16 Movies We Can’t Wait to See at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival

The 2026 Sundance Film Festival marks the annual cinema celebration’s final year in Utah before heading to Boulder for the 2027 edition and beyond. While the festival is packed with plenty of legacy programming to honor both the festival’s decades in Park City and the legacy of late founder Robert Redford, 11 days of feature-length world premieres are ahead.

Below, IndieWire has hand-picked 16 films we’re pretty excited about this year in Park City. Between this films and more, stars including Ethan Hawke, Charli XCX (making a splash this year with multiple films!), Olivia Wilde, Jenna Ortega, Natalie Portman, Iliza Shlesinger, Zoey Deutch, Rinko Kikuchi, Cooper Hoffman, Rachel Sennott, Alexander Skarsgård, Olivia Colman, Dave Franco, Peter Dinklage, Channing Tatum, Gemma Chan, and many more are all bringing new films to the festival, with filmmakers from Gregg Araki to Jay Duplass, John Wilson, and Josephine Decker.

While we’re only focusing on a handful of documentary and narrative features in this year’s preview, there are also plenty of short films to dive into on that side of the lineup, from Kelly McCormack’s starry “How Brief” with Tatiana Maslany to “Candy Bar” directed by Nash Edgerton, brother of Joel.

Also, take a look at IndieWire’s market coverage so far courtesy of reporter Brian Welk here.

David Ehrlich and Christian Zilko contributed to this story.

“Buddy” (Midnight, dir. Casper Kelly)

“‘Barney’ as a horror movie” is more than enough of an elevator pitch to attract a certain brand of cinephile to a midnight festival screening. Then throw in the fact that said film hails from director Casper Kelly, an alt comedy favorite for projects like “Too Many Cooks” and “Adult Swim Yule Log,” and you end up with arguably the buzziest film of the 2026 Sundance Midnight lineup. “Buddy” makes no attempt to claim that it’s anything more than its hooky premise, but this story of a group of children trying to escape a deadly kids’ TV show promises to be a genre delight. —CZ

“Chasing Summer” (Premieres, dir. Josephine Decker)

Over the past 13 years, Josephine Decker has quietly trafficked in career reinvention. Sure, IndieWire devotees and indie film freaks are well-aware of her breakout hit “Madeline’s Madeline” (a Sundance classic, basically from the first moment it screened in 2018), but less people are caught up on her early double whammy of “Butter on the Latch” and “Thou Wast Mild and Lovely,” and her Elizabeth Moss-starring Shirley Jackson biopic “Shirley” was a victim of bad timing (it came out in June 2020). In 2022, she tried her hand at coming-of-age with the A24- and Apple-backed YA adaptation “The Sky Is Everywhere,” and now she’s going even further afield: a mid-life crisis dramedy starring screenwriter Iliza Shlesinger.

A story about a woman who loses it all — job, boyfriend, adult independence — isn’t the most unexpected entry in a Sundance slate, but one from Decker and Shlesinger? Now, that’s worth paying attention to. We predict it will be a breakout of the festival, and yet another feather in the filmmaker’s ever-evolving career cap. –KE

“Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass” (Premieres, dir. David Wain)

When the 2026 Sundance lineup dropped, many cinephiles quickly noted the prevalence of comedies on the lineup. And few were more intriguing than “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass,” the new film from “Wet Hot American Summer” director and Sundance legend David Wain. The film takes the classic relationship conversation topic of a celebrity “hall pass” to its natural conclusion, following an engaged couple whose relationship hits a snag when the groom-to-be takes advantage of an opportunity to sleep with a celebrity crush. His eponymous fiancée sets out to avenge the betrayal by traveling to Hollywood to fulfill her (and frankly, everyone’s) dream of sleeping with Jon Hamm.

Star Zoey Deutch is joined by a hilarious ensemble that also includes the likes of John Slattery, Ken Marino, Miles Gutierrez-Riley, and Ben Wang in a film that should reassure film comedy enthusiasts that hope for the genre is not completely lost. —CZ

“Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!” (U.S. Dramatic Competition, dir. Josef Kubota Wladyka)

We go to film festivals in part to see things that we can’t find anywhere else — and a film about Tokyo’s thriving ballroom dancing scene certainly fits that criteria. Josef Kubota Wladyka’s “Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!” stars Rinko Kikuchi as a dancer whose attempts to boogie through her grief spark an unexpected romance. From Fred Astaire to Baz Luhrmann, ballroom dancing has always provided a rich canvas for filmmakers capable of capturing its kinetic beauty. And “Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!” promises to be a vibrant, colorful film that cuts through the winter chill to warm audiences’ hearts in Park City. —CZ

“Hanging by a Wire” (World Cinema Documentary Competition, dir. Mohammed Ali Naqvi)

Mohammed Ali Naqvi’s tense Himalayan rescue drama should appeal to fans of Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and their Nat Geo films about heroism in perilous moments of near-death crisis. Here, a routine school commute takes a harrowing turn when a cable car wire snaps, with eight passengers, including six schoolboys, left suspended 900 feet above the ravine. A group of rescuers rushes to save them, working against a clock with just 10 hours to go as the scene in the north of Pakistan turns into an international event. The film combines drone footage, on-the-ground recordings, and tasteful reenactments to construct a nonfiction thriller best seen on the big screen. —RL

“The History of Concrete” (Premieres, dir. John Wilson)

For a certain brand of sickos (read: people who are pathologically unable to look at New York City scaffolding without remembering, in complex detail, the full contents of a 2020 episode of “How to with John Wilson”), the prospect of an entire film from our foremost chronicler of the mundane is almost too much to dream of. And it’s about concrete? Sometimes, good things really can happen.

In true Wilson fashion, don’t expect the film’s highly unusual and wonderfully weird logline to do it justice — “After attending a workshop on how to write and sell a Hallmark movie, filmmaker John Wilson tries to use the same formula to sell a documentary about concrete,” to wit — and the documentary promises to be one of the real treats of the festival. –KE

“I Want Your Sex” (Premieres, dir. Gregg Araki)

Indie godhead and Sundance legend Gregg Araki hasn’t made a movie since 2014’s “White Bird in a Blizzard,” but his return to the festival seems poised to make up for lost time, as the delightfully titled “I Want Your Sex” has the potential to be the most Gregg Araki movie there is, was, or ever will be. It begins, as all films should, with Cooper Hoffman landing a job as Olivia Wilde’s sexual muse; he’s a fresh-faced kid who’s just finding his way in the world, and she’s a horny art world provocateur who’s surely hiding some unforeseen kinks in her process (the movie is billed as an “earnest look at the current state of sex,” but also promises murder). Rising star Mason Gooding co-stars.

With a ridiculous cast that also includes Daveed Diggs, Chase Sui Wonders, Margaret Cho, Johnny Knoxville, and the suddenly ubiquitous Charli XCX (kicking off her cover version of Jessica Chastain’s 2011), “I Want Your Sex” is the closest thing this year’s Sundance has to a pre-certified indie blockbuster. —DE

“Jaripeo” (NEXT, dirs. Efraín Mojica and Rebecca Zweig)

Documentaries out of the NEXT section typically blur the line between fiction and nonfiction, and with a boundary-pushing, stylized aesthetic. Efraín Mojica and Rebecca Zweig’s “Jaripeo,” one of the queer documentaries playing this year’s Sundance, transports viewers to the Mexican state of Michoacán. There, they profile young queer rancheros in their element amid bacchanaling spectators, with the film combining Super 8 and vérité footage to capture hypermasculinity through a distinctively queer lens. —RL

“Josephine” (U.S. Dramatic Competition, dir. Beth de Araújo)

It’s tough to imagine a more vicious, visceral filmmaking debut from the last decade than Beth de Araújo’s staggering 2022 offering “Soft & Quiet.” That first film showed how uniquely skilled at building dread and terror on both a technical and emotional level the filmmaker is, as she harnessed the one-take technique to follow a group of white supremacist women as they meet, mingle, and eventually attack a pair of POC sisters.

But it almost wasn’t her first film, as de Araújo had previously been working on what would become her sophomore feature, “Josephine.” Loosely inspired by an incident that occurred in de Araújo’s own childhood, the film follows a family (including Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan) as they deal with the fallout from their young daughter witnessing a heinous act in a San Francisco park. —KE

“The Moment” (Premieres, dir. Aidan Zamiri)

A comic meditation on modern celebrity made by a major pop star at the height of her fame so far, Aidan Zamiri’s “The Moment” might feel like more of a risk if Charli XCX wasn’t in such brilliant command of her self-image. Or, for that matter, if she hadn’t already proven herself to be such a capable actress (as TIFF audiences discovered when “Erupcja” premiered there last fall).

But playing yourself in an exaggerated mockumentary about your recent arena tour feels about as “brat” as it gets, particularly when it comes as an A24-branded middle finger to the bugaboo of overexposure, and early word is that “The Moment” finds “360” music video director Zamiri adding sincere new dimensions to Charli’s place in the culture even as it takes the piss out of her success. Reigning Sundance champion Hailey Gates co-stars along with Alexander Skarsgård, Kylie Jenner, and Rachel Sennott. —DE

“The Only Living Pickpocket in New York” (Premieres, dir. Noah Segan)

John Turturro stars as an aging New York hustler who struggles to adapt to an increasingly digital world in Noah Segan’s character study, which hails from executive producer Rian Johnson. The film looks to be both an homage to the old New York that inspired everyone from Scorsese to the Safdies and a satire of how modernization isolates us from analogue traditions. But honestly, all we needed to hear was “John Turturro playing a pickpocket.” The role could offer the “Severance” star an excellent opportunity to show off both his gritty charisma and his softer side as his character confronts the passage of time. —CZ

“The Shitheads” (dir. Macon Blair, Premieres)

Fresh off the juicy success of his “Toxic Avenger” reboot, Macon Blair returns to Sundance with a film he promised IndieWire is “much more tonally in the spirit of the first movie that I made,” the 2017 festival favorite “I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore.”

This one has the potential to become a new Sundance comedy classic, thanks to a stacked cast that includes Peter Dinklage, Dave Franco, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Nicholas Braun, Mason Thames, and Kiernan Shipka. And the logline? Say less. Per the festival, the film follows what happens when “two unqualified bozos are hired to transfer a rich teen to rehab, [and] their straightforward gig quickly spirals into dangerous mayhem.” What this world needs now is more bozos doing something low stakes and for the giggles, and we have little doubt that Blair’s bozos – Franco and Jackson, with Thames as their apparently deranged charge – are going to bring some much-needed fun to the fest. —KE

“Union County” (U.S. Dramatic Competition, dir. Adam Meeks)

Adam Meeks’ sensitively drawn U.S. Dramatic Competition premiere offers a standout showcase for actors Will Poulter and Noah Centineo. They play foster brothers who, in rural Ohio, are assigned to a county-mandated drug court program that is one of the few sustainable (and successful) recovery efforts working against the opioid epidemic in the region. Based on his 2020 short film, Meeks draws from his personal ties to Ohio to upbraid our preconceptions about the cyclical nature of addiction and recovery. Here, he works with actual participants and mentors from the program to create a documentary-like atmosphere woven throughout the backdrop of the original screenplay. —RL

“The Weight” (Premieres, dir. Padraic McKinley)

A little star power and some production value go a long way at Sundance these days, as evidenced by the breakout success of recent period breakouts like “Train Dreams,” “Mudbound,” and “Call Me by Your Name.” This year, director Padraic McKinley hopes to add “The Weight” to that list, and this 1933-set adventure — about a work camp prisoner (Ethan Hawke) whose evil warden (Russell Crowe) forces him to smuggle gold through the wilderness in exchange for seeing his daughter again — will certainly stand out from the rest of the festival lineup.

Working from an original screenplay inspired by the ruggedly introspective New Hollywood epics of the 1970s, McKinley’s feature debut is the kind of project that may not draw much attention at other, less stringently curated festivals, but at Sundance, there’s reason to hope that it could be something special. —DE

“Wicker” (Premieres, dirs. Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer)

Alexander Skarsgård is featured in multiple Sundance movies this year (including “The Moment”) but “Wicker” might be his most intriguing on the basis of the premise alone. In this darkly comic folk tale, Olivia Colman also stars as a spinster fisherwoman fighting for her relationship with Skarsgård who stars as a literal tree. Elizabeth Debicki and Peter Dinklage also star as human denizens of a fishing village in a film based on the short story “The Wicker Husband” by Ursula Wills-Jones. Festival alumni Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson previously directed the 2020 Sundance entry “Save Yourselves!,” a sci-fi comedy out of that year’s U.S. Dramatic Competition. —RL

“zi” (NEXT, dir. Kogonada)

Any number of filmmakers have returned to their indie roots after ill-received forays into the studio world, but few have done so faster — or with a more palpable sense of creative rejuvenation — than Kogonada, who follows last fall’s “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” with a small, searching, spartan one. Equally free in both form and budget, “zi” stars Michelle Mao as a violinist who’s become temporally unstuck, if only by what seems like a few frames at a time.

Zi perceives things at some point after they happen, and yet her life on Hong Kong’s Lantau Island is paradoxically beset by visions of her future self, visions that become more destabilizing after a chance encounter with an American expat played by Kogonada mainstay Haley Lu Richardson (who continues to bring out the best in her director and vice-versa). Nodding to everyone from Chris Marker to Wong Kar Wai as he rediscovers the sound of his own voice, Kogonada cobbles together a circular and sneakily rewarding ode to the pain of getting lost in the noise, and to the pleasure of seeing the path forward take clear shape in the space just behind you. —DE

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