Lifestyle
These films took the top prizes at Sundance – plus 11 films our critic loved
Alia Shawkat stars in Atropia, the feature debut of writer-director Hailey Gates. Atropia won the Grand Jury Prize for dramatic films.
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At this year’s Sundance Film Festival, talk on the ground frequently turned to the devastating fires in Los Angeles, which have affected many attendees in the film industry. A campaign to “Keep Sundance in Utah” was out in full force in preparation for the festival’s possible move in 2027; Boulder, Colo., and Cincinnati, Ohio are in the running to become the event’s new home after the festival’s lease ends. If Sundance stays in Utah, much of the festival will relocate to Salt Lake City, though current host Park City could still host some events.
But the movies are why everyone comes together each year in this snowy ski town, and the slate offered some gems we could be talking about throughout the year, assuming they land distribution. Awards were announced on Friday, with the top prizes going to Hailey Gates’ war satire Atropia, which won the U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize, and Seeds, Brittany Shyne’s film about Black farm workers in the South, which won the U.S. Documentary Grand Jury Prize. (You can see the full list of winners here.) I was on the ground for the first few days of the fest and then caught up with more films at home during the virtual portion. Here are a few of my favorites.
True crime is dead (long live true crime)
As the true crime genre has exploded in popularity, plenty of valid critiques have framed it as a form of morally dubious schadenfreude, murder-as-entertainment, as it were. Two excellent documentaries at Sundance this year took unique approaches to questioning the form.
A still from Zodiac Killer Project by Charlie Shackleton.
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For his film Zodiac Killer Project, filmmaker Charlie Shackleton initially set out to make a documentary about Lyndon E. Lafferty, a former California Highway Patrolman who published a book in 2012 claiming he knew the Zodiac Killer’s identity. Lafferty’s family ultimately refused to grant Shackleton the rights, so instead he made a film about the film he would have made … which becomes an engrossing deconstruction and affectionate skewering of the visual and narrative tropes that accompany pretty much every true crime doc or dramatization these days. Shackleton’s narration is wry and astute but also wistful; he’s self-aware enough to know he’s drawn to this stuff just like so many of us, even as he understands its limitations and drawbacks. The film won Sundance’s NEXT Innovator Award.
And then there’s Predators, David Osit’s sharp focus on the popularity of To Catch a Predator and its present-day online descendants. Osit evaluates the mid-00s reality show’s legacy by complicating its hard-nosed perspective on vigilante justice; he wonders what was truly gained in exposing possible sex offenders, and whether the “benefits” really outweighed the costs for everyone involved, from the young actors cast as underage kids to the men who were shamed and arrested on national TV. Osit even gets the host of To Catch a Predator, Chris Hansen, to sit down for an interview, which only crystallizes how fraught the show’s mission was.
One other true crime doc was memorable in a different way: Geeta Gandbhir’s The Perfect Neighbor, about the 2023 killing of a Black woman by her white neighbor in Marion County, Fla. The majority of the film plays out through police body cam footage or interrogation room video, which captures months’ worth of simmering tensions within the neighborhood leading up to the fatal encounter, as well as the arrest and trial that followed. At times the access to such detailed documentation veers a bit too closely into feeling exploitative of Black trauma, but Gandbhir’s complication of narratives around community relationships and policing through the astounding footage still makes this worth a viewing. Gandbhir won the U.S. Documentary Directing Award.
Stars are born
The psychological thriller Lurker explores familiar themes around celebrity obsession and the trappings of fame – think All About Eve meets Ingrid Goes West meets The Other Two – yet it’s so well-executed and smart about its perspective that it feels incredibly fresh. Matthew (Théodore Pellerin) is a retail worker who worms his way into the inner circle of emergent pop star Oliver (Archie Madekwe) and, of course, upends the entire group dynamic to the -nth degree. Both actors have been around for a minute (Pellerin was recently in Becoming Karl Lagerfeld and Madekwe was in Saltburn), but their moody chemistry together as the star-struck barnacle and the self-serious artist crackles on screen, and could very well mark a turning point in their careers. It’s a promising feature debut for writer-director Alex Russell, who previously wrote for The Bear and Beef; the latter series’ darkly comic sensibilities definitely course throughout Lurker.
Tonatiuh and Diego Luna in Kiss of the Spider Woman.
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On a completely different note: Bill Condon’s adaptation of the Broadway musical Kiss of the Spider Woman – based on Manuel Puig’s 1976 novel – was one of the splashier titles to debut at the festival this year. In the early 1980s during Argentina’s military dictatorship, two prisoners share a cell: political activist Valentin (Diego Luna) and queer window dresser Molina (Tonatiuh). To distract from their imprisonment and abuse, Molina reimagines a movie starring their favorite actress, Ingrid Luna (Jennifer Lopez), which gives Condon the chance to pay homage to classic Hollywood musicals like Singin’ in the Rain, and, more recently, Chicago (for which Condon wrote the screenplay). Luna and Lopez are great, but this is Tonatiuh’s movie – he takes a role that could easily be a caricature of queer flamboyance and pathos, and grounds it with depth and soul.
And another standout performance can be found in Cole Webley’s family drama Omaha. Set sometime in the late 2000s, a financially struggling widower (Past Lives‘ John Magaro) takes his children Ella (Molly Belle Wright) and Charlie (Wyatt Solis) on an unexpected road trip to Nebraska. The film is heavy on immaculately lit imagery of desert highway and small-town life and a little too lean on narrative details until the very end, but the adolescent Wright is particularly affecting as a child who’s old enough to sense her dad’s holding something back yet too young to fully grasp the severity of their situation.
Sweeping ambition
Kahlil Joseph’s BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions arrived on the back of a small wave of behind-the-scenes controversy, when it was unexpectedly pulled from Sundance just before the festival, and then added back onto the schedule a few days later. Hopefully this dustup doesn’t overshadow the work itself, which is intricate, rich, and supremely ambitious. Borne out of Joseph’s video installation BLKNWS, the film uses the Encyclopedia Afrikana (an uncompleted project of W.E.B. Du Bois which inspired a book by Henry Louis Gates and Anthony Appiah decades later) as a basis to traverse eras, continents, and historical figures. A deliberately-paced Afrofuturistic narrative thread involving an international cruise liner is opaque and meandering, occasionally to the point of being inaccessible in a Terrence Malick-y way. But its most affecting moments are the essayistic montages of archival footage, which stitch together a clear-eyed mediation on memory, lineage, and the meaning of freedom.
Let’s get weird
I really dug the war satire Atropia, the feature debut of writer-director Hailey Gates. In 2006, wannabe Hollywood actress Fayruz (Alia Shawkat) works a gig playing an Iraqi civilian in a 24/7 U.S. military live training simulator, used to train soldiers on facing “the enemy” before they’re shipped overseas. The film (and especially the excellent Shawkat) juggles a bunch of different tones – farce, romance, social critique – and it succeeds at some better than others. But it’s scrappy and oddball enough to withstand some of its more scattered ideas around the stupidity of war.
Laura Casabé’s The Virgin of the Quarry Lake is a unique coming-of-age horror tale set in Argentina in the early 00s. Teenager Natalia (Dolores Oliverio) harbors a deep crush on her friend, but her plans to pursue him romantically are thrown out of whack when an older woman enters their inner circle. Casabé uses magical realism and the macabre to explore desire, jealousy, and insecurity within a protagonist who’s both extremely relatable and scary to contemplate.
Together is a fun body horror-comedy about a couple (real-life husband-and-wife Dave Franco and Alison Brie) stuck in a rut but unwilling to do anything about it. When they move to the country, they stumble upon a cursed cave that forces all of their unspoken issues to the forefront in the most visceral and icky ways possible. Writer-director Michael Shanks’ third act fumbles a bit in its predictability, but Brie and Franco lock into the offbeat humor of the film’s premise, and the special effects are a marvel.
Dylan O’Brien and James Sweeney in Twinless, which Sweeney also wrote and directed. The film won the festival’s audience award for U.S. dramatic films.
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And in Twinless, writer-director James Sweeney also stars as Dennis, a snarky gay Portlander who forms a bromance with a dim but kindly straight dude (Dylan O’Brien) he meets in a grief support group for people who have lost their twins. There are some twists and turns in this dark comedy, and your tolerance for those directions may vary – but for me at least, watching these two opposites attract and trauma-bond was exciting and satisfying. It took home the U.S. Dramatic Audience Award.
The scoreboard shows the results of the women’s singles final match between Iga Swiatek of Poland and Amanda Anisimova of the U.S. at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025.
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Fifteen points in tennis? Nice. Thirty, 40 — even better. Advantage — that sounds good. “Love” — that also must be great, right? Well, not quite.
As the French Open rolls on and Serena Williams has announced her return to the sport, maybe you’ve been paying a little more attention to tennis. The sport’s scoring system is notably distinct, and can sometimes be hard to grasp for newcomers. But even tennis aficionados might not know why, or how, “love” became the unmistakable callout for zero points. For this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week, we’re exploring how a word that signifies trailing behind got such a sweet name.
“Love” comes from the heart — or an egg?
It’s hard to pinpoint when the first tennis ball went over the net. Tennis is a derivative of lots of other sports, such as “jeu de paume,” a handball game played in France, said JT Buzanga, the collections manager at the International Tennis Hall of Fame museum.
But tennis became a patented, official sport in 1874, said Steve Flink, a journalist whose tennis coverage got him inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. It has retained its unique, mysterious scoring system ever since.
“By and large, the original system has held up almost entirely,” Flink said.
The use of “love” goes back to the late 18th century, said Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer. But it was used earlier than that in card games such as whist and bridge. Before the term made its way to tennis, the sport favored plain old “nothing,” or “nil,” he said.
Why love in the first place, though? Historians don’t really know for sure, but there are a few theories.
The French could have something to do with it. Some historians believe “love” derives from “l’oeuf,” which means “the egg” in French. Because eggs are shaped like zeros, terms such as “goose egg” and “duck’s egg” have been used in other contexts to mean zero, Sheidlower said.
It’s also possible English speakers mispronounced l’oeuf as “love.” But Sheidlower isn’t convinced that’s the answer.
“It’s the French equivalent of an English expression. But since that expression doesn’t appear in French, the French word wouldn’t have been used,” he said.
To be sure, France has had a lot of influence on tennis culture, Buzanga said. For example, “deuce” or a game tied at 40 points, comes from the French word for “two”: “deux.” But he prefers another prominent theory: that “love” comes from the idiom “for the love of the game.” Even if a player hasn’t scored, it doesn’t matter, because their heart is in it. It’s the theory Sheidlower said is the most plausible, because the idiom was used by the English before tennis was popularized.
Another variation of the “love of the game” theory is that the word could have come from the Dutch “lof,” or “honor” — or the Latin “amare,” meaning “to love,” Flink said.
But if tennis’ “love” doesn’t come from a French word, the theory at least has a French sensibility.
“I think the ‘for the love of the game’ is kind of romantic,” Buzanga said.
“Love” probably isn’t going anywhere
Tennis used to be a sport of leisure. The style of play has changed a lot over the years; players are more athletic and competitive, for instance, Flink said. But the rules of the sport are more steadfast, he said.
“There’s this incredible, enduring respect for tradition in tennis,” he said. “Changes are not made easily.”
There has been one major change in modern history: the tie-break. Matches can go on and on because players have to score two consecutive points to break a deuce, or by two games to break a tied set. But the onset of television meant matches would have to get shorter if the sport wanted to capture a larger audience, Flink said.
Change even came for “love.” An alternative sprouted up in the 1970s, and is still used today: “bagel,” named for its zero shape, Sheidlower said. Novices may say “zero,” and insiders will understand what they mean, but they “will needle them about it,” Flink said.
But “love” still prevails.
“People kind of like it,” Flink said. “It’s different. Why say zero when you can say love?”
On a 75-mile cliff-hugging stretch of highway in California, traffic is way up, despite soaring gas prices. And locals expect the busiest summer in years.
The road is Highway 1 in Big Sur, which reopened in January after three years of repair and reconstruction following a pair of landslides. Drivers can once again embark on the state’s most famous road trip, covering the 100 miles between Cambria to the south and Carmel to the north without leaving the two-lane coastal highway. And they’re heading out in big numbers.
Caltrans estimates that as of May, Big Sur restaurant and retailer guest counts are up 40% from last year, and that northbound traffic at Ragged Point, the southern gateway to Big Sur, has risen 900% year-over-year.
People pose for photos near Bixby Bridge. Monterey County’s Board of Supervisors voted to explore a 12-month ban on parking around the bridge.
Safety cones prevent parking along Coast Road near the Bixby Bridge.
“Take your time,” said Kirk Gafill, co-owner of the popular Nepenthe restaurant and president of the Big Sur Chamber of Commerce, offering advice to travelers. “You’re going to be sharing the road with a number of people.”
As travelers rediscover the road, the cost of driving has been shooting skyward. California’s average gas price ($6.11 per gallon as of May 26) is up 26% from the year before. In early April, rates hit $9.99 at the isolated gas station in the Big Sur community of Gorda.
For spring and summer travelers, these numbers would seem to pose a stark question: Stay home and save money, or head for the coast because the road is finally open and it’s still cheaper than flying?
So far, the latter answer is winning big.
Fog lingers off the coast of Highway 1.
“We are definitely seeing a huge uptick in our reservations,” said Megan Handy, assistant general manager at the upscale Treebones resort. She estimated that bookings are 30% or more ahead of last year, and rates are unchanged since then. But “it’s still not feeling super crowded, which is nice. Everything still feels kind of calm.”
But added traffic has raised some anxiety. On May 19, Monterey County’s Board of Supervisors voted to explore a 12-month ban on parking at Bixby Bridge, one of the region’s top photo spots.
Over the years, the number of cars parking near the bridge — often illegally, sometimes impeding emergency vehicles — has risen. The proposed parking moratorium won’t take effect until the supervisors discuss it further.
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Busy as things are, several business owners pointed out that many international travelers have not yet returned — perhaps because most make their plans more than six months ahead, perhaps because of global politics, perhaps a little of each.
The biggest challenge for businesses during this resurgence? “Restaffing and retaining,” said Handy at Treetops.
At Nepenthe, Gafill said his business has seen a 45% boost in guest volume since the road’s reopening. Gafill said he would have expected a 35% pickup, “simply by virtue of reopening the highway.” The additional 10%, he said, might be “all that pent-up demand,” aided by “a very beautiful and very dry winter,” followed by a mild spring.
A lunch crowd dines at popular restaurant Nepenthe.
Another possible factor: Nobody can be sure how long the road will remain open.
To cope with the influx of people, Gafill said, “everybody is trying to recruit and retain their existing staff.”
At the Ragged Point Inn, where rates dropped as low as $149 nightly last fall, rates are back over $200 and staffers are suggesting that customers book at least six months ahead. The inn has reopened its snack bar for the first time since early 2023, and management is investing in capital upgrades and staging live music on weekends throughout the summer.
Business “is up over 100%,” said Diane Ramey, whose family owns the inn. “I know not all of our neighbors are having the same lift, but everybody is doing better.”
Traffic approaching Bixby Bridge.
A visitor poses in an oversized chair at Big Sur River Inn.
Even at the New Camaldoli Hermitage, a Benedictine monastery above Lucia, the road’s reopening and coming summer season have made a difference. Bookings are up an estimated 30% at the hermitage, which rent rooms and cottages (for two nights or more) to visitors who agree to its requirement of silence.
Big Sur business owners advise visitors to travel on weekdays for less traffic and the best hotel rates, and to get on the road as early as possible.
Since its opening in 1937, the highway has been vulnerable to landslides and shifting ground, operating on a longstanding cycle of landslide, closure, repair, reopening and then another landslide, or sometimes a fire. The U.S. Geological Survey has identified the Big Sur coastline as one of the most landslide-prone areas in the western United States. The 2023-2026 closure was the longest in the highway’s history.
Over time, road crews have used increasingly sophisticated strategies. In the most recent efforts, Caltrans said, it used drones to help survey the slopes and remotely operated bulldozers and excavators to reduce risks to workers.
During the closure, no traffic was allowed on 6.8-mile span from just north of Lucia until about a mile south of the Esalen Institute. Drivers detoured inland by way of U.S. 101.
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