Sundance Film Festival 2026: Eleven Must-See Films

Over the decades, the Sundance Film Festival has kept its promise as the haven of independent cinema, a site of genuine discovery. A slew of classics has premiered here: Reservoir Dogs (1992), Memento (2000), In The Bedroom (2001), Little Miss Sunshine (2006) , Fruitvale Station (2013), Whiplash (2014), God’s Own Country (2017), Get Out (2017), The Souvenir (2019), Minari (2020) etc. Stardom has been born, as Timothee Chalamet in Call Me By Your Name (2017), Jennifer Lawrence in Debra Granik’s 2010 sturdy, unsentimentally searing Winter’s Bone.

Ahead of the 2026 edition, here are eleven films you should look out for.

Sara Dosa’s Oscar-nominated 2022 documentary of French volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft Fire of Love is one of the most swooning love stories in recent years. Produced by National Geographic Documentary Films, Dosa’s new film tells the story of Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason, as he ruminates on his country’s vanishing glaciers and the death of his grandparents. Folding personal archives into a time capsule, the documentary hews the climate crisis with deeply mortal considerations, casting its gaze on geological time.

Two-time Oscar winner Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo, WALL-E) premieres his new film, a triptych spanning thousands of years across three eras. In one timeline, a Neanderthal family struggles to stay afloat. In the present day, a post-grad anthropologist (Rashida Jones) embarks on a relationship with a fellow student. Two centuries later, a woman (Kate McKinnon) on a spaceship is headed for a distant planet. Gently threaded, these segments reflect on love, loss, the fragility and power of human connection, the balance between the natural world and technological incursions.

Kogonada’s big studio leap with Margot Robbie-Colin Farrell starrer A Big Bold Beautiful Journey (2025) crashed, but his new film Zi promises a return to the delicate textures of his 2017 breakout Columbus. His muse Haley Lu Richardson reteams as both producer and actor, essaying a stranger in Hong Kong altering the trajectory of the protagonist (Michelle Mao). A cross between sci-fi and supernatural, Zi teases a subtle, tender emotional blend.

In his first film in twelve years, New Queer Cinema icon Gregg Araki serves a delicious spin on a May-December romance. Licorice Pizza’s Cooper Hoffman scores a job with a provocative artist (Olivia Wilde), who inducts him as her sexual muse. Thus begin unpredictable forays into a world racked by sadomasochistic obsessions, manipulations, depravity, vicious power games, even murder. Charli XCX also stars. Araki is a Sundance veteran, this film being his ninth to premiere at the festival. A 4k restoration of his 2004 classic Mysterious Skin will also be screened.

Natalie Portman plays a desperate gallerist Polina seeking to impress an art influencer, Dalton. He’s more piqued by a corpse, which she attempts to sell. This promises to be a scabrous satire of the art world’s exclusionary impulses and appetite for scandal. The Gallerist is directed by Cathy Yan, whose 2018 debut Dead Pigs, had premiered at the festival.

The documentary tracks three American doctors of varying descent—Palestinian, Jewish, Zoroastrian—devoted to saving lives in Gaza, while navigating personal and political dangers. Director Poh Si Teng calls for demanding accountability from the government, carving a proactive path out of normalised atrocity towards hope and justice.

The eight-year-old Josephine (Mason Reeves) witnesses a terrible crime at a park. Her parents, played by Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan, seek to help her grapple with what she’s seen. But their efforts are warded off. Josephine’s haunted perspective, shifting between fury and fear, steers us through Beth de Araujo’s film.

In her debut feature, Molly Manners spins a delightful, effervescent tale of female friendship, self-discovery and young love. In an English boarding school, two teenage best friends audition for A Midsummer Night’s Dream and decide that their school project will be to fall in love with the first person they see, which happens to be their geography teacher.

Olivia Wilde’s latest is a chamber drama about a couple who invite their neighbours over for dinner, only for the night to descend into a volley of damaging revelations, thrusting insecurities, sexual frustrations and pent-up resentments. This acerbic, funny portrait of marital disintegration stars Penelope Cruz, Edward Norton, Seth Rogen along with Wilde.

A divorced doctor’s life is in a toss over attending to his daughter’s anxieties and the unexpected return of his high school love. The premise sounds too familiar, but when it’s writer-director Rachel Lambert (Sometimes I Think About Dying, 2023) at the helm, curiosity is immediate. Chris Pine and Jenny Slate play the leads.

Will Poulter and Noah Centineo pair up for Adam Meeks’ feature debut—a meditation on addiction and recovery amidst the opioid epidemic set in the director’s own hometown in rural Ohio. Meeks anchors the cyclical patterns of relapse and small hope in a close-knit community’s fight for wellness.