The 2026 Sundance Film Festival’s 16 Most Anticipated Movies

Even before the announcement that it would relocate to Boulder, Colorado, next year, the Sundance Film Festival was in the midst of an epochal transformation. Much of it it has had no control over: The Hollywood studio system sometimes seems to be on life support, but the independent market (of which Sundance remains the most prominent avatar) is in even scarier shape. There are more movies than ever before, but also fewer deals to be made amid shrinking audiences and a streaming ecosystem that prizes familiarity over quality, torpor over attention. And yet, the festival might also be more influential than ever. It had its first Best Picture Oscar winner several years ago (with CODA) and has two more contenders in this year’s race (Train Dreams is nominated for Best Picture, while If I Had Legs I’d Kick You star Rose Byrne is competing for Best Actress). In fact, this awards season’s biggest directors — Paul Thomas Anderson, Ryan Coogler, and Chloé Zhao — were all discovered at Sundance years ago. All this speaks to the fact that the festival continues to have a massive impact on the film world. And why shouldn’t it? There are great movies at Sundance every year. Here are some of the ones we’re most looking forward to this time.

The premise of The Gallerist makes it sound like the kind of movie that will live or die based on its handling of tone. Natalie Portman plays an art gallerist trying to sell a dead body at Art Basel in Miami. Desperate workers in the art world? A supporting cast that includes Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Jenna Ortega, and Catherine Zeta-Jones? A satire about the capitalist forces harming art in a time when the medium’s worth and value is under attack? Yes, please. The Gallerist has the potential to be a vicious and revelatory satire. The reason I am especially excited is that the film was directed and written by Cathy Yan, whose last theatrical work was 2020’s Birds of Prey starring Margot Robbie. I have a soft spot for that film (which I saw several times in theaters). Birds of Prey demonstrated Yan has an irreverence and sense of vibrant visual experimentation that intrigues me. I can’t wait to see what she does with such thorny material. — Angelica Jade Bastién

Directed by Josef Kubota Wladyka, Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty centers on Haru (Rinko Kikuchi), a fixture in Tokyo’s ballroom-dance scene thrust into great grief that changes her relationship to her craft. But with a new instructor, Haru’s life blooms once more. The film looks to be dazzling, fantastical, and emotionally bold in its approach. I am always in the mood for colorful melodrama, but especially during a bitter winter in a year as unpredictable as this. — A.J.B.

Hey, Park City. How To’s John Wilson will be on the ground with his feature documentary debut, The History of Concrete, which seems, well, very Wilson-esque. Yes, this is quite literally a movie about concrete, but it’s also about the years since Wilson’s hit HBO series came to an end and what the filmmaker found himself doing to maintain creative momentum. In an attempt to explain the world’s most prevalent substance, Wilson travels from a Hallmark-movies writing workshop to Europe in hopes of learning how and why we’ve become so reliant on concrete (and also how it’s different from cement) and if the substance might outlive us all. Wilson’s work is so singular — equal parts existential and hilarious — and The History of Concrete is rife with characters and strange businesses and facts that only he could find. — Fran Hoepfner

Gregg Araki is back to moviemaking! The iconic ’90s new queer-cinema auteur, best known for his Teenage Apocalypse trilogy, has made his first film since 2014’s White Bird in a Blizzard after spending the past decade over in TV land. For many, Araki’s return is enough of a sell on its own to see this movie, but the film also just looks fascinating. Cooper Hoffman plays a young man who is seduced by artist Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde) and becomes her sexual muse. He gets dragged into the underbelly of the art world, where there is “sex, obsession, power, betrayal, and murder,” per the logline. Sounds hot! The film marks Araki’s 11th Sundance premiere in total and co-stars a laundry list of the coolest people imaginable: Charli XCX, Daveed Diggs, Mason Gooding, Chase Sui Wonders, Johnny Knoxville, and Margaret Cho. You want I Want Your Sex. — Jason P. Frank

There’s always at least one mountaineering doc at Sundance, it seems. They also tend to be pretty good, with filmmakers utilizing the latest in camera technology to place us at the center of the deadly action. This one, by Amir Bar-Lev (who has made such remarkably diverse documentaries as Fighter, My Kid Could Paint That, and Happy Valley), seems different from the others in a number of ways. It follows a 2021 expedition to scale Pakistan’s notorious K2 mountain in winter — one of the few nobody-has-done-this-yet feats left on earth — that resulted in catastrophe and death. As such, it promises to be less a movie about the thrill of climbing mountains and more about the perfect storm of nationalism, capitalism, and carelessness that led to this horrific tragedy. — Bilge Ebiri

Charli XCX’s mockumentary about brat summer, directed by her frequent collaborator Aidan Zamiri, owes more to This Is Spinal Tap than Truth or Dare. Like Charli herself, the movie looks both earnest in its attempt to entertain and entrenched in layers of irony. The film will be hitting theaters on January 30, not long after its Sundance premiere, but you have to see it in Park City to really be part of the Charli experience. It co-stars a mix of ultrahot celebs like Kylie Jenner and Alexander Skarsgård and comedians like Rachel Sennott, Kate Berland, and Richard Perez. Why not get in on The Moment? — J.P.F.

Over the years, Sam Green has brought some of the more exciting nonfiction films to Sundance, including 2003’s Oscar-nominated Weather Underground and the remarkable 2018 Kronos Quartet collaboration A Thousand Thoughts. Now, he returns with a documentary following different people around the globe as each in turn gains (and eventually must, of course, give up) the title of oldest person in the world. Does that sound depressing? Perhaps. But Green’s style of filmmaking tends to be playful, energetic, and uplifting in unexpected ways, which suggests that this picture will be more about the wonder of life than about the sadness of death. — B.E.

Over a decade after his death, the highly experimental and bold filmmaker William Greaves (known for the metatextual documentary Symbiopsychotaxiplasm) has a film premiering at Sundance. The documentary concerns a 1972 party at Duke Ellington’s apartment that brought together the remaining artistic titans of the Harlem Renaissance. Co-directed by his son, David Greaves, who was present for the event, the film has the potential to go in a number of rich directions. As one of the most important artistic movements in American history, the Harlem Renaissance touches on art’s ability to ignite a deeper understanding of our social, psychological, political, and emotional worlds. I am excited to see what conversations took root among the poets, musicians, teachers, actors, and other artists who carry a deep history with one another. — A.J.B.

Refugee stories are certainly nothing new at Sundance, and the past decade has predictably seen a surge in such tales at the festival, an understandable response by filmmakers to the world around them. Even so, this project from directors Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes is noteworthy. Filmed over ten years, it follows a young Syrian girl, Isra’a, and her family from their home in war-torn Aleppo through Turkey, the Balkans, and eventually to Cologne, Germany. The story of refugees and migrants is also one of culture clash and assimilation. By adopting a longitudinal approach, these directors have the opportunity to explore not just an urgent worldwide crisis but also a more persistent psychological and social phenomenon. — B.E.

Maria Bamford’s bizarre but deeply earnest brand of comedy can be an acquired taste, which makes the idea of a documentary about her life and career a far more intriguing concept than the typical strain of comedian-bio-docs we’ve been subjected to in recent years. Bamford is someone who wears her anxieties on her sleeve — not in a performative, doing-it-for-the-laughs kind of way, but in a manner that suggests that she is incapable of doing anything else. Directed by Judd Apatow and Neil Berkeley and shot over many years, this film hopes to explain the appeal of Bamford’s humor while delving into her odd world. — B.E.

Prestige-era TV this, streaming-service that — the real golden era of television was the 1970s, not because of a quality of programming but because anything could be television, as was evident on Manhattan Cable Television. David Shadrack Smith’s look into New York City’s history of public-access programming — and the kooks and outcasts who populated those shows — is educational and provocative. In its heyday, Manhattan Cable Television had little to no oversight, allowing some of the most outspoken figures in television to get on their proverbial soapbox and say what they had to say. There was a fair share of kooks, like Frantic Fran (no relation), who played piano and ranted about whatever, but there were also some groundbreaking voices in politics and social justice, like the queer broadcasters who were on the front lines of AIDS/HIV protection when “polite” society refused to acknowledge it. Public Access will have you nostalgic for a time in which television could be a product of the people and not just Game of Thrones spinoffs. — F.H.

There are two films at Sundance this year about controversial school musicals. Run Amok, the more dramatic of the two, features newcomer Alyssa Marvin as a teenager attempting to stage a musical about a schoolwide tragedy. Directed by NB Mager, the film also stars notables like Patrick Wilson, Margaret Cho, Elizabeth Marvel, and high-school film icon Molly Ringwald. The Musical, meanwhile, is more focused on the teachers. It follows a drama instructor (Will Brill) whose art teacher girlfriend (Gillian Jacobs) leaves him for the inane principal (Rob Lowe). He then sabotages the school musical to get back at them in a ridiculous manner. Both films have a dark sense of humor and continue the Sundance tradition of great musicals with incongruous subject matters, a la Hamlet 2. — J.P.F.

Last year, Jay Duplass returned to directing after a 13-year hiatus with his marvelous comedy The Baltimorons, whose charming surfaces slyly masked a deep undercurrent of melancholy. Now, he’s got a film that tackles some of those darker themes more directly, with this adaptation of Adam Cayton-Holland’s memoir Tragedy Plus Time: A Tragi-Comic Memoir, starring Cooper Raiff as a man struggling to get through the raw trauma of his sister’s suicide. But this one is something of a comedy, too, apparently? With a cast that also features Kaitlyn Dever, David Duchovny, Hope Davis, and Kumail Nanjiani, this could be a welcome return to the festival from one of the more interesting filmmakers to have been discovered there. — B.E.

Union County features two great performances from Will Poulter and Noah Centineo, but the real stars of Adam Meeks’s feature debut are the non-actors alongside them. Set not far from Meeks’s hometown in rural Ohio, Union County is a meticulous and detailed look at how a community works to fix its opioid crisis, funneling addicts through therapy, jobs, and recovery programs in an attempt to keep people alive. These real-life recovering addicts are vulnerable and charming — their years of effort paying off little by little as they rebuild that which they lost in the throes of their disease. Union County avoids the pitfalls of didactic lecturing about drugs and instead reveals just how much work goes into breaking these cycles of suffering. — F.H.

There are few guys who love dressing up in a period-appropriate costume and chewing on scenery more than Ethan Hawke and Russell Crowe, so it’s nice they’re getting that opportunity to do it together in Padraic McKinley’s The Weight. This Depression-era crime thriller sends Hawke’s Samuel Murphy with a stash of gold into the Oregon wilderness in an attempt to get back to his daughter after being imprisoned. More than The Weight pits man against man, it pits man against nature — not just the bleak realities of the woods, but the literal weight of money mined from the earth. Hawke especially is a Sundance staple, so it’s great to have him back at the festival during its final year in Park City. — F.H.

Okay, while not a movie, this Nicole Holofcener(!)-directed pilot adaptation of Alexandra Tanner’s hit novel Worry is one of the sharpest, laugh-out-loud comedies playing at this year’s festival. Written by Tanner and Lesley Arfin, Worried tells the story of New York City’s most burdened computer job worker Jules (Gideon Adlon) whose younger, hives-ridden sister Poppy (an excellent Rachel Kaly) comes to stay with her for an indefinite period of time. Holofcener is perfect for this material — at its best, Worried feels like a modern-day Walking and Talking (though Worried is more walking and bickering). Featuring a very charming Devon Bostick as Jules’s kind of boyfriend, Worried is a promising entry into the young-people-making-it-work in Brooklyn genre, if only because these young people are really not making it work. Here’s hoping this gets picked up to series and that Poppy gets that skin thing looked at. — F.H.