The 2026 Sundance Film Festival comes to a close this weekend, but every screening has felt tinged with melancholy. This is the final year the festival—founded by the late Robert Redford—will be held in this small Utah ski town, which annually bursts with buyers, media, movie stars, filmmakers, and cheerful volunteers in chic, festival-issued puffer jackets. In 2027, the whole thing will move to Boulder, Colorado—a location-shift that portends a bit of an identity crisis.
The valedictory mood threatened to overshadow the actual films on the program this year and the sales news was relatively quiet. But my colleague Lisa Wong Macabasco and I managed to see some good movies—and one or two pretty great ones (a typical batting average for Sundance). Here were our favorites, which are either seeking distribution or due to come out later this year. Put them on your to-watch list. —Taylor Antrim
The laws of movie karma dictate that Olivia Wilde is due for a comeback, and lo and behold her third film, The Invite, which she directed and stars in, alongside Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz, and Edward Norton, was the hit of Sundance. (It caused a bidding war, won by A24.) A send-up of marriage, bourgeois mores, and early-middle-age sexual adventuring, this hilarious San Francisco-set chamber comedy set at a two-couple dinner party had me stifling guffaws in my ski jacket. The performances are all full-tilt—Rogen, the highlight, is an acerbic wonder—and the script by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack is witty, controlled, and dryly realistic. The Invite, plus another (lesser) comedy at the festival, I Want Your Sex from boisterous filmmaker Greg Araki, in which Wilde plays an artist dominatrix, should reestablish Wilde as a comedic force in 2026. —TA
The Invite will be released in theaters, date TBD.
The Moment, starring Charli XCX, opens in theaters on January 30.
The strobe-heavy trailer told me I would be overwhelmed by the Charli XCX-led faux-documentary The Moment (and at my packed screening, the only free seat was—horrors!—front row). Aidan Zamiri’s hectic late-capitalist, music-industry satire stars Charli an Icarus-like version of herself, anxiously rehearsing for a tour, willing to do anything to extend the drug-hit of attention brought on by her 2024 album Brat. The movie premiered at Sundance just days before it opened in theaters and reviews have been a little mixed—but for me this star-heavy, feature-length crash-out works. Charli may be messy and maddening, but her self-awareness and comic timing are near-perfect. And the supporting players (Alexander Skarsgård, Hailey Benton Gates, Rosanna Arquette), plus amusing cameos (Rachel Sennott, Kylie Jenner, Julia Fox), keep the proceedings ticking along. The Moment didn’t tell me anything new about our heat-seeking, sell-out-at-any-cost moment, but I was entertained and, in the end, something close to touched by the human cost of it all. —TA
The Moment is in theaters now.
The two precocious teenagers at the center of Molly Manners’s feature debut–set at an all-girls English boarding school—are Minna and Flic (and the actors that play them are pretty well-named themselves: Galaxie Clear and Marni Duggan). These two hold themselves to excruciatingly high standards in pretty much everything they do. That will include falling in love, a state of grace they plan to achieve over the course of the academic year—not with boys, mind you, whom they hold in collective disdain, but with Miss Delavigne, their geography teacher, played with mousey modesty by Alice Englert. Things don’t go to plan, and this funny, extremely sweet film throws in enough arch humor and adolescent misfortune to keep sentimentality at bay. The two leads are finds, and watching them come of age is a brisk delight. —TA
Extra Geography is seeking distribution.
I did not have “wicker penis” on my Sundance Bingo card this year, but here we are. Wicker, directed by Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer, and based on a short story by Ursula Wills, is a wickedly funny shot of bawdy defiance against societal mores. Olivia Colman matches salty ripostes with aching vulnerability as Fisherwoman, who’s ostracized for her independence in a medieval village where every citizen is known only by their profession. Rejecting the imposed confines of her community, she commissions a husband made of wicker (a tender but still hot Alexander Skarsgård in a true feat of makeup and costume design). This is a sly, sensual fable about jealousy, desire, belonging, and loneliness, weaving a beguiling blend of whimsy and earnestness from a premise that could have easily tipped toward absurdity. Instead it reveals something all too human. Elizabeth Debicki, Peter Dinklage, and Richard E. Grant round out the delightful supporting cast. —Lisa Wong Macabasco
Wicker is seeking distribution.
Nothing made me laugh at Sundance this year as much as this surprisingly sexy, offbeat charmer. Directed by Josephine Decker (Madeline’s Madeline) and written by its winning star, standup comedian Iliza Shlesinger, Chasing Summer follows a crisis-aid worker who has found herself unceremoniously jilted and temporarily living back at her parents’ house in Texas. There, she is forced to confront people, places, and prior versions of herself, not all of which are remembered faithfully. While it does skirt some familiar rom-com beats, the film succeeds thanks to its sharply witty script, strong supporting performances (Megan Mullally and Lola Tung among them), and Y2K needle drops (Sum41, Wheatus, Lit). —LWM
Chasing Summer is seeking distribution.
Undertone will be released in theaters on March 13.
Who would record a podcast about occult phenomena, by themselves, at three in the morning? That is what the protagonist of this tidy, well-orchestrated, micro-horror flick does. Her name is Eva (Nina Kiri) and when she’s not podcasting, she is caring for her mother (who is slowly expiring upstairs). The podcast is called The Undertone and Eva records it remotely with her friend and cohost, Justin (Adam DiMarco, only a voice in this movie). Their gimmick is that he believes all the supernatural stories they talk about and she doesn’t. Undertone, a feature debut from Ian Tuason, was snapped up by A24 upon its premiere at the horror-oriented Fantasia festival last year, and one can see why: It’s a marvel of unsettling effects–most of them auditory. Justin has found 10 audio files recorded by a couple who supposedly succumbed to possession. As Eva and Justin listen to them live on the podcast, one by one, something begins to go bump in Eva’s house. The ending didn’t quite deliver the big, big scare I was hoping for, but I was tense and uneasy throughout. —TA
Undertone will be released in theaters on March 13.
Cookie Queens isn’t just a documentary about hawking Girl Scout cookies. It’s a window into ambition, class, and often unseen emotional labor in the cookie industrial complex. Under Alysa Nahmias’s warm and observant direction, we stay nearly the entire time with four instantly endearing girls—expertly cast, diverse across geography, race, and class—as they hope, hustle, and sometimes falter under the weight of expectations more complicated than their ages might suggest. There’s sweetness here, of course, all beautifully filmed: sunlit scenes of wagons piled high with cookies, songs belted in front of grocery stores to entice customers, a girl creating a sugar-free cookie for a fellow diabetic customer (adorable Ara, take all my money!). But Cookie Queens doesn’t shy from the tensions: parents quietly fretting over the financial burden (they pay upfront for the inventory), children questioning the incentive structure (they pocket only $1 of each $6 box), and a younger sister struggling to live up to her successful older sisters. Hard to beat this as the most heart-warming, crowd-pleasing film at Sundance this year, backed by executive producers Prince Harry and Meghan Markle (a former Girl Scout herself). —LWM
Cookie Queens is seeking distribution.
I am not going to insist that Tamra Davis’s archival love letter to a set of alt-rock and indie bands touring Australia and Southeast Asia in the summer of 1995 is great cinema. It’s shaggy and slapped together (from video tapes Davis shot herself on that tour, found while packing up her Los Angeles house during the Palisades Fire last year). But to fans of this era and these bands—Sonic Youth, The Beastie Boys, Pavement, Bikini Kill, The Amps, Rancid, and more—The Best Summer is transporting and more or less unmissable. It’s simple stuff: the movie consists of live performances intercut with backstage interviews and banter. The latter could have done with some editing, and there is perhaps too much of the Beastie Boys simply hanging out (Davis was married at the time to Mike D), but the onstage sequences of deep tracks from these bands…“Bull in the Heather”! “Egg Raid on Mojo”!—are thrilling. —TA
The Best Summer is seeking distribution.
What would otherwise be a pleasant narrative of female friendship inside a small group of art- and theater-minded young urbanites becomes something more fraught and remarkable in the hands of Iranian filmmakers Maryam Ataei and Hossein Keshavarz. The Friend’s House Is Here, with its relaxed pace and digressive sequences of late-night dinner parties, feels like a minor Godard hangout movie. Except this one is set in Tehran, and given the extraordinary repression and violence going on in the Iranian capital, the movie ends up carrying far more consequence. Indeed, The Friend’s House Is Here was filmed in secret and smuggled out of Iran on a hard drive to arrive for its premiere at Sundance. The friends at its center, Pari and Hanna, are free spirits and don’t wear hijabs (which they are chastised for at a cafe by a female passerby). They want nothing more than freedom in their artistic careers (in dance and theater). But the regime they live under makes that impossible, and the sense of loss and looming threats darken the movie as it proceeds. —TA
The Friend’s House Is Here is seeking distribution.
