Sundance Film Festival Reviews 2025: “Love, Brooklyn” & “Sunfish & Other Stories On Green Lake”

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LOVE, BROOKLYN (no distrib):  Roger (Andre Holland) is a successful magazine writer who’s hung up on his latest piece, because it requires him to come to grips about how he feels regarding the Brooklyn bourgeoisie of which he’s a part, and the gentrification that’s taking increasing hold of the borough.  Is disruptive change something to be regretted or embraced?  Roger’s writers block is mirrored by his personal life.  Casey (Nicole Beharie) is his ex and now best friend, but the two of them behave like soulmates, and one has the feeling that they could resume their old relationship at any moment.  Casey is also a local gallery owner whose place is actively being pursued by the corporate interests buying up the rest of her block.  Meanwhile, though, Roger is trying to build something with Nicole (DeWanda Wise), a masseuse who’s launching her business.  She and Roger had something casual, but Nicole is a single mom whose daughter Ally (Cadence Rose) has increasing curiosity about her mother’s new friend, and once she’s involved, there is no casual.  Roger is constantly in motion, biking around Brooklyn to dinners, dates, gallery and museum openings, hanging out with his buddy Alan (Roy Wood, Jr.) and worrying about his story, yet he’s also frozen in place.  Director Rachael Abigail Holder and screenwriter Paul Zimmerman–both first-timers– have created a diverting romantic triangle loaded with local color (the vibrant photography is by Martim Vian) and character incident.  The cast is marvelous, and the pace is easygoing but purposeful at 97 minutes.  What Love, Brooklyn lacks is a sense of meaningful stakes.  No one apart from Roger cares what opinion he expresses in his story, and the women in his life are both pretty wonderful.  Roger can’t really go wrong, which makes his decisions mildly interesting but no more than that.  Love, Brooklyn favors warm light over meaningful heat.

SUNFISH & OTHER STORIES ON GREEN LAKE (no distrib):  Sierra Falconer’s debut is a mildly appealing quartet of short stories, covered briskly in under 90 minutes.  They’re all set around a Michigan lakeside community, and all are concerned with aspects of growing up. The title story gives us Lu (Maren Heary), a 14-year old more or less dumped with her rural grandparents when her mother decides to follow her surprise wedding with a surprise honeymoon.  Lu is mildly disgruntled, but before long she’s discovered grandpa’s sailboat, and is happily navigating the lake, blessed with a new sense of independence.  Meanwhile, Jun (Jim Kaplan), an attendee at a highly prestigious  band camp on the lake, struggles with the pressures of his stage mother while he tries to have some kind of social life amid the striving for first chair.  Elsewhere, in the “biggest” of the tales, a bartender (Karsen Liotta) joins one of her patrons (Dominic Bogart) to steal a harpoon and go after the big fish he swears he’d sighted.  In the final story, sisters (Tenley Kellogg and Emily Hall) cope with the final days before the older leaves for culinary school.  Falconer establishes a pleasing atmosphere and a set of likable characters, if little else.  Sunfish, which began as the filmmaker’s master’s thesis at UCLA, proves her polish and abilities with actors, but her postgraduate work will need more commitment to narrative.