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The 2026 Sundance Film Festival is almost upon us, and it’s a notable one. This is the last year that the festival will be held in its longtime home of Park City, Utah. Some things went down, and the festival decided to pull up stakes and relocate to Boulder, Colorado starting next year. It is indeed the end of an era. That sea change will probably make up the bulk of the chatter on the ground, but presumably there will also be talk of the movies. To that end, I’ve listed ten films that I think have the strongest chance of being buzzy breakouts. Such things are notoriously hard to predict at Sundance, where real hits often come out of the blue, but I’ve done my best. 

I’ll be traveling to the festival this year, doing reviews for The Hollywood Reporter and filing at least one dispatch about the whole experience in this here newsletter, so stay tuned! And if you happen to be there and see me wandering in the snow, utterly lost, come say hi and point me in the direction of the Chase Sapphire Lounge.

The Moment

Picture it: I’m at the Eccles Theater in Park City (this is the high school auditorium where the biggest movies tend to premiere; or tended to! This is the last year that will happen!). It is 9:15 on Friday night. I, a frail 76 years old, am there to see cool Charli xcx in her cool movie from cool music-video director Aidan Zamiri, which is a mockumentary about the BRAT tour, and I gradually crumble into dust and blow away. That’s kind of how I’m imagining I’ll feel when I watch this seemingly achingly hip movie. Which, actually, will be out in regular theaters just a week later. So you won’t have to wait long until you, too, can age like one of those sped up videos of an animal decomposing. Or, I dunno, maybe you are young and cool yourself and this will be totally up your alley. Or! I’ll like it too and everything will be fine. It’s all going to be fine. 

The Gallerist

This is easily one of the most anticipated big-ticket movies at the festival. It’s got a starry cast: Natalie Portman, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Jenna Ortega, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Zach Galifianakis. It’s directed by Cathy Yan, whose debut film Dead Pigs premiered at Sundance and won an award in 2018, and who then went on to direct the standalone Harley Quinn movie Birds of Prey right before the pandemic came and ruined everything. And it’s got a hooky premise: a gallery owner tries to sell a dead body as a piece of art at Art Basel Miami. It’s a dark comedy, it’s a thriller, it’s a chance to see Natalie Portman maybe do another of her weird characters. I’m very excited for it. One thing to bear in mind as you read this post, though, is that oftentimes the celebrity-driven stuff disappoints at Sundance. Not always, of course. But it happens a lot. For whatever reason, though, I have a good feeling about this one. 

Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass

If you are of the Wet Hot American Summer generation, a new David Wain movie is always something to look forward to. And thus this film is high on my list. It’s about what the title suggests it is: a lady from the Midwest (played by Zoey Deutsch, most recently seen speaking French with zero accent in Nouvelle Vague) heads to Los Angeles to sleep with her celebrity pass, in retaliation for her fiancé doing the same with his. She’s after Jon Hamm, while also being pursued by the mob for some silly reason. Ken Marino co-wrote the script and appears in the film, alongside John Slattery, Kerri Kenney-Silver, Thomas Lennon, and more. This is the first Wain joint of this nature since 2014’s under-seen They Came Together, and I am excited for the sort of dumb, absurdist comedy that only he does. And it hopefully means that after years of appearing in a random variety of Sundance fare (remember Aardvark? I’m sure you do not), Hamm will have something actually notable at the festival. 

The Only Living Pickpocket in New York

John Turturro has accomplished many things in his long and varied career—he’s met the Transformers, he once played a pharaoh of Egypt for some reason—but he’s never been nominated for an Academy Award. Which is part of what intrigues me about this seemingly lo-fi urban thriller-drama. Might this be the kind of role—a fading hustler like movies in the 1970s were about—that gets Turturro a sort of, “thanks for all the great work over the years,” nomination? Maybe! The film is directed by Noah Segen, an actor mostly known for appearing in Rian Johnson films. His last (and first) film was a Shudder horror-comedy that got decent reviews, so his presence here is promising enough. Mostly I just like the idea of Turturro shuffling around his beloved hometown, doing shifty things and teaching us a little about how thieves used to do it in the old days. That shaggy vibe sounds like a throwback to Sundance titles of yesteryear. And it could be just the ticket to get Turturro the awards attention he so greatly deserved for his work in Monkeybone. 

Buddy

Look, I know high-concept, pop-culture-referencing horror-comedies can be really annoying. But something about this one, in which the great Cristin Milioti plays a woman stuck inside a children’s TV show and trying to escape with her life, sounds interesting. It’s directed by Casper Kelly, who has done a lot of Adult Swim stuff (which is often funny!) and who could make this film more distinct than a super-sized Black Mirror episode with a snarky twist. I’m hoping for less Death of a Unicorn (which did not premiere at Sundance; it was at SXSW, which tends to get most movies like this these days) and more . . . I dunno, something Charlie Kaufman-esque? I have faith that Milioti—who did strong quirky sci-fi work in Palm Springs, which was at Sundances in 2020—has yet again exercised her good taste and chosen the right one of these to do. Does the production-still of an axe-wielding guy in a Barney-esque unicorn suit make me nervous? It does. But one must have faith if one is going to fly all the way to Utah to see movies. 

I Want Your Sex 

This is a film based on what handsome men say to me all the time, everywhere I go. I assume, anyway! The festival website says it’s a Gregg Araki movie about kinky sex starring Olivia Wilde as a dom gallery owner who ensnares Cooper Hoffman in her web of doin’ it and danger. But I don’t know. That could just be a fake-out and the movie does, in fact, concern what I’m constantly hearing from guys with perfect mustaches any time I go anywhere. Whatever the case, Araki is a longtime indie fixture who has perhaps not received his due credit as one of the innovators of the movement. Partly because his films are sometimes not so great. But there is usually something in them worth contending with. As a nice bit of symmetry, the festival is also replaying Araki’s excellent 2004 drama Mysterious Skin, the movie that changed everyone’s perception of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, from “that’s the kid from 3rd Rock from the Sun” to “great googly moogly.” 

In the Blink of an Eye 

Many movie moons ago, the Pixar director Andrew Stanton took a jaunt into live-action filmmaking with the resounding success John Carter. Everyone loved the movie, it was a huge hit, it won best picture, and to this day Taylor Kitsch is the biggest movie star in the world. Okay, sorry, that’s mean. John Carter was of course an enormous flop and basically sent Stanton to director jail, minus Finding Dory, until now. And what is he doing for his triumphant return? A movie that sounds a lot like Cloud Atlas. Uh oh! The movie is set in three eras: cavemen times, the present day, and the future in outer space. Kate McKinnon is a spaceship captain in the last part. I don’t know who’s playing the cavemen. Perhaps Jon Hamm? This is billed as a moving portrait of human narratives intersecting across millennia, and I dunno. I’m intrigued, but also very nervous. Didn’t Robert Zemeckis just try some version of this with Here? But maybe this one will work. Not that Cloud Atlas doesn’t work, exactly, but this sort of ambitious let’s-sum-up-the-human-experience kind of thing can get pretty unwieldy pretty quickly. I wish Mr. Stanton luck. All of Mars is rooting for him. 

The Invite

Olivia Wilde returns to the director’s chair after her totally chill experience with Don’t Worry Darling, this time leaving the sci-fi aside and instead focusing on plain old marital relationships. She plays half of one couple, alongside Seth Rogen, while Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz are their married friends. The word is that the movie harkens back to the marriage comedy-dramas of yesteryear; you know, all that, Bob & Carol, Woody Allen-adjacent stuff. Or maybe it’s kind of like The Four Seasons—the Alan Alda movie, not the show? Mostly I’m curious to see Cruz in this kind of English-language movie, chatting in living rooms over wine and whatnot. She has not done much of that, or any of that, in her storied career. I want to know what she and Rogen talked about on set. “You smell like Javier when he comes back from one of his walks.” 

Leviticus

Only the term “gay curse horror” could get me to even consider a midnight movie at Sundance. This one, from debut filmmaker Adrian Chiarella, concerns two teenage boys in small-town Australia whose attraction to one another turns into some kind of supernatural nightmare. That’s an alluring premise, and suggests the continuation of the Australian-curse boom begun with Sundance sensation Talk to Me a few years ago. Sadly I don’t think anyone plays hockey, or even any sport, in this movie. But that’s okay. It’s high time we remembered that not every gay story has to have a happy ending or involve some sort of athletics. I know it seems these days that every single thing being churned out of TV and film studios is about hot jocks being nice together, but once in a while we need to shake it up. So, I’m going to do just that with these Australian saddos. 

Wicker

Olivia Colman plays a woman in period England in search of a husband made of the titular material. I believe Alexander Skarsgård plays the result of that request. Peter Dinklage and Elizabeth Debicki are also involved. (Perhaps they play sassy rattan friends?) One reads the synopsis of this and is tempted to roll one’s eyes, because there is so much gimmicky ephemera like this littering Sundance history. But the filmmakers behind this movie, Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer, were last at the festival with a movie called Save Yourselves!, which got really positive reviews. Thus there is reason to hope that there will be some purpose to the quirk here. Or, at least, the quirk will be genuinely funny. The question now is, how many times while waiting in line for this movie will I hear some movie nerd make a Nicolas Cage/Wicker Man joke? I’m guessing over 100, but perhaps I’m being too conservative.