Sundance 2026: 12 Best Movies

Singer, songwriter, Sixties icon, star of stage and screen, survivor, elder stateswoman of sticking to your creative guns — Marianne Faithfull lived enough lifetimes for a half dozen documentaries. Filmmakers Jane Pollard and Iain Forsyth (20,000 Days on Earth) somehow manage to cram virtually everything you’d want to know about Faithfull into one vital portrait of an artist. (Just don’t ask her about that whole naked-under-a-fur-rug myth.) Though the movie is framed as an inquiry held within the fictional institution known as the Ministry of Not Forgetting, the focus never wavers from its subject, and gives Faithfull plenty of room to hold court. And if you can hold your tears from going by as she gives what would be her final performance, a rendition of “Misunderstanding” accompanied by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, than you’re a stronger person than I am.

It’s been a decade since Polish documentarian Michał Marczak premiered his extraordinary chronicle of Warsaw youth All These Sleepless Nights at 2016’s Sundance — and his long-awaited follow-up proves that he’s one of the best, most expressionistic nonfiction filmmakers working today. Once upon a time, a teenager named Krzysztof Dymiński was caught on surveillance cameras walking onto a bridge… and was never seen again. Ever since then, his father Daniel trawls the Vistula River, searching for a body yet sustaining the hope that somehow, even as months turn into years, his child might still be out there. It’s a devastating look at paternal love and resilience, which respectfully follows this grieving father (and several others like him) as he refuses to give up hope. And though he borrows the visual template of the true-crime doc, complete with several surreal Lynchian flourishes, Marczak never steers this into exploitative waters. His eyes stay on the prize, sketching out how an endless quest for answers can drive someone toward both madness and, eventually, acceptance.

Hanna (Hana Mana) is a dancer, known for posting social-media videos of herself subversively moving and shaking in front of public monuments. Pari (Mahshad Bahram) is a playwright who mounts socially conscious multimedia productions. These two women live together and operate within the same thriving underground-art scene in Tehran. And for the bulk of Hossein Keshavarz and Maryam Ataei’s breezy, buoyant look at bohemian life, we simply watch them bicker and banter and go about the blissful business of being young, creative, and idealistic it’s a look at a transitional moment in life that owes as much to Godard hangout movies like Masculin Feminin as it does, say, Kiarostami films (see title). Then a seemingly innocuous discussion after Pari’s latest production begins to take on a sinister tone, and you’re reminded that the country’s powers that be isn’t exactly friendly to artists or dissidents. The fact that Keshavarz and Ataei’s own extraordinary slice of life under a repressive regime had to be smuggled out of the country in order to play in Park City only underlines the importance of free expression as a form of resistance. Amazing.

If you’ve seen the HBO show How to with John Wilson, then you know that its director-slash-tour-guide has a knack for finding life lessons in New York’s more idiosyncratic nooks and crannies. The question was always: Could he sustain something like that in more of a longer format? The answer is a resounding [in John Wilson voice], “Um, well… yes.” Here, Wilson takes on no less than chronicling the history of concrete, which will take him everywhere from Rome to Ridgewood, Queens, bricklaying competitions to seminars on how to write the perfect Hallmark movie. Occasionally, we sit in on Zoom meetings in which Wilson unsuccessfully pitches the doc you’re currently watching. It initially plays like a supersized How To episode, gently ambling from one ironic vignette to the next, until a chance encounter at a liquor store leads us toward a story that suggests something a little more emotionally, er, concrete. Remember, the only thing permanent in this life is impermanence.

Speaking of sly feints: Lithuanian filmmaker Andrius Blaževičius kicks off his story of a middle-class couple — Marija (Zygimante Elena Jakstaite), an administrator at a chic content-creation company, and Vytas (Marius Repšys), a former film director who seems to be permanently between gigs — in the process of dissolving their union. Then the news that Russia has invaded Ukraine hits the airwaves, and once the war starts, both of them try to “do the right thing” by becoming involved in relief efforts at home. And what started as a realistic domestic drama about a failed marriage slowly transforms into a stinging satire about virtue signaling, what happens when your value systems get road-tested, and good intentions blowing up in your face. You’ll relate to this way that will almost assuredly be too close for comfort.

If you have a soft spot for gently absurdist U.K. humor, man — do we have a movie for you. Siblings Isla (Gayle Rankin) and Sandy (Grant O’Rourke) live an isolated life as the only two residents of a remote Scottish island, having sustained themselves on a world formed by their own demented, self-made mythology. Enter Daniel (Domhnall Gleeson), a meek clerk from the mainland who’s been tasked with telling them they have to relocate. The duo have been prepared for any “incomers” who might try to evict them, however, and essentially take their visitor hostage. Imagine Dogtooth as written by Richard Ayoade, and you’re halfway there. Writer-director Louis Paxton’s debut has the keenest of wits, and Rankin and O’Rourke deliver two of the funniest comic turns we’ve seen in a long time; we hope the former gets more chances to show off her chops as a physical comedian and a purveyor of 0-to-60mph punch line delivery way more often now.

Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: A couple who are having fissures in their marriage entertain another couple in their apartment one evening. Things get tense, and more than a little bonkers. We mention the stock set-up of director Olivia Wilde’s funny, occasionally filthy comedy of manners only to emphasize how wonderful the pay-off is — it’s the sort of one-location, star-driven ensemble piece that could have merely been a theatrical exercise, and somehow manages to avoid being either stagy or stodgy. Even more impressive is how each of the actors sync up their own unique performance styles; you wouldn’t think that Seth Rogen’s signature heh-heh-heh stunted-bro persona would mesh with Edward Norton’s ironic take on another egocentric blowhard or Penélope Cruz’s sultry chilliness. But like a supergroup, they somehow find a rhythm that makes the disparate parts sound better together. The surprise here is Wilde, who not only knows how to keep viewers on the back foot as a filmmaker but taps into a neurotic register and oft-kilter comic timing for her high-strung hostess that fits her like rubber glove. A24 bid high for this one at the fest. It’s easy to see why.

Every year at the festival, there is usually a consensus pick for the genuine standout entry — the kind of film that feels like a true discovery, that either introduces or seriously levels up a new talent, and that seems capable of making the phrase “critics agree!” not feel like the ultimate oxymoron. Writer-director Beth de Araújo’s family drama was the 2026 winner for that honor, and even if you shuddered appreciatively at her debut, the 2022 Neo-Nazi Karen parable Soft & Quiet, you simply won’t be prepared for the emotional wallop coming your way. Every Sunday, a jock-ish dad (Channing Tatum, doing career-best work here) and his eight-year-old daughter, Josephine (Mason Reeves), go running in the park near their apartment in San Francisco. One morning, the girl strays off their usual path, and happens to witness an assault. We then follow the aftermath, as this child is forced to grasp a situation beyond her comprehension and grow up way too quickly. There’s zero false notes here, and the way in which Tatum and Gemma Chan play off each other as Josephine’s concerned parents feels completely on point; as for Reeves’ receptive way of reacting to what’s around her, the youngster’s performance transcends the good-for-a-child-actor compliment and goes straight to “phenomenal.” Not even a detour into familiar courtroom dramatics can shake the feeling that you’re watching something brilliant, singular, and astounding. The film walked away from Sundance with both the Grand Jury and the Audience awards in the Best U.S. Dramatic Competition section. May these be the first of dozens of accolades for this instant classic.

There was no shortage of documentaries at this year’s Sundance that hit you with the full stylized, bells-and-whistles treatment — but Abby Ellis’s look at three folks fighting to keep Utah’s rapidly disappearing Great Salt Lake from turning into an “environmental nuclear bomb” keeps things simple and observational, and is the stronger for it. The more this body of water dries up, the greater the potential for carcinogen-carrying dust storms to contaminate the regions downwin from the lake and beyond. And because this is happening within a city that serves as the base for the Church of the Latter Day Saints, there’s a complicated mixture of politics, faith, science, skepticism, and activism around the issue, all of which Ellis details in a way that reminds you how personal this is for those fighting the good fight.

In 1972, the late, great filmmaker William Greaves (Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One) sent out an invite to the last living creators and emissaries of the Harlem Renaissance: Come to Duke Ellington’s apartment on the corner of West 157th and St. Nicholas Avenue for a night of cocktails and conversation. He proceeded to document a who’s who of songwriters, authors, poets, theater bigwigs, journalists, movers, and shakers sitting around and reminiscing. The footage remained virtually unseen — until now. Thanks to David Greaves, William’s son (who was also operating one of the cameras on that fateful night), we now get to be a fly on the wall as a host of legends detail how they made history and changed American art forever. It’s not just that you feel like you are there, sitting next to groundbreakers like the pianist Eubie Blake and photographer James Van Der Zee as they wax poetic about what it was like in their heyday. It’s the way that Greaves gives you a true portrait of a community, and lets you eavesdrop on their bickering and airing of grievances as well as their mutual admiration and gratitude. A masterpiece, this.

Before the World Wide Web, before Wayne’s World, before social media and the era of 24-7 content creators and influencers, there was public access television — a wild frontier of would-be talk show hosts, bon vivants, raconteurs, kooks, freaks, and free-speech advocates with a need to push the boundaries of good taste. When New York City introduced the nation’s first public cable channel in 1971, it not only opened the floodgates to a host of DIY entertainers and marginalized communities — it changed what could be said and shown on the air. David Shadrack Smith’s doc gets into the good, the bad, and the Midnight Blue of it all, filling in a lost chapter of media history that’s crazier than you could imagine.

The Walter Hill vibes are strong in Padraic McKinley’s Seventies-style survivalist thriller, about a single dad (Ethan Hawke, clearly on a roll right now) trying to provide for his daughter during the Great Depression. A stroke of bad luck puts him on a prison work gang, but the group’s overseer (Russell Crowe) makes him a deal: lead an outfit of fellow convicts on a mission to transport several bags of gold bricks through the treacherous rural Oregon landscape, and he can go free. Let’s just say the trip has its share of dangers and obstacles. We’ll cop to having a deep love of throwback movies like this, but this kind of gritty, bruising story of tough folks fighting the elements (and their paranoia regarding each other) would be a knockout even if you’re not already a fan of such sweaty adventure-type cinema. It’s worth its weight in you-know-what.