Mill Valley Film Festival 48 (Oct. 2-12, 2025)

[Chris Knipp]

Mill Valley Film Festival 48 (Oct. 2-12, 2025)

GENERAL FILM FORUM LINK

The Mill Valley is one of America's best small film fests, and not really so small: it features some of the season's most important films. It traditionally has showcased a curated selection of independent films, including international features, documentaries, and shorts, often with a focus on gender equity and social issues. This year's festival, #48, runs from October 2 to October 12, 2025, opening with Chloé Zhao's HAMNET and featuring a tribute to Spike Lee. The festival also includes various programs like Mind the Gap for gender equity and Active Cinema for impactful documentaries, along with panels, workshops, and networking opportunities for attendees.

Mark Fishkin was the founder and longtime director of the Mill Valley Film Festival since its founding in 1977 until recently, but has now stepped back to a part-time role. Under his directorship it grew to an internationally noted event, always with a great selection of many of the best new films of the festival year.

Highlights include Cannes winners It Was Just an Accident (Palme d’Or), Sentimental Value (Grand Jury Prize), The Secret Agent (Best Director, Best Actor), Sirāt and Sound of Falling (Jury Prize), plus The President’s Cake, After the Hunt, Blue Moon, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, Bugonia, The Mastermind, No Other Choice, Is This Thing On?, Wake Up Dead Man, Once Upon a Time in Gaza and more.

Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet and Hikari’s Rental Family will topline the 48th Mill Valley Film Festival, as the lineup was announced by Founder/Director Mark Fishkin and Director of Programming Zoë Elton this week.

This year’s lineup features 138 films from 40 countries, with 52% of the films directed or co-directed by women or non-binary filmmakers.

[Chris Knipp]

SIRÂT (Oliver Laxe 2025)
This is an absolutely stunning film about what becomes a desperate journey across the Moroccan Saharan desert. It won the Cannes Jury Prize this year for Oliver Laxe. It's undesirable to reveal too much about how it turns out. The film starts with a desert festival or rave, then Luis (Sergi Lopez) and his young son begin to follow in their van people making a difficult trek across the desert to another rave. They are searching for Luis' lost grown daughter. The electronic musical soundtrack is essential and haunting. This is an experience, the kind of film that makes me remember why I love cinema.

[Chris Knipp]

WAGNER MOURA IN THE SECRET AGENT

THE SECRET AGENT (Kleber Mendonça Filho 2025)
This year we have another great film about life under Brazil's 1970's dictatorship, very different from Walter Salles' I'm Still Here, which won the 2025 three Oscars last year. Kleber Mendonça Filho casts a wider net, with comedy, rich social detail, and Hitchcockian suspense. For some this may be too complicated. For many though, it's a delight. This one is about a researcher on the run from the south to his native Recife because he has offended an evil government-friendly businessman who chooses to shut down his academic research . Sound familiar? It did to me. (This won multiple awards at Cannes this year.)

[Chris Knipp]

METALLICA SAVED MY LIFE (Jonas Akerlund 2025)
Do we need another Metallica doc? Yes, because this famous long-lived heavy metal band has some of the most determined and faithful fans and this is about them. The title could read "Metallica is my life," because some make that declaration. They are from everywhere, and they travel the world over for concerts. They like to be at the bar, right in front, so the band members see, greet, chat with, befriend, and give them free passes. They made the band in the early days and have become the elite of fans. They sometimes assemble extraordinary collections of Metallica memorabilia. Fascinating. But do we need 145 minutes about this? If we're fans we sure do.

[Chris Knipp]

IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT

IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT ( Jafar Panahi 2025)
This feature film from renowned and beleaguered Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi won the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year. In it a driver with a pregnant wife and young daughter has car trouble. The mechanic he seeks recognizes him as a prison torturer and captures him, then gathers fellow ex-prisoners to verify his identity and decide what to do with him. This tragicomic thriller takes Panahi's picture of the Iranian regime's victims to a new emotional intensity. The DIY feel, the story's own uncertainty of truth, only add to the memorably rough edges of this unique and remarkably visceral cry from the wilderness of dictatorship.

[Chris Knipp]

MARGARET QUALLEY, ETHAN HAWKE IN BLUE MOON

BLUE MOON (Richard Linklater 2025)
Lyricist Lorenz Hart’s legendary contribution to the Great American Songbook with composer Richard Rodgers include My Funny Valentine, The Lady Is a Tramp, Where or When, With a Song in My Heart, Isn't It Romantic?, My Heart Stood Still, Bewitched, I Didn't Know What Time It Was, Manhattan, and Blue Moon. But at the moment in 1943 that's the focus of this incredibly vivid and touching film portrait, that marriage was on the rocks and Hart was soon to die of pneumonia a victim of alcoholism. Here he is, in Richard Linklater's film in a performance by Ethan Hawke as Hart drinking and monologuing at Sardi's after Rogers' huge success collaborating with Oscar Hammerstein on Oklahoma! has left him in the cold. It's an astonishing tour de force by Hawke and a rich, sad but brilliant portrait of a man and a moment. Also great here: Bobby Cannavale as Eddie the barman, Margaret Qualley as Hart's young female protege Elizabeth Weiland and Andrew Scott as Richard Rodgers.

[Chris Knipp]

JODIE FOSTER, VIRGINIE EFIRA IN A PRIVATE LIFE

A PRIVATE LIFE (Rebecca Zlotkowski 2025)

An American-born psychiatrist has practiced in Paris for decades. Things go awry when the sudden death of one of her longtime patients leads her to suspect a murder and she starts doing her own investigating. The stellar cast includes Jodie Foster, Daniel Auteuil, and Mathieu Amalric, with Virginie Efira as the deceased patient. The plotline is tangled and ultimately loses much of a sense of suspense, but the obvious treat here, which never quite goes away, is getting to watch Jodie Foster perform almost entirely in French, and performing very well too. It's also fun watching those other French French stars, especially Daniel Auteuil, who used to be ubiquitous but now isn't seen as often.

[Chris Knipp]

LÉA DRUCKER IN CASE 137

CASE 137 (Dominik Moll 2025)
Veteran French actress Léa Drucker plays a tireless, dedicated Paris police internal affairs investigator who looks into the severe injury to a young "Yellow Vest" (Gilet Jaune) demonstrator which evidence shows was caused by police. It's a tough job: nobody seems to like or approve what she's doing, and in the end her results are inconclusive. This is a precise point-by-point film (as was Moll's The Night of the 12th but less successfully) that illustrates how outwardly thankless some absolutely necessary jobs can turn out to be.