IFFBoston 2025

Audiences at Sundance voted to give Come See Me the Festival Favorite Award, and this evening, White will be on hand as his film opens this year’s Independent Film Festival Boston. Thirty-nine features and twelve programs of short films will screen at the Somerville and Brattle Theatres before the twenty-second edition wraps up on April 30 at the Coolidge Corner Theatre with Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby.

Writing for Film Comment, Amy Taubin calls Victor’s first feature a “rueful, understatedly caustic comedy.” Victor stars as a professor processing a traumatic event, and she “has an amazing and unique sense of timing, as both director and actor, and a keen eye and ear for how the space around a word or a small bodily movement surprises us and makes us excited about what might come next.”

The Centerpiece presentation will be Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements. “The most accurate way to describe it,” suggested Vulture’s Nate Jones when he caught Pavements in Venice, “is as a mix of a documentary, a mockumentary, and a fake biopic—all of which share the conceit that Pavement is the most important and influential band that has ever existed.” And for Jones, “it’s pretty funny. Perry’s pranks, puckishness, and masturbatory self-indulgence feel incredibly true to the spirit of Pavement.”

Previewing IFFBoston 2025 for WBUR, Sean Burns finds “the scrappy lineup characteristically excellent . . . Personally, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Predators. Filmmaker David Osit is a survivor of child sexual abuse who grew up obsessed with NBC’s sleazy Dateline spinoff To Catch a Predator, finding the program both empowering and retraumatizing. This uncommonly thoughtful documentary probes the tragic history of the show and the attraction of these sordid stories, focusing on the shared humanity that is lost when the ugliest aspects of society are packaged for our entertainment. Host Chris Hansen comes off as the most disgusting person onscreen, and that’s saying something for a movie full of child molesters.”

Another standout for Burns is “the festival’s most nerve-wracking movie,” Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April, which will open in New York on Friday. Ia Sukhitashvili, who led the cast in Kulumbegashvili’s first feature, Beginning (2020), stars in this winner of a Special Jury Prize in Venice as Nina, an obstetrician in eastern Georgia who “divides her time between the sterile, imposing wings of her hospital workplace, where she is under investigation after a birth goes wrong, and the grassy wild of the mountain villages, where she travels to perform illegal abortions for those who need them,” as Fran Hoepfner explains at Vulture. “The threat of violence and the power of nature itself (deafening thunderstorms, imposing darkness) haunt each drive out to the mountains.”

Dispatching to Notebook from Venice, Leonardo Goi found April to be “a grim affair—almost punitively so—but its morbid atmosphere is undercut by Kulumbegashvili’s ability to locate wonder in these desolate settings. This fertile tension between the magical and the macabre doesn’t just power the film; it winds up shaping its grammar.” April is “the work of a filmmaker in full control of their medium, an artist firmly convinced of cinema’s ability to surprise and mesmerize.”