Our 6 favorite films at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival

Funmilayo Akechukwu in the movie “BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions.”

(Rich Spirit)

Briefly pulled from the Sundance lineup over a dispute between director Kahlil Joseph and the project’s financier, the boldly transportive “BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions” was reinstated when a new backer stepped in. Part essay film, part noirish sci-fi-fantasy set aboard an ocean liner, the film is also a chapter of an ongoing project that wraps together the past, present and future of Black history. Structured in movements akin to an album, the film is less intimidatingly rigorous than it may appear, developing a hypnotic momentum and uninhibited energy as it weaves together found imagery with footage created for the project. Particularly in sections where Peter Jay Anderson portrays W.E.B. Du Bois, there is a vivid emotional resonance that ties it all together. At one point art curator Okwui Enwezor describes an exhibition as “a kind of thinking machine” that can be used to examine “the state of things,” and there may be no better description for the fascinating, reflexively idiosyncratic “BLKNWS.” — Mark Olsen