As a blog, The Movie Gourmet has evolved to specializing in film festival coverage, with a concentration in filmmakers’ first feature films. The most exciting payoff from my coverage of this year’s Slamdance, Cinequest, San Luis Obispo, Frameline and Nashville film festivals were these discoveries. The first four are listed on my Best Movies of 2025 , Although I saw most of these at film festivals, before their releases, you can already stream seven of them now.
- Shih-Ching Tsou (US/Taiwan), Left-Handed Girl: Although this is Shih-Ching Tsou’s directorial debut, you’ve already been seeing her filmmaking work. She met Sean Baker in film editing class, and the two have since collaborated as filmmaking partners. They co-directed their first film, she produced his Starlet, Tangerine, The Florida Project and Red Rocket, and Baker and Tsou co-wrote Left-Handed Girl. Left-Handed Girl is a character-driven dramedy about family foibles that we all recognize, and with a pointed critique of traditional gender roles in Taiwan. Netflix.
- Alexandra Simpson (US), No Sleep Till: A hurricane is about to hit downscale Florida beach towns; the tourists are already gone, and workaday Floridians prepare to evacuate or hunker down. The storm is merely the setting for a compendium of short stories, as Simpson reveals essential truths about her characters, one or two at a time – a lost crush, a solitary obsession, a resuscitated friendship. Each chapter is so authentic, I had to keep reminding myself that I wasn’t watching a cinema verité documentary. Simpson also wrote, edited, produced and collaborated on the sound design, and she is a writer of uncommon economy. Simpson and cinematographer Sylvain Froidevaux capture the ominous weather, which mirrors the turbulence in the lives of the characters. hoopla.
- Simon Bouisson (France), Drone: A woman is stalked through Paris by a mysterious drone, in a thriller that explores issues of privacy and the male gaze. A magnificent 4-minute opening sequence, introduces us to the vulnerability caused by the voyeur drone. There are exhilarating set pieces in a parking garage, a motorcycle chase and an abandoned factory, as writer-director Simon Bouisson and cinematographer Ludovic Zulli keep their drone camera in pursuit of the story’s stalker drone. In his first theatrical feature, Bouisson keeps the tension pounding, all the way to the ingenious ending.
- Cris Tapia Marchiori (Argentina), Gunman: A minor hoodlum goes on the run in a 75-minute, real-time thrill ride. Based on a true story and shot in its actual setting, the drug-plagued Buenos Aires neighborhood of Isla Maciel, Gunman is brimming with verisimilitude.
- Giovanni Tortorici (Italy), Nineteen (Diciannove): .Diciannove is the singular and imaginative calling card of a new auteur; Tortorici may be a visual show-off, but he has an uncommon gift for creating a realistic, but compelling and unpredictable character. He maintains visual interest by throwing everything at the screen – disco scenes with an operatic score, slow motion, animated dreams and every kind of fancy cut. Nighttime scenes in a cold and hard London give way to lovingly beautiful shots of tranquil Siena. .AppleTV.
- David Fortune (US), Color Book: After the sudden death of his wife, Lucky is left to parent their son Mason, who has Down syndrome. Now grieving and trying to make ends meet on a one income, Lucky faces the unrelenting struggles of single parenting – why does everything have to be so hard? Although he has a hard time asking for help, in many ways, Lucky is the ideal dad – affectionate, patient and consistent. Lucky wants to thrill Mason with his first major league baseball game, but the two get a bigger dose of Atlanta’s transit system than they would ever want. The journey is far more more meaningful than is the destination. Atlanta writer-director David Fortune has won eight festival awards in the US and France with his inaugural film. The black and white cinematography by Nikolaus Dummerer is exquisite. Without a hint of sentimentality, Color Book is authentic and endearing.
- Woody Bess (US), Portal to Hell: In this witty, dark comedy, a hangdog bill collector named Dunn (get it?) discovers a portal to hell, replete with hellfire and brimstone, in his local laundromat, and he strikes a bargain with its proprietor. Dunn is too nice for his wretched job, but just what is he capable of? And how about the insipid pop band who sings your least favorite earworm – who wouldn’t want to consign THEM to hell? Portal to Hell considers the question, what is a good person? but never too seriously. This is an imaginative, comic triumph for writer/director/cinematographer Woody Bess.
- Richard Melkonian (UK), Universe25: This thoughtful, ever-surprising and mysterious film embeds a fable of self-discovery in a dystopian sci-fi framework. Mott the Angel is sent to Earth, essentially on a cleanup mission, by a Creator who is ready to pull the plug on our world. In a singular and impressive feature debut, writer-director Richard Melkonian has imagined a look at humanity from an space alien’s point of view. As he careens from Britain to Romania, Mott questions just what/who he aspires to be. Hilariously, the story is revealed when the scroll that Mott writes for the Creator ends up in the lost mail bin, where it is read by a bitter postal clerk.
- Erica Xia-Hou’(China), Banr: In this marvel of innovative storytelling, an elderly husband (Sui Li) is struggling to hold on to his wife as she sinks into Alzheimer’s, with the support of their adult daughter (Xia-Hou herself). That main story is told in a cinéma vérité documentary style, but that’s just what the husband and daughter see in their lucidity. Those segments are interwoven with fragments of the wife’s memory and her delusions and dreams. In depicting the most ordinary daily activities, Xia-Hou keeps us continually off-guard by shifting the points of view between the clear-eyed and the muddled. weaving together the lucis and the confused With the exception of herself, Xia-Hou used all non-professional actors.
- Freddy MacDonald (US, Sew Torn: The young protagonist is a mobile seamstress and her super power is rigging Rube Goldberg solutions with needle and thread to face any emergency situation. It doesn’t take long before she’s entangled in a fight to the death between two gangs of crooks, and we’re asking just what are we watching here? There’s a surprise in the construction of the story, which I won’t spoil, except to say that it involves the reimagining of outcomes. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube.
- Kate Beecroft (US), East of Wall: In the engrossing indie family drama, a grieving widow struggles to support her family and a brood of foster kids by training horses. Beecroft handles the central thread of the story – the highly charged relationship with the mom’s rodeo champion teen daughter – with remarkable authenticity. What is most impressive is that, with the exception of supporting players Scoot McNairy and Jennifer Ehle, Beecroft is doing this with non-professional actors in all the main roles. These are all rural South Dakotans playing fictionalized versions of themselves. Amazon, AppleTV, Fandango.
- Kelsey Taylor (US), To Kill a Wolf: In this character-driven indie drama, a reclusive woodsman in the Pacific Northwest finds a seventeen-year-old runaway collapsed in the forest. He brings her back to his isolated cabin, nurses her back to health and tries to learn how he can return her to her home. She’s not forthcoming, so he has a mystery to solve. Meanwhile, the audience is on to other mysteries – why is the Woodsman (that’s the character’s appellation in the credits) living such an isolated life and why is his relationship with local community members so charged? As the Woodsman takes Dani on a road trip to her most recent residence, the answers, one by one, are revealed. A superb story-teller, Taylor doesn’t explain behaviors before you need to understand them. We’re continually wondering about the characters and about what will happen next, and are usually surprised about what the Woodsman is doing and why. Music is unusually important to the characters and to the film itself. The way Taylor ends the film is perfect – the final shot is not even a half-second too long. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube.
- Xinyan Yu (China) and Max Duncan (US), Made in Ethiopia: This scintillating documentry is a brilliant exploration of clashing cultures and economic imperialism. PBS, PBS POV.
- Gala del Sol (Spain/Columbia):,Rains Over Babel: In an imagined Cali, Columbia, bars connected to the Underworld (not the just criminal underworld), are ruled by a sexy loan shark who is the Grim Reaper. Among the denizens are a sleek and smarmy bartender, a prudish preacher, a gangland enforcer who’s been dead for twenty years, a talking salamander and more drag queens than you can shake a stick at. The story, fraught with desperation and Faustian bargains, flies by. Del Sol says she marries magic realism with gritty realism, and Rains Over Babel is visually orgiastic. The intricate production designs of the interiors could be by a demented Wes Anderson. The sound design is jarring and totally original. As an auteur, Gala del Sol is thinking so far outside of the box that you can’t tell that there’s a box.
- Raul Sebastian Quintanilla (Mexico), The Move In (Mudanza): A couple moves into a new home and, the first night, think someone has broken in; it turns out to be only the clang of an old window, but it’s a really scary experience, and the man, heading off to defend them, suffers a panic attack. As they unwind from the incident, it appears like they can get past it, but can they? In his first feature, writer-director-producer RS Quintanilla gradually reveals more about the origin and underpinnings of their newish relationship, as the incident’s impact lingers. It’s a similar premise to Ruben Ostlund’s Force Majeure, but The Move In is more subtle and perhaps even better. This a profoundly clever screenplay, and The Move In was one of the very best films at Cinequest.
