From a sure-to-be-controversial sex comedy to a look at Courtney Love’s comeback — our picks for the must-see movies at this year’s Sundance Film Festival
Goodbye, Park City, and thanks for all the memories.
Back in 1978, when Robert Redford first established what was then known as the Utah/U.S. Film Festival, this modest little affair was based in Salt Lake City; the initial idea was simply to attract more filmmakers to the region. Then, in 1981, Redford moved the fest to Park City, a quaint little ski-resort town where he owned property. And for the past 45 years, that’s where this event — which would eventually be rechristened the Sundance Film Festival, after one of the actor’s most famous roles, in 1991 — took place. Film lovers, industry bigwigs, indie-cinema movers and shakers, A-list celebrities, wannabe auteurs, and legions of corporate sponsors and lookieloo tourists and paparazzi flocked to this small hamlet in the snowy Utah mountains every January to make deals, establish careers, debate the future of the art form and, above all, to see movies. Lots and lots and lots of movies.
Now, with a relocation to Boulder, Colorado, on the horizon, Sundance is ready to say farewell to its longtime home. When the 2026 edition of the festival kicks off on January 22nd, it will be its final go-round in Park City, and its first without its late, great founder. We’d be lying if we said we weren’t a little misty-eyed about bidding adieu to the place where we’d seen so many memorable, occasionally lifechanging films. But damned if Sundance is not exiting its former base of operations without one last big bang. This year’s lineup looks to be one of its strongest in years, and we’ll be reporting on the highs and lows of the fest throughout its 11-day run. But here’s a look at some of the hotter, buzzier titles that seem poised to set Park City on fire (metaphorically speaking). From Charli XCX’s white-hot meta-fiction about Brat Summer to a white-knuckle Ethan Hawke survivalist thriller, a warped midnight movie from an Adult Swim legend to a doc about the life, times, and comeback of Courtney Love — here are 22 movies we can’t wait to see at Sundance 2026.
-
‘Antiheroine’
Image Credit: Edward Lovelace/Courtesy of Sundance Institute
Everyone has some sort of opinion on Courtney Love — her history, her artistry, her marriage, her persona, her problems, and the undeniable force of the music she made with her seminal 1990s band Hole. Ms. Love is well aware of what folks might think about her — and she’s ready to set the record straight on a few things. Documentarians Edward Lovelace and James Hall give the former girl with the most cake a stage in which to tell her own story in her own words, covering everything from her tumultuous youth to her early brushes with fame to everything that happened after. We’ve been waiting for this for a long time.
-
‘The Best Summer’
Image Credit: Tamra Davis/Sundance Institute
It was the summer of ’95, and Australian music promoter Stephen “Pav” Pavlovic was putting together a traveling down-under music festival he dubbed “Summersault.” The lineup included the Beastie Boys, the Foo Fighters, Sonic Youth, Bikini Kill, Rancid, Pavement, Beck, and a host of James Lavelle’s Mo’ Wax crew. Fresh off of directing the cinéma du Sandler classic Billy Madison, Tamra Davis was following the traveling circus, camera in hand; she’d end up recording a number of performances, along with a handful of interviews with the musicians. Cut to January 2025, when Davis was evacuating her house during the Palisades fires. She happened to come across a box of tapes filled with her old Summersault footage — and now we get this oral history-cum-mixtape of a once-in-a-lifetime fest that captured a moment of Nineties live music in full feedback-soaked bloom.
-
‘Broken English’
Image Credit: Amelia Troubridge//Sundance Institute
When we were forced to bid farewell (on this plain of existence, at least) to Marianne Faithfull in January of last year, it wasn’t just one more cascade of tears going by — the loss of both a Sixties icon and a genuinely timeless iconoclast felt like a true end of an era. Documentarians Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard (no strangers to iconoclasts, having made the Nick Cave portrait 20,000 Days on Earth) revisit the life and times of the singer via something called the Ministry of Not Forgetting, where Tilda Swinton interviews the lady herself and digs into the who, what, where, and when of it all. Nick Cave, Courtney Love, Beth Orton, and Suki Waterhouse occasionally drop by to sing a song or three. Having played festivals in Venice, London and Taipei, this singular take on the music doc makes it’s U.S. premiere here at Sundance. The Faithfull faithful on these shores may now commence rejoicing.
-
‘Buddy’
Image Credit: Worry Well Productions/Sundance Institute
The program note for this festival selection consists of a single sentence: “A brave girl and her friends must escape a kids’ television show.” Pretty vague, amirite? And yet! There may not be another movie in Sundance’s Midnight sidebar that we’re looking forward to seeing more than this one, due to the fact that thias comes courtesy of writer-director Casper Kelly, the gent who gave usthose demented Adult Swim Yule Loge videos, the instant classic “Too Many Cooks,” the TV show Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell, and a number of other brain-melting, psychotronic shorts. Also check out the cast: Cristin Milioti, Michael Shannon, Patton Oswalt, Keegan Michael-Key, Topher Grace and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You‘s Delany Quinn. Something tells us this one is going to generate some chatter. And probably some vomiting.
-
‘Carousel’
Image Credit: Sundance Institute
Noah (Chris Pine) is a doctor, a divorcé, and a dad who’s determined to make a modest medical practice in Cleveland enough to sustain both a close proximity to his daughter and his sense of well-being. He’s content to be on his own. Then an old high-school flame named Rebecca (Jenny Slate) returns, and suddenly, his carefully constructed life is upended. We’re fans of filmmaker Rachel Lambert’s previous Sundance entry, the oddball Daisy Ridley vehicle Sometimes I Think About Dying (2023), so we’re excited to see what she does with a similar story of self-imposed isolation and second chances.
-
‘Chasing Summer’
Image Credit: Eric Branco/Summer 2001 LLC/Sundance Institute
Comedian Iliza Shlesinger wrote and stars in this dramedy about a woman who, having found herself unexpectedly single and unemployed, retreats to her hometown in Texas. Once back in the Lone Star state, she finds her past catching up to her and naturally gets caught up in a host of angst-fueled shenanigans. Personally, you had us at “Iliza Shlesinger” — her stand-up specials are a hoot, and if you’ve seen her supporting turn in 2020’s Pieces of a Woman, you know she has chops — but add in the fact that she’s enlisted Jospehine Decker (Madeline’s Madeline, Shirley), and you’ve got something that sounds like more than just another millennial coming-of-age story.
-
‘The Disciple’
Image Credit: Sundance Institute
From the moment that heard the Wu-Tang Clan’s seminal debut album Enter the 36 Chambers, Tarik Azzougarh became an instant ride-or-die fan. The Dutch-Moroccan kid quickly put together his own hip-hop crew in his hometown of Tilburg, and ended up slinging verses onstage next to Ol’ Dirty Bastard when the group played in Amsterdam. Taking the name Cilvaringz, Azzougarh would become a Wu “affiliate” and end up booking a world tour for RZA. He’d also began conceiving and producing a project that would eventually be called Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, and, well… you know what happened next. Oscar-winning filmmaker Joanna Natasegara chronicles how a kid obsessed with the Staten Island collective ended up collaborating with heroes — and how what was supposed to be a major addition to the Wu legend ended up becoming one of the most controversial album “releases” of all time.
-
‘The Gallerist’
Image Credit: MRC II Distribution Company L.P./Sundance Institute
We remember catching Cathy Yan’s debut Dead Pigs at Sundance 2018 and immediately pledging our allegiance to this sui generis filmmaker (not even a detour into superhero I.P., 2020’s Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn, could dampen her sharp wit or her idiosyncrasies). So we’re especially jazzed that she’s back at the fest with one of the most buzzed-about screenings of this year’s edition — it nabbed the prime Saturday-night-at-the-Eccles slot — about a gallery owner (Natalie Portman) trying to catch the attention of an art-world tastemaker (Zach Galifianakis) before Art Basel Miami kicks into full gear. Let’s just say that a corpse becomes a key part of the equation. It’s fair to call this particular satire “star-studded”: In addition to Portman and Galifianakis, the cast includes Jenna Ortega, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Sterling K. Brown.
-
‘Ghost in the Machine’
Image Credit: Stefan Berin/Sundance Institute
No surprise that A.I. is a hot doc topic at this year’s fest, with not one but two different nonfiction takes on the tech that’s causing a lot of deserved existential dread among us flesh-and-blood types. There’s the Premieres section’s The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell’s big-picture look at the ins and outs of artificial intelligence as filtered through the lens of fatherhood. And then there’s this entry in the fest’s more experimental, odds-and-sods NEXT sidebar from documentarian Valerie Veatch (Love Child), which takes a more essayistic approach about the history of human advancement through technological advances, and how the combination of utopian ideology, dystopian nightmares and good old-fashioned exploitation are playing into what could happen next with AI.
-
‘The History of Concrete’
Image Credit: John Wilson/Sundance Institute
If you’ve seen John Wilson’s brilliant HBO series How to With John Wilson, then you know this one-of-a-kind documentarian has a knack for turning the mundane into the magnificent, not to mention mining B-roll footage for maximum irony. His feature debut picks up where his TV show left off, with Wilson asking a simple question: what is the history of that substance that paves our sidewalks and provides our structures with a strong foundation? His attempt to find an answer will lead him everywhere from a screenwriting class that teaches you how to write a Hallmark movie to a marathon that requires runners to run around a block for 3100 miles. To say “we can’t wait to see this,” per our list’s headline, is severely underselling our excitement.
-
‘I Want Your Sex’
Image Credit: Lacey Terrell/Sundance Institute
He (Cooper Hoffman) is a young Angeleno who just scored a plum gig as an artist’s assistant. She (Olivia Wilde) is his new boss, who’s also decided that her new hire will become her “sexual muse.” Considering this cockeyed explored of intimacy, consent, power dynamics and hot ‘n’ heavy kink comes to us courtesy of director, cowriter and New Queer Cinema icon Gregg Arraki (The Living End, The Doom Generation, Mysterious Skin), we expect a post office’s worth of envelopes to get pushed before the end credits roll. Charli XCX, Daveed Diggs, The Studio‘s Chase Sui Wonders and Scream‘s Mason Gooding costar.
-
‘In the Blink of an Eye’
Image Credit: Sundance Institute
Pixar legend Andrew Stanton (WALL-E, Finding Nemo) has spent the last decade directing episodes of top-shelf TV series (Stranger Things, Better Call Saul, For All Mankind). Now he steps back into the world of live-action features — his first since 2012’s John Carter — with this trilogy of tales that spans the prehistoric era to the present day to our distant future. A family of cave dwellers fight to survive the harsh terrain. An anthropology grad student (Rashida Jones) starts a relationship with a peer (Daveed Diggs) while studying the remains of early humans. And an astronaut (Kate McKinnon) roams the galaxy many, many light years from now, trying to ward off a threat to the ship’s in-house ecosphere. Chances are good that there will be numerous similarities between all of these tales, which will lead folks to believe that time sure passes… well, see the title.
-
‘The Invite’
Image Credit: Sundance Institute
Olivia Wilde isn’t just at the festival as an actor for hire (see: I Want Your Sex). The hyphenate is also bringing her new directorial effort, the first since 2022’s Don’t Worry Darling — yeah, yeah, we know, quiet down now, people — which centers around two couples gathered together for what’s supposed to be a nice, civil dinner party. Quicker than you can ask who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf, the evening devolves into an airing of marital grievances that that threatens to go nuclear. Wilde and Seth Rogen play one of beleaguered duos; Edward Norton and Penelope Cruz play the other. Very curious about this one, in a sort of Bill-Hader-as-Keith-Morrison-chomping-popcorn-meme kind of way.
-
‘The Moment’
Image Credit: A24/Sundance Institute
Remember how Charli XCX and “Brat Summer” dominated 2024? The singer-songwriter is now ready to give you a firsthand look at what it was like to be in the eye of that pop-superstar storm, via a cheeky metafictional comedy! Director, co-writer, and longtime Charli collaborator Aidan Zamiri has described this faux-chronicle of the hitmaker on tour as an “alternate history of the Brat era… if she’d made all the wrong choices.” Alexander Skarsgård plays the hottest director in town, who’s been hired to document everything. Rachel Sennott, Kate Berlant, Rosanna Arquette, Jamie Demetriou, and Hailey Gates co-star. We assume the premiere will shock Sundance like a defibrillator.
-
‘Once Upon a Time in Harlem’
Image Credit: William Greaves Productions/Sundance Institute
In 1972, the late, great filmmaker William Greaves (Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One) sent out an invite to the last living creators and emissaries of the Harlem Renaissance: come to Duke Ellington’s apartment on the corner of West 157th and St. Nicholas Avenue for a night of cocktails and conversations. Greaves proceeded to document a who’s who of songwriters, authors, poets, theater bigwigs, journalists, movers, and shakers sitting around and reminisced. The footage remained virtually unseen — until now. Thanks to David Greaves, William’s son (and who was operating one of the cameras on that fateful night), we now get to be a fly on the wall as a host of legends detail how they made history and changed American art forever.
-
‘Paralyzed by Hope: The Maria Bamford Story’
Image Credit: Sundance Institute
Anyone who has been lucky enough to sample Maria Bamford’s sense of humor — via her stand-up specials, the Comedians of Comedy documentary, her TV show Lady Dynamite, or at a mid-sized theater or club near you — can attest to the fact that she is one of the funniest, smartest, and most unique comics working today. Seriously: name another comedian who would center an entire televised showcase around performing her act live for her parents, and no one else. She’s also had her share of struggles in terms of anxiety, depression, mental instability, and what may or may not be professional self-sabotage (it depends on whether you consider a Target pitch-person talking shit about the superstore to be “self-sabotage.”) Bamford has been long overdue for a solo doc, so thank the good lord that Judd Apatow and co-director Neil Berkeley have not only put this profile together, but refused to play down her issues — or how she’s consistently managed to turn a long, hard stare into the abyss into a tight hour of hilarious material.
-
‘Public Access’
Image Credit: Midnight Blue/Sundance Institute
Before the World Wide Web, before Wayne’s World, before social media and the era of 24-7 content creators and influencers, there was public access television — a wild frontier of would-be talk show hosts, bon vivants, raconteurs, kooks, freaks, and free-speech advocates with a need to push the boundaries of good taste. When New York City introduced the nation’s first public cable channel in 1971, it not only opened the floodgates to a host of DIY entertainers and marginalized communities — it changed what could be said and shown on the air. David Shadrack Smith’s doc gets into the good, the bad, and the Midnight Blue of it all, filling in a lost chapter of media history that’s crazier than you could imagine.
-
‘See You When I See You’
Image Credit: Jim Frohna/Sundance Institute
Jay Duplass — he of the Duplass brothers, Transparent and Industry acting fame, and director of the recent shaggy-dog comedy The Baltimorons — hits Sundance with an adaptation of Adam Cayton-Holland’s memoir Tragedy Plus Time: A Tragi-Comic Memoir. Cooper Raiff (Cha Cha Real Smooth) plays the author’s screen counterpart, a young writer named Aaron who’s trying to find his voice. Then a family tragedy forces him to deal with an unbearable loss, and the idea that humor can help guide folks through the darkest of times. If anyone can pull this off without turning this into quirky indie grief-porn, it’s Duplass. Kaitlyn Dever, David Duchovny, Hope Davis, and Lucy Boynton costar.
-
‘The Shitheads’
Image Credit: Sundance Institute
Because what is Sundance without a ridiculous buddy comedy, usually involving various dim and/or down-on-their-luck dudes getting into absurd — and absurdly dangerous — situations? Thank god writer-director-actor Macon Blair (I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore) stepped up and gave the 2026 edition its requisite bumbling-idiots road-movie farce. O’Shea Jackson Jr. and Dave Franco are hired to transport a rich teen (The Black Phone’s Mason Thames) to rehab. Simple enough, right? Except the kid is a sociopath, and before you can say The Ransom of Red Chief, he’s turning their lives into a living hell. Also along for the ride: Peter Dinklage, Nicholas Braun, Kiernan Shipka, and Killer Mike.
-
‘The Weight’
Image Credit: Matteo Cocco/Sundance Institute
No stranger to Sundance — he’s been a constant presence at the fest since Reality Bites premiered there in 1994 — Ethan Hawke stars as a Depression-era dad who ends up in a brutal work camp out in the Oregon wilderness. But there’s this corrupt warden (Russell Crowe), see, and he has an offer: smuggle a mother lode’s worth of gold through a 100 miles of unforgiving terrain, and if he makes it through, the prisoner can go free. The task is way, way harder than it sounds. This sounds so up our action-filled-1970s-style-character-study-survivalist-thriller alley.
-
‘When a Witness Recants’
Image Credit: Dawud Anyabwile/Sundance Institute
It started with a teenager being robbed and murdered for his Georgetown jacket in the hallways of his high school, during the middle of a school day; the 1983 crime would rock the Baltimore neighborhood in which it took place, causing a generation of kids to feel that they were unsafe in their own community. But it would also lead to a gross miscarriage of justice, in which one of the victim’s best friends was coerced by the police to lie about what he witnessed that day — a decision which would send three innocent teens to jail for 36 years. Documentarian Dawn Porter (The Lady Bird Diaries, John Lewis: Good Trouble) and executive producer Ta-Nehisi Coates revisit the case, and dive into the details regarding the conspiracy that landed the trio in jail, how they were eventually exonerated and released, and the sense of guilt that hovered the young man whose decision cost them their freedom.
-
‘Zi’
Image Credit: Benjamin Loeb/Sundance Institute
Video artist and filmmaker Park Joon Eung — who goes by the nom de artiste Kogonada — has been one of the major Sundance discoveries of the past 10 years, having shown his extraordinary first feature Columbus at the festival in 2017. He’s back with this elliptical, sci-fi–inflected story of a Hong Kong resident (Michelle Mao) who begins to encounter her future self. Then things apparently get weird(er). Longtime collaborator Haley Lu Richardson and Pachinko’s Jin Ha add to the vibes.
