It’s the end of an era for the Sundance Film Festival. After the beloved showcase’s upcoming 2026 edition—scheduled to run from January 22 to February 1—it will be leaving Park City, Utah, its home since its inception over three decades ago, and relocating to Boulder, Colorado. It’s also the first time the festival will take place without its founder, Robert Redford, nearby; the Hollywood legend died at the age of 89 last September. As a result, a flurry of screenings will revisit and honor classic Sundance films from years past (Little Miss Sunshine, Saw, Half Nelson), with special events and talks also reflecting on the festival’s impressive legacy.
But Sundance is looking forward, too: its latest line-up is as dizzyingly eclectic and buzzy as always, with star-studded absurdist comedies, boundary-pushing erotic thrillers, thoughtful dramas, and potential awards contenders for 2027. Here are the 12 films you need to have on your radar.
The Moment
Brat winter is here: Charli XCX’s thrillingly bonkers, mile-a-minute A24 mockumentary—a fictionalized account of her culture-defining summer back in 2024—arrives in all its retina-searing glory. Helmed by Aidan Zamiri, who also directed the music videos for “360” and “Guess,” and starring everyone from Kylie Jenner and Rachel Sennott to Alexander Skarsgård and Shygirl, it’s set to be a whirlwind of strobe lights, chain-smoking, and explosive meltdowns.
I Want Your Sex
Following in the footsteps of many an onscreen May-December romance (The Idea of You, Babygirl, Marty Supreme), Mysterious Skin’s Gregg Araki serves up a darkly sexy riff on the sub-genre. In it, Licorice Pizza’s Cooper Hoffman is an eager-to-please young man who lands a dream job with a provocative artist (Olivia Wilde) who enlists him as her sexual muse, drawing him into a world of sadomasochistic sex, depravity, knotty power dynamics, obsession, betrayal, and murder. Considering former Vogue sex columnist Karley Sciortino is a co-writer, and the supporting cast includes Charli XCX, Daveed Diggs, and Chase Sui Wonders, this should be a playful, no-holds-barred romp.
The Gallerist
In her first major big-screen role since May December, an icy-blonde Natalie Portman is Polina Polinski, an ambitious gallerist gearing up for her Art Basel premiere, in this acerbic art world satire from Cathy Yan (Dead Pigs). When Polina hosts an early look for an art influencer (Zach Galifianakis), he is decidedly unimpressed—until one piece catches his eye: a corpse, which Polina is then determined to sell. Honestly, it doesn’t get more Sundance than that.
Joining the pair is Jenna Ortega, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Sterling K. Brown, Daniel Brühl, and… Charli XCX (yes, the pop star is making her Sundance debut with a whopping three projects).
Wicker
Oscar winner Olivia Colman is a sardonic fisherwoman who asks a basketmaker to weave her a handsome husband (Alexander Skarsgård) in Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer’s characteristically whimsical follow-up to their surreal end-of-the-world comedy Save Yourselves!. Adapted from the Ursula Wills short story The Wicker Husband, it’s an expansion of the writer’s madcap vision, threading together a witty script, a formidable supporting cast (Elizabeth Debicki, Nabhaan Rizwan, Peter Dinklage), and plenty of surprises to form a fascinating fable about setting aside our expectations in the search for true love.
The Weight
Fresh off his awards-tipped turn in Blue Moon, Ethan Hawke takes center stage in another weighty period piece: in ’30s Oregon, he is a grizzled widower toiling away at a brutal work camp under the supervision of a cruel warden (Russell Crowe). When the latter tempts the former with an early release—which would allow him to reunite with his long-lost daughter—in return for smuggling gold through the wilderness, he sets off on a perilous mission with a crew of fellow convicts. Directed by Padraic McKinley, a long-time editor making his big-screen debut behind the camera, it’s an atmospheric and richly detailed Depression-era crime saga, complete with enchanting landscapes, pulse-racing set pieces, and the bubbling threat of mutiny.
The Invite
Olivia Wilde’s third directorial effort, following Booksmart and Don’t Worry Darling, is this single-location chamber piece in which she’s joined by Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz, and Edward Norton. The quartet play two couples, neighbors who come together for a dinner that goes off the rails, with awkward small talk slowly descending into a tsunami of marital grievances, insecurities, abandoned aspirations, and sexual frustrations. Rashida Jones and Will McCormack (Celeste and Jesse Forever) provide the raw, revelatory, and surprisingly funny screenplay, while the director and her illustrious co-stars let rip with reckless abandon.
Frank Louis
Petra Biondina Volpe, the Swiss director who recently helmed the engrossing Leonie Benesch-led hospital drama Late Shift, makes her English-language debut with another intimate story about devoting yourself to the care of others. Anchoring it is the always excellent Kinglsey Ben-Adir as an inmate serving a life sentence for murder who, in the hopes of winning parole, takes a job looking after a fellow prisoner: a once-fearsome but now frail and paranoid older man (Rob Morgan) struggling with early-onset dementia. The unexpectedly tender and touching friendship that forms between them breaks both men open, prompting them to reflect on their memories, regrets, and the possibility of redemption. An understated charmer.
Josephine
Gemma Chan and Channing Tatum are the two helpless parents of a sensitive eight-year-old (Mason Reeves) who is deeply shaken after accidentally witnessing a horrific crime at a local park in Beth de Araújo’s devastating portrait of childhood trauma. When she acts out violently, wrestling with a new and ineffable sense of fear and anger, the adults around her find themselves at a loss. How long will this haunt her? And how might it shape her future life?
Rock Springs
After giving us nightmares with his eye-popping, blood-soaked performance in Weapons, Benedict Wong teams up with Star Wars’s Kelly Marie Tran and Crazy Rich Asians’s Jimmy O. Yang for this spine-chiller, a very different kind of supernatural horror from first-time filmmaker Vera Miao. It follows a grieving family that, upon moving to a sleepy new town, uncovers something terrifying hidden in the woods behind their home—a clue to the enclave’s poisonous history. Drawing from real-life historical atrocities and Chinese beliefs about the afterlife, this is a visceral exploration of immigration, racism, and the resilience of displaced communities.
Union County
Will Poulter and Noah Centineo join forces for Adam Meeks’s delicately constructed feature debut: a thoughtful study of addiction and recovery amid the opioid epidemic, set in the director’s own hometown in rural Ohio. Poulter plays a young man assigned to a county-mandated drug program, trapped in the cyclical patterns of hard-won progress and the threat of relapse and embedded within a struggling community splitting at the seams. With its firm and detailed sense of place and a supporting cast of local non-actors, it has a groundedness, authenticity, and depth which remains rare for stories on this subject.
In the Blink of an Eye
Before he brings us Toy Story 5, double Academy Award winner Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo, WALL-E) is moving from buoyant animation to mind-boggling sci-fi. The premise of his hallucinatory triptych is quintessentially Sundance: in one timeline, a Neanderthal family fights for survival; in another, set in the present day, a post-grad anthropologist (Rashida Jones) studying ancient remains embarks on a relationship with a fellow student (Daveed Diggs); and in the third, two centuries later, a woman (Kate McKinnon) is on a spaceship bound for a distant planet. Together, the interwoven tales offer a reflection on the need for human connection, our evolving relationship with technology, and our understanding of nature.
Antiheroine
The buzziest of Sundance’s impressive slew of documentaries is this deep dive into the tumultuous life and career of the legendary Courtney Love, from directors Edward Lovelace and James Hall. Spanning her explosive connection with Kurt Cobain, her seismic impact on music and cinema, and her sobriety and imminent release of new music for the first time in over a decade, it’s a complex and unfiltered look at the pop cultural icon. Best of all, it has Love’s own voice front and centre—open, honest, and unapologetic in confronting the relentless scrutiny she faced and the impossible expectations she was met with.
