Sundance’s decision to screen Michael Ritchie’s 1969 masterpiece as a tribute to Robert Redford, the festival’s founder, who passed away in September 2025, transformed a repertory showing into ceremony. Watching Downhill Racer in Park…
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Edward Lovelace and James Hall follow Courtney Love in London since 2019. The film presents something rarely found in celebrity documentation: genuine uncertainty. Neither hagiography nor excavation, this is a document of a woman…
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Macon Blair's The Shitheads announces itself with title and intent: this is cinema willing to treat failure and the criminal underclasses with the same attention cinema usually reserves for the ambitious. Dave Franco and O'Shea Jackson Jr.…
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Cathy Yan tries to build a satire of the art world around a Miami gallery owner. Natalie Portman plays Diane, a woman whose taste has been compromised by necessity. The setup has potential. Yan has shown she can handle ensemble comedy. But…
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THUNDERLIPS is Sean Wallace and Jordan Mark Windsor. Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant is their film about two isolated people who have sex and something extraterrestrial happens. It sounds silly. It is. But underneath the body horror comedy is…
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Adam Meeks filmed inside Ohio's recovery courts, mixing actors with real people who actually appeared in those rooms. The result is a film about addiction that doesn't traffic in redemption. Recovery here is provisional, fragile, one day,…
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Louis Paxton's The Incomer is a film about the violence of bureaucracy and what happens to human development when isolation is absolute. Set on a remote Scottish island, it begins with a premise that could be farcical: Daniel and Isla…
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Josephine Decker's Chasing Summer is a film at war with itself. Decker wants to make something bleak and formally risky. Iliza Shlesinger's script wants to make people laugh. The two impulses never quite align, and the result is strange…
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Amir Bar-Lev documents the first winter ascent of K2 (2020-2021) and creates a film that's less about reaching the summit than about what happens to mountaineering when every moment becomes content. Between the climbing sequences, there's…
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Alex Gibney's Knife documents the 2022 stabbing that nearly killed Salman Rushdie. It's based on Rushdie's own account. But what matters is how Gibney built it: as elegy, as historical record, as defiance.
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Judd Apatow and Neil Berkeley's documentary follows Maria Bamford at a strange moment: successful enough to matter, fragile enough to break. Paralyzed by Hope runs 115 minutes and never feels long. It's an honest film about what happens…
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Daniel Roher’s The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist arrives as a brisk, visually maximalist primer on artificial intelligence for an audience presumed to know very little about the subject. A father-to-be attempts to understand…
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Jason Osder and William Lafi Youmans construct an indictment of institutional abandonment. Their documentary reexamines the October 1985 assassination of Palestinian-American activist Alex Odeh, a murder that echoes in the silence that…
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Three television pilots. Three different approaches to comedy. Sundance's Episodic Fiction Pilot Showcase captured distinct sensibilities. Each suggests how contemporary comedy works when it refuses easy laughs.
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Vera Miao's debut ties a ghost story to the Rock Springs massacre of 1885, when Chinese miners were murdered in Wyoming. This history lives in the present through three generations of women. The film doesn't treat the massacre as…
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Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer's Wicker begins with a strange premise. A lonely fisherwoman commissions a husband made from wicker. Not metaphorically. Actually wicker. And the film takes this seriously.
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Two best friends at an English boarding school devise a plan to seduce their geography teacher. Molly Manners' Extra Geography announces this premise with genuine promise. What follows is half a good film watching itself run out of fuel.
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Rachael Morrison's Joybubbles is less biography than séance, an attempt to conjure the consciousness of Joe Engressia (who renamed himself Joybubbles) through archival fragments and audio recordings. The 79-minute runtime doesn't permit…
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Sharon Liese's documentary Seized is built entirely around the August 2023 police raid on the Marion County Record in Kansas. The raid itself carries the surreal tenor of authoritarian spectacle. Officers converged on the newspaper,…
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Ian Tuason's debut feature Undertone is a formally innovative horror film that makes audio itself the primary site of dread. Distributed by A24, the film tracks podcast hosts investigating inexplicable audio recordings while simultaneously…
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Olivia Wilde's The Invite is a dinner party film that remembers what Edward Albee understood: that marriage is where civility dies in real time. Written by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack, the film channels that specific claustrophobia,…
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Georgia Bernstein's debut unfolds in a memory care facility. Eleni, a caregiver, is drawn to Douglas, a resident sliding into dementia. What develops could have been exploitative. Instead it becomes something harder to categorize, a…
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Gregg Araki hasn’t made a feature in twelve years. I Want Your Sex announces itself as deliberately shocking, then spends ninety minutes deciding whether to actually go through with it. The film opens well: Olivia Wilde plays Erika Tracy,…
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Sara Dosa's "Time and Water" is a 90-minute meditation on climate catastrophe that locates its emotional center not in urgency but in stillness. Her previous film "Fire of Love" captured the passionate contradictions of volcanologists.…
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Selina Miles documents a weaponized legal system. Defamation law, designed to protect reputation, has become a tool for powerful people to silence critics. The film follows human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson defending victims whose only…
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Valerie Veatch made Ghost in the Machine self-edited and self-funded. It's a polemic without apology. Two hours examining artificial intelligence's ideological roots, tracing the line from eugenics to contemporary tech evangelicalism. The…
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Josef Kubota Wladyka's Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty! is a film that kills any easy separation between grief and life. A competitive ballroom dancer loses her husband mid-performance and finds herself navigating the unnavigable: how to keep…
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Liz Garbus and Elizabeth Wolff follow Billie Jean King across three distinct territories: her tennis career, her fight for equal pay in professional sport, and her emergence as a queer icon. The film doesn't present these as a timeline.…
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Andrew Stanton jumps from prehistoric caves to contemporary life to a distant spaceship bound for Kepler. The goal: find the universal human story threading through all three. Kate McKinnon, Rashida Jones, and Daveed Diggs anchor each…
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Judit Polgár was the greatest chess player of her generation. Yet her historical reckoning has always been shadowed by gender instead of achievement. Rory Kennedy's documentary captures the Hungarian grandmaster caught between Cold War…
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Olive Nwosu's feature debut Lady arrives as a neo-noir meditation on urban survival that finds grace within Lagos's teeming streets. The film follows Ujah, a taxi driver navigating the precarious economy of sex work from the driver's seat,…
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Padraic McKinley's feature debut is one of those rare films that justifies its ambitiousness. A depression-era heist with prisoners stealing gold. The film conducts a dialogue with William Friedkin's Sorcerer, matching it on desperation,…
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David Wain and Ken Marino wrote Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass. It’s absurd. A hairdresser named Gail discovers her fiancé used his "celebrity sex pass", that notional couple agreement allowing one guilt-free celebrity encounter,…
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Harry is a pickpocket in Manhattan where nobody carries wallets anymore. His skills, the brush pass, the double dip, sleight of hand executed so precisely it becomes invisible, now qualify him for obscurity. John Turturro carries the…
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Joanna Natasegara directed The White Helmets. She won an Oscar. Now she's made The Disciple, a film about a Dutch-Moroccan named Cilvaringz who has spent his life devoted to Wu-Tang Clan. Not as a fan. As an operational reality.
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Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris's Little Miss Sunshine won Sundance in 2006 and launched a thousand indie imitators. The festival honored it with a legacy screening in 2026 that proved something simple: great storytelling doesn't age, it…
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Tony Jones gained access to the University of Washington’s animal research laboratory, a space rarely open to cameras. The film is neither advocacy polemic nor corporate defense. It’s an examination of the moral gap between scientific…
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Walter Thompson-Hernández's film follows Lil Ant, twelve, as his father returns from prison in Watts. The boy has learned to measure love in small amounts, in ways that won't disappoint him. His father arrives as both present and absent,…
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Jane Pollard and Iain Forsyth made this film as Marianne Faithfull was dying. She died in January 2025, during production. This fact transforms what could have been biography into something else entirely, a memorial.
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Jeffrey Walker adapts David Walliams' Fing for film. The premise is simple: spoiled 12-year-old Myrtle Meek's parents find a mysterious creature to teach her a lesson. It could be preachy. Instead Walker gets something right.
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Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman position Churchill, Manitoba as ground zero: polar bears forced inland by melting ice encounter a town predicated on their absence. It's not a polemic. It's not a nature film. It's something more…
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Michał Marczak's Closure opens with a simple devastation: Father Daniel searches the Vistula River for his teenage son, who vanished from a bridge. The film doesn't resolve anything. It documents a man learning to live inside an open wound.
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Beth de Araújo's Josephine won both Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at Sundance 2026. An eight-year-old girl witnesses sexual assault in Golden Gate Park. She responds with escalating violence. The film never explains where this…
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Casper Kelly’s debut asks: what if children’s television, all that cheerful safety, harbored violence? An orange unicorn named Buddy kills. Children become trapped in a vintage TV program. The premise is genuinely unsettling. The film…
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