This past weekend, the Sundance Film Festival wrapped its final edition at its longtime location in Park City, Utah. Next year, it moves to the student city of Boulder, Colorado. The festival’s reputation as the birthplace of great American indie cinema has faltered recently, mostly because so many American indie movies are not very good (oop!). Thankfully, there were just enough breakouts for the festival to feel cool and relevant still—with some new stars, future Oscar hits, and a slate of documentaries that will inevitably hit Netflix soon.
Two Great New British Actors
Nine years ago, Sundance gained the bragging rights of minting five of our biggest actors in one year: Timothée Chalamet (Call Me by Your Name), Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out), Florence Pugh (Lady Macbeth), Josh O’Connor (God’s Own Country), and Harris Dickinson (Beach Rats). Two of those five were nominated for Oscars the following year.
The hit rate has been a little lacklustre since then, with fewer acting stars breaking through— Greta Lee in 2023’s Past Lives is an exception, and I’ll argue that Ruaridh Mollica’s turn in the gay drama Sebastian in 2024 will reap rewards for the festival at some point very soon. But there were two performances in one film this year that feel worthy of mentioning. The whimsical Extra Geography, about two teenage girls at a boarding school in the early ’00s trying to seduce their frumpy teacher, didn’t work for me despite that tantalizing premise. The writing felt clunky, the directorial voice a little distracted by its predecessors (Lady Bird, Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging), but its charm was anchored by two first-time performers who made that core friendship feel so real.
They are the great Galaxie Clear (yes, that’s her government name), who has a future-Dior-ambassador, vaguely Celtic kind of beauty, and the Liverpudlian actress Marni Duggan, who’s so funny and lived-in in the movie and served cunt on the ground in Park City. They feel cool. In an age of posh, private-school-trained young actors, that’s refreshing.
A Marxist Millionaire and a Misunderstood Polar Bear
Every documentary nominated at this year’s Oscars had its world premiere at Sundance in 2025, which turns the non-fiction slate at the festival into a fun game of “Spot the Future Academy Award Winner.” In 2026, most of the hype revolved around Nuisance Bear, which I’d describe as a David Attenborough doc shot by someone on shrooms. It’s a beguilingly-framed film about the clashing of culture, nature, and commerce in rural Canada.
A polar bear, starved of its food source due to climate change, wanders around the trash dumps of a town that’s become world-renowned for its dense population of those creatures. Tourists take photographs, but the locals want to get rid of it. A few hundred miles away, a rural inuit community still relies on polar bear meat as a food source, and hunts for it, despite the dangers that brings. The whole film looks, feels, and sounds enthralling—Cristobal Tapia de Veer, who wrote that iconic theme tune for The White Lotus, wrote the music.
There were a bunch of documentaries with noble and intriguing subjects, even if they felt formulaic. American Doctors is a gobsmacking documentary about the American medical practitioners who enter Gaza to help surgeons while Israeli bombs rain down, knowing their tax dollars fund that violence. All About the Money, meanwhile, is arguably the most insane documentary you’ll see this year. It’s an on-the-ground portrait of Fergie Chambers—the heir to a billionaire empire who divested from his parents’ company and used the rumored $250 million payout to start a Marxist-Leninist commune in Massachusetts. Every twist it takes feels ever more ridiculous. It’s giving number-one-on-Netflix vibes, but I fear that even this guy’s politics will be too hot for a media empire to touch.
Channing Tatum, Oscar Nominee?
Every year, there’s always a much-hyped movie or two that critics anticipate will go the distance and get Oscars 15 months later. Last year, those were 2026 Best Picture nominee Train Dreams and the unfairly snubbed but otherwise celebrated Sorry Baby by Eva Victor.
This year, it seems like all bets are on this movie Josephine. Written and directed by indie filmmaker Beth de Araújo, it stars Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan as two parents reckoning with the aftermath of their 8-year-old daughter witnessing a violent rape in a park. Despite the harsh subject matter, it’s a meaty and accessible movie about the moral quandary of protecting your child versus making selfless decisions for the sake of others.
Everyone’s talking about how great Tatum is in it, which I think is mostly warranted, but might just be because we’ve been struggling to shake the Magic Mike/Step Up image we have of him, and this feels like a rare dramatic departure. But the film pulled off a double win, with de Araújo taking home both the U.S. Dramatic Prize and the Audience Award. The last two Sundance films to do that—CODA and Minari—went on to get nominated for Best Picture, too.
Justice for The Moment!
The typical Sundance critic crowd skews older, which means some movies that require a little IYKYK attitude—like Aidan Zamiri’s The Moment—can be misunderstood. You can read our thoughts on that smart, garish, sort-of-amazing movie here.
All the Hits I Didn’t See
Getting to Sundance from London is an arduous exercise akin to the journey taken by Frodo Baggins, so very few people do it. On one hand, that doesn’t matter, because the entire competition slate is streamed online for members of the press. What isn’t, though, is the starrier fare.
A lot of the big movies on the ground were part of the Premiere strand, which meant I had to lock into the gossip from those on the ground. (shout-out Richard Lawson.) The big, big movie was The Invite, Olivia Wilde’s follow-up to Don’t Worry Darling, about a couple opening up their relationship. Based on a Spanish movie from 2020, and a script co-written by Rashida Jones, it wound up getting bought by A24. Expect to see that later this year.
Elsewhere, the Greg Araki heads seemed to dig his new one, I Want Your Sex, which co-starred Wilde as a woman domming her younger assistant, played by Cooper Hoffman. No word on when that might meet regular audiences, but there’s a big appetite for Araki, so it won’t be too long.
But the movie that has left me most excited is an Australian debut called Leviticus—a horror movie about gay conversion therapy. Neon, who’s worked magic with Longlegs and other scary things in the past, promptly picked it up. Maybe next year I’ll make it to Boulder and I’ll have more in-depth gossip on these titles.
The Real Discovery
It’s not just actors that come to Sundance to have their rising-star status anointed. Plenty of filmmakers have had that privilege, too, be it Ari Aster for Hereditary, Quentin Tarantino for Reservoir Dogs, or Nia DaCosta for Little Woods. That spirit felt a little lacking for me until I saw Lady, the directorial debut of British-Nigerian filmmaker Olive Nwosu.
Her film follows a taxi driver in Lagos who reluctantly accepts a contract job driving a group of rambunctious and expressive sex workers to their clients. So many narrative features this year felt derivative or made in the image of a filmmaker’s idol, but Lady felt original, with its own color and rhythm.
For the most part, the historically well-developed American indie scene is starting to feel a little sluggish. Meanwhile, movies made on the African continent by filmmakers based in the United Kingdom are feeling alive and interesting. Lady joins the likes of My Father’s Shadow (also from a British-Nigerian filmmaker, Akinola Davies Jr.) and Rungano Nyoni’s underseen and brilliant On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, set in Zambia, as films that surpass the quality of the so-called leading movie nation. North America should take note.
For the purpose of your Letterboxd watchlist, here’s a quick list of the movies mentioned above:
Extra Geography (Molly Manners)
Nuisance Bear (Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman)
American Doctors (Poh Si Teng)
All About the Money (Sinéad O’Shea)
Josephine (Beth de Araújo)
The Moment (Aidan Zamiri)
The Invite (Olivia Wilde)
I Want Your Sex (Gregg Araki)
Leviticus (Adrian Chiarella)
Lady (Olive Nwosu)