20 Movies We Can’t Wait to See at Sundance 2023

While it was gratifying to hear everyone sing the praises of Jennifer Connelly last year after Top Gun: Maverick saved the moving pictures, many of us longtime fans were left going, Um, you know she was great before that, right? Connelly is the main reason we’re psyched to check out this story of a former child star [cough, cough] whose narcissism and neuroses turn a weekend retreat with her guru (Ben Whishaw) into a nightmare for all involved. The fact that director Australian writer-director Alice Englert started her film career as an adolescent actor suggests this dark comedy is one part therapy session and one part old-score-settling.

Documentarian Roger Ross Williams (The Apollo) makes his narrative feature debut with this based-on-a-true-story tale of a Mexican wrestler named Saúl (Gael García Bernal) who’s stuck in a bit of a professional rut. Then he creates a campy character named Cassandro, “the Liberace of lucha libre,” and guess whose fortunes change almost overnight? And also whose life becomes 100 times more complicated when success in the ring throws a monkey wrench into relationships with his mother and his secret male lover?

Yes, they’ve actually made a movie of Kristen Roupenian’s 2017 short story, the same one that nearly broke the New Yorker’s website and inspired a gajillion online think pieces and heated debates. A young woman named Margot (CODA’s Emilia Jones) begins dating an older man (Succession’s Nicholas Braun), who seems kind and nice, until he doesn’t. To say their relationship is “complicated” is to put it mildly — what relationship isn’t? — but given the way the story touched a cultural nerve around things like consent, gender roles, generational differences, agency and power dynamics, we imagine that the screen version of this is going to be the film-festival equivalent of a lit dynamite stick.

We’ve been wondering what William Oldroyd would do for a follow-up to his jaw-dropping 2016 take on Nikolai Leskov’s novella Lady Macbeth, a.k.a. the movie that introduced much of the world to Florence Pugh. Now we have our answer: An adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s story about a prison secretary (Thomasin McKenzie) in the 1960s who forms a tight bond with a new employee (Anne Hathaway). It seems like this lonely woman has finally found a friend and a companion, until this recent addition to the staff reveals… some rather unsavory behavior. The buzz is strong on this one.

After the death of his wife, a widower (Scoot McNairy) and his young child (Nessa Doughtery) head to San Francisco — it’s the early 1970s, the sexual revolution is still in full-swing, and he’s ready to explore his sexuality. As the years pass, father and daughter have their issues, especially given his style of hands-off, go-with-the-flow parenting. By the time the young woman — now played by Emilia Jones, a strong contender for the Parker Posey Ubiquity Award for Sundance ’23 — is old enough to appreciate her unique upbringing, tragedy begins to loom on the horizon. Filmmaker Andrew Durham’s adaptation of Alysia Abbott’s memoir doubles as a scrapbook for a bohemian Bay Area paradise and a bygone era, complete with funky nostalgia and familial growing pains. The fact that it’s produced by Sofia Coppola only sweetens the deal.

Come visit the resorts of an unnamed Eastern European country, where tourists can sit by the pool, enjoy delicious meals and, should they accidentally kill a local resident, have the option of letting a manufactured “double” suffer the consequences. And if you’re lucky, you may run into a cabal of wealthy, entitled elitists who treat this odd perk as something of a license to do whatever they want. Brandon Cronenberg’s singular contribution to eat-the-rich thrillers is like a bad drug trip in the best possible way. It also gives Alexander Skarsgard the rare chance to play both an alpha and a beta male at the same time (it’s complicated) and confirms that Mia Goth may be the single most interesting actor working in genre movies today.

He was legendary, he was loud, and he was 100,000 watts of pure electricity every time he hit those 88 keys. He was Little Richard, and the man himself would tell you, “I was the one who started it all.” Everyone from Mick Jagger to John Waters weighs in on one of the key architects of rock & roll in this docuportrait of the “little” musician who left a giant impact on the world — and wrestled with some mighty large demons and contradictions. Expect some wop-bop-a-lu-bop, followed by a good deal of wop-bam-boo. (Full disclosure: This is a co-production of Rolling Stone Films.)

It’s more or less official that 2023 is The Year of Jonathan Majors: He’s about to become the next big villain in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and is starring opposite Michael B. Jordan as the nemesis of Adonis Creed in Creed III. And since Sundance is where a lot of us first noticed Majors, thanks to his role in The Last Black Man in San Francisco, it’s appropriate that he’s starring in one of the more hotly anticipated titles in the U.S. Narrative Competition. Majors is a would-be bodybuilding star dealing with anger issues, family issues and a desperate need to prove himself to the world. He’s going to achieve physical perfection, in other words, or die trying.

Sundance veteran Ira Sachs (Forty Shades of Blue, Keep the Lights On) returns to the festival with the story of a German director (Franz Rogowski) having a torrid affair with a younger French woman (Blue Is the Warmest Color’s Adèle Exarchopoulos). Naturally, this upsets the gent’s husband (Ben Whishaw), and sets off a chain reaction of events that upends everyone’s lives. Sachs is one of the great unsung heroes of Amerindie filmmaking, and this three-way character study sounds like it’s right in his signature sweet spot of brutal honesty and pathos-driven humanity.

Playwright Celine Song’s directorial debut hits Sundance as an A24 joint, which suggests this tale of two childhood friends is already coming to the festival with pre-generated hype. Though they swooned over each other as young schoolmates in Seoul, Hae Sung (Teo Yo) and Nora (the always great Greta Lee) lost touch when she moved to Canada. Over several decades, the two tentatively reconnect over social media and an eventual encounter in New York, where notions of fate, love, distance and time all get thrown into a tizzy. We have a really good feeling about this drama.

In the tech-saturated near future, couples who wish to procreate will have the option of giving birth via a maternity “pod.” A tech executive (Game of Thrones’ Emilia Clarke) and her botanist husband (Chiwetel Ejiofor) find themselves at odds over the procedure, which in turn pops open a can of worms regarding society’s rocky relationship with all those silicon chips and screens. Lots of food for thought in director Sophie Barthes’ sci-fi satire, in other words, and considering how her last film at Sundance — 2009’s Cold Souls — mined the middle ground between funny haha and funny WTF, this should generate a good deal of chatter at the fest.

You likely remember the “you wanna know what comes between me and my Calvins?” commercial from the 1980s, starring Brooke Shields. What you may have forgotten was that Shields was only 15 years old when she shot that provocative ad, and that she’d already been at the center of controversy thanks to projects like Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby. Lana Wilson’s two-part documentary takes a look back at the actor’s career and examines how Shields was sexualized by showbiz from a very young age. It also lets the star speak for herself and reflect on how she dealt with that experience, the way that it affected her personally and professionally, and the manner in which she came to a place where she had more control over her life and work.

Beware of birthday gifts left outside of front doors — especially if the mystery present is a rabbit that your daughter adores, but somehow inspires unexpected mood swings in the youngster and causes you to go into a psychological nosedive. That’s the lesson to be learned from this cryptic, unsettling thriller from filmmaker Daina Reid, which gives Succession’s Sarah Snook the chance to play a mother in full meltdown mode. It sounds like a kinder, gentler Repulsion for wine moms, so, you know: sold!

Welcome, Randall Park, to the actors-turned-filmmakers club! The former Fresh Off the Boat/Blockbuster star makes his feature debut with this adaptation of an Adrian Tomine graphic novel, about a twentysomething dude (After Yang’s Justin H. Min) who manages an arthouse theater in the Bay Area. His girlfriend (Ally Maki) has just taken off to NYC, which leaves our hero alone, lost, and wondering: What do I want to do with my life? Should I keep extending my adolescence into my 30s and embrace being one of those guys that argues about Wong Kar-wai movies in diners, or try to figure out a more “adult” path? Also, what’s on the Criterion Channel right now? The supporting cast includes Sonoya Mizuno, Park’s Veep costar Timothy Simmons, Tavi Gevinson and Sherry Cola.

Before the High Line became a tourist destination and Midtown Manhattan developers turned the Meatpacking District into a chic neighborhood, there was “the stroll” — a few blocks around 14th street where transgender sex workers plied their trade. Kristen Lovell walked the walk there for years alongside her sisters, and always lamented the fact that no one had told their stories. So she picked up a camera, found some of the fellow professionals from back in the day, and gave them the chance to have a voice. Co-directed by Lovell and Zackary Drucker, this HBO doc chronicles a somewhat secret chapter of NYC street history. But it also gives you a portrait of a community that has each others’ backs and offered trans women a safe haven and a strong sense of self.

In the mid-1960s, Aubrey “Po” Powell met fellow burgeoning hippie Storm Thorgerson in the Cambridge flat of their mutual acquaintances, a.k.a. an up-and-coming psychedelic band with the oddball name Pink Floyd. The two men would eventually form Hipgnosis, the graphic design studio that would give the world some of the greatest album covers ever made. Filmmaker Anton Corbijn — someone who’s very familiar with the power of imagery when it comes to bands — charts the rise and fall of the era-defining visual artists, with everyone from the surviving Floyd gents to Peter Gabriel and Paul McCartney weighing in on the impact this pun-monikered company made on their careers.

Before he was 20 years old, Michael J. Fox was a working actor. Before he turned 25, he was on one of the most popular TV shows in America and had just become a freshly minted movie star. By the time he was 30, he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, which would slow down his career — but would not stop him. Sundance alum Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth, It Might Get Loud) chronicles Fox’s life and work, from leaving Canada for Hollywood as a teen to becoming an activist and advocate for finding a cure for his illness.

When Terry was six, his mother Inez (Teyana Taylor) kidnapped him from his foster home and fled New York City. Years later, as the teenage Terry (Josiah Cross) prepares to go off into the adult world, the specter of this crime threatens to come back and haunt them both. Writer-director A.V. Rockwell’s mother-and-son drama sounds exactly like the sort of movie you trek to Sundance to see: bold, uncompromising, compassionate, an alternative to standard multiplex fare and an announcement of several new talents just beginning to hit their stride.

Long before he was the elder statesman of country music, an icon of Lone Star outlaw cool and the poster child for potsmoking as a lifestyle brand, Willie Nelson was a songwriter. By the time he made his classic 1975 concept album Redheaded Stranger, he was already a legend who had crafted some of the best, most enduring music of the 20th century. And some 70 years (!) into his career as touring musician, he and his trusty guitar Trigger are still hitting the road and playing for audiences from San Bernadino to Sarasota. Filmmakers Thom Zimny (no stranger to documentaries about musical iconoclasts) and Oren Moverman have finally given the man with the braided pigtails the multipart docuseries he deserves, digging into his childhood, his early attempts to crack Nashville’s Music Row, his breakthrough as a frontman, his legacy and, yeah, his family. It’s a whole lotta Willie.

The last time writer-director Nicole Holofcener and Julia Louis-Dreyfus worked together, they gave us the beautiful, brilliant and heartbreaking Enough Said — so the bar is set high for their latest collaboration, which centers around a writer finishing a follow-up to a bestselling memoir. She thinks she’s finally got a draft that works after years of trying to get it into shape. Then the author overhears the one person who’s been her confidante and sounding board, i.e. her husband (The Crown’s Tobias Menzies), telling someone that he thinks the new book is… well, frankly, it’s crap. We would geniunely hate to be their couples counselor. Michaela Watkins, Owen Teague, Succession’s Arian Moayed and the mighty Jeannie Berlin costar.