This year’s Sundance film festival will be notable for a major first as well as a major last. It’ll be the first to take place without its founder, Robert Redford, who died last September at the age of 89, and it’ll be the last to take place in Utah, where it’s been since the very beginning back in 1978.
Emotions, which are often on display regardless thanks to films often ruthlessly designed to elicit them, will be high, with events planned to commemorate a figure who helped create a launchpad and then an ecosystem for American indies. But while saying goodbye to both Redford and Park City will be front and centre, Sundance isn’t Sundance without a roster of films to also get attenders talking. Last year, it felt like that chatter was less effusive than usual because while there were films that continued evoking conversation throughout the year (Sorry Baby, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Train Dreams, Lurker, Twinless, pretty much every documentary premiere) there were more that either died on arrival or crawled toward a slow death months later.
Can this year wrap things up in Utah on a high?
The Gallerist
After deservedly winning an Oscar for her all-consuming downfall in Black Swan, Natalie Portman continued to take risks many others of her ilk were too scared to take. Some worked out (Jackie, Annihilation, May December, Vox Lux) and some didn’t (Lucy in the Sky, Jane Got a Gun, Song to Song) and Portman, in more conformist mode, managed to also get lost in the Marvel machine, gaining paycheques but losing our interest. After Portman called out the Academy for its lack of female directors in 2018 and then wore a name-studded cape to the 2020 Oscars to bring attention to sexist snubs, she was criticised for only having made two films with women. She held her hands up and said she would try harder and since then, she’s stuck to it, starring in the muddled Apple series Lady in the Lake for Alma Har’el and this year she has two films made by women set for release. Before we see her enjoy Good Sex for Lena Dunham, she’s leading The Gallerist from Cathy Yan, a dark Art Basel Miami-set satire which sees her play a, yep, gallerist who gets involved in a scheme involving the use of a dead body as art. It’s always a thrill to see Portman in non-superhero territory and the supporting cast – Jenna Ortega, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Zach Galifianakis, Sterling K Brown, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Daniel Brühl, Charli xcx – is the most tantalising of the festival.
The Moment
The year of Charli xcx cinema is kicking off quite spectacularly with a Sundance that will see her feature in three major films. There are two small roles in the art satire The Gallerist and erotic drama I Want Your Sex and then there’s The Moment, her big debut as lead, playing an exaggerated version of herself in an absurdist pop mockumentary. It’s the star’s riposte to the many self-indulgent concert docs we’ve witnessed in recent years, imagining what could have happened if she had made different choices during the Brat summer of 2024. It’s a fun and unusual move from someone at her level of fame but also a risky one given how difficult it can be to nail this particular brand of satire (the star has referenced This Is Spinal Tap as key inspiration, the sequel to which recently crashed and burned …) Hit or miss, it’ll be one of the hottest tickets of the festival.
Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie
While narrative films have been far harder to rely upon in recent years, Sundance has become a more trustworthy home for documentaries. This week saw all five nominees for the best documentary Oscar come out of last year’s festival and this month’s crop promises more hot button issues and big-name celebrity tell-alls. There’ll be docs revolving around figures such as Billie Jean King and Brittney Griner but the one that’s gaining the most heat is Alex Gibney’s intimate look at Salman Rushdie and the horrifying attack he survived in 2022. Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie, based on Rushdie’s similarly titled memoir, will feature video footage shot by his wife, the novelist and poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths, and is set to give viewers more insight into what happened that day and his recovery in the months after. In a recent interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Rushdie has said the film is not the true crime story he imagined it would be but rather “a love story” instead.
Buddy
It’s pretty much a given that the festival will feature a major horror breakout, with hits such as Get Out, Saw, The Babadook, Talk to Me and Hereditary all receiving Park City premieres in recent years. It’s just not always easy to guess which film it’s going to be. The past two years have seen major sales for It’s What’s Inside and Together ($17m a piece), two scary movies that scared audiences away upon release. The most buzz right now would seem to be surrounding Buddy, a mysterious Midnight Movie from the company behind Barbarian and Weapons. Little is known about the plot other than it follows a young girl and her friends having to escape from an evil version of a classic kids TV show and that early promo hype has called it “a new experience in horror”, whatever that might ultimately mean. It stars The Penguin’s Cristin Milioti alongside Michael Shannon, Patton Oswalt and Keegan Michael-Key, an intriguing cast that, along with a writer-director with Adult Swim sitcom experience, suggests a horror with prominent comedic elements.
The Friend’s House Is Here
There might not be another film at this year’s Sundance that feels quite as timely as The Friend’s House Is Here, both for its content and the issues surrounding its premiere. It’s a secretly shot film about the importance of artistic freedom in Iran, made as bombing took place last summer and premiering as the Khamenei regime makes life for Iranians harder than ever with no access to internet and violence inflicted on those daring to protest. It’s also making its debut as Trump’s travel ban has meant that its two female leads and many members of the crew are unable to make it to the US. As Jafar Panahi’s politically tinged thriller It Was Just an Accident enjoys two major Oscar nominations even as the film-maker is facing a prison sentence in Iran, this drama, about two women in Tehran who must protect each other after their creative circle is exposed, couldn’t feel more relevant.
The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist
It’s about that time for an AI doc boom, given how much it’s infecting our day-to-day, and this year’s Sundance has the origins doc Ghost in the Machine and then the far more high-profile offering The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist. It’s the new film from Navalny’s Daniel Roher, co-directing with Charlie Tyrell, and boasts the Oscar-winner Daniel Kwan, of Everything Everywhere All at Once, as producer. The film, which is getting a big push by Focus Features, was born from Roher’s desire to understand the risks and opportunities attached to AI as he prepares to become a father. Pre-release materials promise “a stark wake-up call that explores the existential dangers and extraordinary promise of this rapidly rising technology”.
The History of Concrete
John Wilson’s short-running yet much-adored HBO series How To With John Wilson, which was both memoir and essay and saw saw him document the lives of New Yorkers while giving advice, was so hard to define that he made his own meta-trailer focused around that very fact. His first feature is based around a similarly unusual idea: what if he used the knowledge learned at a workshop aimed at helping people write and sell a Hallmark movie to try to sell a documentary about concrete. It’s hard to know exactly what to expect from that but promo materials highlight the word “strange” but also “joyful”, so expect the unexpected. With Wilson’s ardent fanbase and with Josh Safdie as producer, expect this to be one of the most in-demand tickets of the festival.
The Invite
After she premiered her beautifully made yet bafflingly written thriller Don’t Worry Darling at Venice, one might be a little cautious about getting too excited about another Olivia Wilde-directed film getting a high-profile festival premiere. But the actor-director, who is also leading Gregg Araki’s erotic drama I Want Your Sex at Sundance, has a follow-up intriguing enough to have us curious at the very least. While her ambitious 50s-set sci-fi might have ultimately buckled under the weight of its own incoherence, The Invite is keeping things simple. Based on the Spanish comedy The People Upstairs, it follows an unhappily married couple who are invited to take part in an orgy by their neighbours. Wilde stars alongside Seth Rogen, Penelope Cruz and Edward Norton (the original cast was set to include Amy Adams, Paul Rudd and Tessa Thompson) and while the small cast and limited locations might make it seem like a classic lo-fi Sundance chamber piece, Wilde has reportedly shot it on 35mm with a team of collaborators (Yorgos Lanthimos’s longtime editor, Blood Orange on music, The Last Black Man in Francisco’s skilled cinematographer) that suggests it will be that much more.
The Weight
2025 was a hell of a year for Ethan Hawke, leading a box office hit in Black Phone 2, a critically acclaimed new TV series in The Lowdown and scoring his fifth Oscar nomination for his exceptional performance in Blue Moon. He’s kicking off the new year with a return to Sundance (he’s previously premiered films including Before Sunrise, Boyhood and Juliet, Naked at the fest) teaming up with Russell Crowe, who scored a surprise hit with last year’s second world war drama Nuremberg (the film reached over $46m at the global box office, more than many of this year’s Oscar contenders). In The Weight, from the TV director and editor Padraic McKinley, Hawke will play a struggling father in the 1930s who must smuggle gold in order to escape a brutal work camp. Crowe will again take on villain duties.
Antiheroine
One of the more intriguing star-led docs at the festival promises an unfiltered look at Courtney Love, a star who has long been incapable of operating with any sort of filter. Antiheroine follows her after her 2019 move to London as she focuses on maintaining her sobriety and recording a new album. The film features contributions from names such as Michael Stipe and Billie Joe Armstrong and has been described as “raw, complicated, and deeply human”. It comes from the same production team behind documentaries on other famous women such as Pamela Anderson and Victoria Beckham. While it’s healthy to remain a little sceptical of celebrity docs which have been made with the subject’s input, Love is not a star one can imagine holding back.
