the screen. Where do you belong after you have been driven from your homeland? When your existence is criminalized, how can the laws of so-called civil society apply?”

“Urchin”

From IndieWire’s review by David Ehrlich:

‘”Babygirl’ star Harris Dickinson is a little too young, a little too handsome, and a little too hot right now for critics to pretend as if his directorial debut exists in a vacuum, and yet the raw and raggedy ‘Urchin’ — which would command our attention regardless of who made it — is only a few seconds old before it’s locked into the thrall of a different actor altogether.”

“Viet and Nam”

From IndieWire’s review by David Opie:

“Flying a little under the radar in Un Certain Regard is a Vietnamese film that has been banned in Vietnam before even receiving its world premiere at Cannes. The second feature — excluding a credit in an anthology — by writer/director Truong Minh Quy (‘The Tree House’), ‘Viet and Nam’ is a queer romance that has proved controversial back home not for its characters, but reportedly for its portrayal of ‘a gloomy, deadlocked, and negative view‘ about the country and its citizens, according to an official letter from Vietnam’s Cinema Department.

“While far from the cheeriest of movies, this is a curious fate for a sensitive, transfixing drama that further showcases the talents of one of Vietnam’s most exciting modern filmmakers. The film is seemingly set in 2001, as someone references watching the news that morning and seeing a plane hitting a skyscraper in New York. But among the cited influences on the feature’s inception is an incident from 2019, when 39 Vietnamese migrants were found dead in a refrigerated truck in Essex, England. Emigration through trafficking is lined up for one of the film’s leads, though an ominous, abstract prologue sets a doom-laden tone for the eventual trip not going to plan.”