The 13 Best Movies of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival

Comedian Iliza Shlesinger escaped the state of Texas proper after high faculty, however her hilarious, perceptive, deeply relatable comedy (directed with Judd Apatow-level expertise by Josephine Decker) is all about trying again, as her overachieving character Jaime returns “home” after almost 20 years away. Something embarrassing occurred between Jaime and her teenage crush, Chase (“Smallville” star Tom Welling). She’s been out saving the world — that’s actually her job as a catastrophe reduction employee — to show herself to the bullies who’ve lengthy since moved on. “Nobody’s thinking about high school anymore,” Chase says after they run into each other. He certain has modified, however has Jaime, who reverts again to her teenage self, flirting with a gallant, decades-younger child (Garrett Wareing) at a kegger? Jaime has quite a bit of sorting out to do while in Texas, and Shlesigner’s insightful “you can’t go home again” story graciously lets her character fumble via it. (Read the full review by Peter Debruge.)

Life behind bars means dying behind bars, and all the pain and frailty that often precedes it — a destiny that awaits a very good quantity of America’s incarcerated tens of millions, though one we hardly ever see mentioned or depicted on display screen. A two-hander set solely within the steel-blue confines of an American males’s jail, Petra Volpe‘s drama charts with grace and sensitivity the initially reluctant but increasingly dependent connection between two inmates: a 60-year-old lifer (Rob Morgan) slipping into the fog of Alzheimer’s disease and a youthful parole applicant (Kingsley Ben-Adir) enlisted to be the older man’s daily caretaker. Volpe has scant time for melodrama or farfetched buddy antics. But her movie is all the more shifting for that regular, solemn sense of mortal inevitability: As one man’s life progressively escapes his grasp, the other seeks to reclaim his while he still has time. (Read the full review by Guy Lodge.)

In David Wain’s antically humorous satire of high-concept motion pictures, Zoey Deutch performs a Kansas harmless who traipses via big unhealthy L.A. in pursuit of Jon Hamm (the one superstar she’s made a cope with her fiancé she will be able to sleep with). In other arms, this might need been a believable rom-com. But Wain turns it right into a fish-out-of-water comedy laced with flaky surreal dunked-in-media lunacy. It’s a smartened up homage to dumbing down, rooted in an ironic nostalgia for a Hollyweird that barely exists anymore. (Read the full review by Owen Gleiberman.)

In their ferociously inspirational and entertaining documentary, administrators Liz Garbus and Elizabeth Wolff reveal how the tennis famous person Billie Jean King turned a game changer in every method. At 82, King talks in wealthy percussive sound bites, and the movie, trying again over her extraordinary life and profession, showcases her feral energy as an athlete, her movie-star charisma (in that thick shag haircut, she was like Diane Keaton’s jock sister), her revolutionary struggle for equal pay, and the trauma and triumph that surrounded her sexual identification. It all involves a head in the 1973 “Battle of the Sexes” match between King and Bobby Riggs, which turns into one of the most thrilling documentary sequences in years. (Read the full review by Owen Gleiberman.)

Even the most inspirational movies about rising up in the inner-city generally tend to look down on their topics. But in Walter Thompson-Hernández’s one-of-a-kind Sundance discovery, the filmmaker — and his largely untrained ensemble — spend most of their time trying as much as the skies, the place passing airplanes signify the world past Los Angeles’ working-class Watts neighborhood. Talent-to-watch Thompson-Hernández offers them wings. Aiming to ascertain a new idiom to signify the community and circumstances by which he was raised, the journalist-turned-director channels parts of surrealism, trendy dance and Greek mythology that have never been mixed in fairly this method before. (Read the full review by Peter Debruge.)

Olivia Wilde’s bravura dinner-party dramedy is like “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” redone as classic Woody Allen. Joe (Seth Rogen), a former indie-rock musician, and Angela (Wilde), a high-strung bundle of nerve endings, will fight about something under the solar, because that’s now their method of connecting. Their upstairs neighbors, Pína (Penélope Cruz) and Hawk (Edward Norton), are every thing Joe and Angela are usually not: mellow, glamorous, harmonious. They also flip out to be “enlightened” New Age addicts of group intercourse. For all the managed rancor on show, what attracts us in is the outstanding move of the dialogue, and the quartet of actors are superb. “The Invite” is so full of shock, so recent and up-to-the-minute in its notion of how relationships work (or don’t), that you watch it in a state of rapt immersion and delight. Lots of people are going to see themselves mirrored in this film, which is humane sufficient to play a fact game that rings true. (Read the full review by Owen Gleiberman.)

Inspired by traumatic occasions in writer-director Beth de Araújo’s personal childhood, “Josephine” tells the story of an 8-year-old lady (Mason Reeves) who sees one thing no youngster ought to — a sexual assault between two strangers — and her ensuing battle to make sense of a criminal offense she will be able to’t start to understand. Early one Sunday morning, while working via Golden Gate Park together with her father (Channing Tatum), Josephine comes upon a surprising scene. Her dad and mom’ intuition is to keep away from the topic. “Josephine” ultimately builds to a big courtroom second the place its title character courageously agrees to testify, however de Araújo appears less involved with the verdict than she is with recognizing how the experience impacts Josephine, reshaping how she views the world going ahead. While some would possibly discover it triggering, “Josephine” dares to confront the life-shattering intersection of intercourse and violence in our tradition, dealing with the hardest of “adult situations” with clear eyes. (Read the full review by Peter Debruge.)

“I want it to look like you,” resonates as the most romantic line between the two younger males at the middle of Adrian Chiarella’s gripping queer horror, which reaches for unassuming brilliance via a supernatural premise that’s as terrifying as it’s thematically related. The assertion implies that if their destiny is to be haunted by an entity that takes the kind of the individual they’re most drawn to, they might select for that malevolent power to personify one other. (Read the full review by Carlos Aguilar.)

If life is a contest, the method the of us at Guinness World Records appear to deal with it, how precisely does one win? Is it by amassing the most property? The most knowledge? Some would possibly argue that success is available in dwelling the longest — in outliving all of your friends, to place it in barely more macabre phrases — although Sam Green’s delightfully insightful “The Oldest Person in the World” suggests there’s an age at which the reward of life begins to really feel … extreme. With his sneakily profound and unexpectedly private new nonfiction project, Green takes a deep take a look at the topic of mortality. In the custom of Agnès Varda, he’s decided to glean no matter recommendation he can from the last few people born method again in the nineteenth century, however also together with his personal unsure future, as the director was identified with a number of myeloma during the making of this movie. (Read the full review by Peter Debruge.)

In 1972, the pioneering documentary filmmaker William Greaves invited main lights of the Harlem Renaissance to Duke Ellington’s house on St. Nicholas Avenue. The visitors comprised a who’s who of that legendary interval in the Twenties and ’30s when writers, actors, intellectuals and activists made Harlem a cultural hub of Black creativity and cultural ambition. Ten years after his father’s dying, his son David completes this vivid and layered time capsule by which oral historical past is just one ingredient of a historic tour. (Read the (*13*)full review by Lisa Kennedy.)

In a mesmerizingly tender performance, John Turturro performs 60-something Harry, a petty, old-school thief making an attempt to get by in the Big Apple. Writer-director Noah Segan’s nostalgia-powered character research quietly mourns a bygone period, when life was analog and so have been its criminals. Longtime actor Segan’s sophomore feature seems like a heat embrace in defiance of an more and more chilly world that has misplaced its manners, together with the tactile parts value holding onto. It’s the variety of unapologetically local love letter to the Big Apple and its less-illustrious denizens that New York deserves. (Read the full review by Tomris Laffly.)

Visar Morina’s third feature sees him turning his focus again to his homeland, after his glorious, likewise Sundance-premiered 2020 sophomore effort “Exile” provided a bitingly comedian take a look at the Kosovan immigrant experience in trendy Germany. There is markedly less humor in the studied, achingly sober “Shame and Money,” which again examines social outsider standing, however this time with wealth and sophistication — whether or not inherited or immediately acquired — as the dividing boundaries. Though his latest is a slow burn providing little in the method of hope or levity, Morina doesn’t commerce in one-note miserablism both: Intricately noticed home dynamics maintain the drama textured and humane, as does Astrit Kabashi’s layered performance as a person softly overwhelmed down however screaming on the inside. (Read the full review by Guy Lodge.)

In Dawn Porter’s highly effective documentary, Ta-Nehisi Coates presents a stirring story of American injustice, which he remembers from his high faculty days. The story of three Black teenage boys falsely convicted of murdering their classmate (and subsequently sentenced to life), the film spans a number of a long time, functioning as each an archival portrait of Baltimore in the Eighties and a retroactive true-crime investigation. However, its conclusions are solely surprising, and fully devastating. (Read the full review by Siddhant Adlakha.)