New films starring Charli xcx, Natalie Portman and Salman Rushdie will all receive their world premieres at next month’s Sundance film festival.
The festival will be held for the last time in Park City, Utah, before it moves to Boulder, Colorado, in 2027. Over the years, it has been home to the first screenings of films including Get Out, Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Blair Witch Project, Past Lives, Napoleon Dynamite, Precious and Little Miss Sunshine.
Charli xcx will be seen in three films premiering at the 2026 festival, led by The Moment, a mockumentary where she plays a version of herself. “It’s not a tour documentary or a concert film in any way, but the seed of the idea was conceived from this idea of being pressured to make one,” she has said of the film. It also stars Rachel Sennott, Alexander Skarsgård, Kate Berlant and Kylie Jenner.
She will also appear alongside Portman in dark comedy thriller The Gallerist. The film centres on a gallerist trying to sell a dead man at Miami’s Art Basel. It’s co-written and directed by Cathy Yan, whose last film was DC spin-off Birds of Prey. The cast also includes Jenna Ortega, Sterling K Brown, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Zach Galifianakis.
The singer’s third film is I Want Your Sex, an erotic thriller from Mysterious Skin director Gregg Araki, marking his first film since 2014. It stars Cooper Hoffman as a young man who starts working for a provocative artist, played by Olivia Wilde, and soon finds himself in “a world of sex, obsession, power, betrayal, and murder”, according to the synopsis.
Wilde will also premiere “provocative date night comedy” The Invite, her directorial follow-up to Don’t Worry Darling which follows two couples spilling secrets at a dinner party. She stars with Seth Rogen, Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz.
Rushdie heads up a strong section of documentary premieres with Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie, a new film directed by Alex Gibney that will feature unseen footage captured by the author’s wife as he recovers from the 2022 attack. “The opportunity to make this film about his recovery – in the broadest sense of the term – comes at a critical time,” Gibney said. “It gives me hope.”
There will also be documentaries on Marianne Faithfull, Brittney Griner, Courtney Love, Nelson Mandela, Billie Jean King and the Harlem Renaissance as well as the new project from John Wilson, where he learns how to make a Hallmark movie and uses the same template to try to sell a film about concrete. Ta-Nehisi Coates will also collaborate with director Dawn Porter for wrongful conviction documentary When A Witness Recants while Navalny director Daniel Roher returns with a cautionary film about AI.
Olivia Colman, who has previously premiered The Father and Jimpa at Sundance, will return with offbeat romance Wicker which sees her star as a “smelly, single and perpetually ridiculed” fisher who commissions a basket maker to create a husband, leading to “outrage, jealousy and chaos”. Skarsgård, Peter Dinklage and Elizabeth Debicki star alongside.
As he gains Oscar buzz for his role in Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, Ethan Hawke will next be seen in The Weight, a 1930s drama about gold smuggling that co-stars Russell Crowe. Chris Pine will star opposite Jenny Slate in Carousel, a film where he plays a doctor whose life unravels. That film will be playing in competition alongside titles including Run Amok, about a teenage girl staging a musical based on a shooting that happened at her high school, and the Channing Tatum-starring Josephine about a young girl who witnesses a crime which causes her to spiral.
Sundance has become a key destination for new horror films with previous years seeing films including Saw, Hereditary and The Babadook premiering. This year sees the launch of Buddy, about a young girl who has to escape a kids TV show, starring The Penguin’s Cristin Milioti and Keegan Michael-Key. It comes from the same production company behind this year’s smash hit Weapons.
Relic director Natalie Erika James will also return to the festival with Saccharine about teenagers indulging in a new weight loss craze that sees them eating human ashes.
Other premieres include the new film from Madeline’s Madeline director Josephine Decker called Chasing Summer starring comedian Iliza Shlesinger, comedy Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass with Zoey Deutch and Jon Hamm, The Shitheads starring Dave Franco and O’Shea Jackson Jr as “two unqualified bozos” transporting a rich teen to rehab and In the Blink of an Eye, an ambitious time-spanning sci-fi drama from beloved Pixar director Andrew Stanton.
In the TV section, Riz Ahmed will premiere his new six-part series Bait, where he plays a struggling actor whose life spirals out of control.
As well as saying a goodbye to Park City, the festival will also be commemorating founder Robert Redford who died earlier this year. There will be a special screening of his film Downhill Racer and a number of other events.
Last year’s festival saw the premieres of Twinless, Lurker, The Perfect Neighbor, Train Dreams, The Alabama Solution and Sorry, Baby.
The festival will take place between 22 January and 1 February.
