Charli XCX is making a trip to the Sundance Film Festival in January. The pop singer-songwriter appears in three films premiering at the 2026 festival, including a mockumentary that she produced and stars in. Programmers on Wednesday unveiled a lineup of 90 feature films set for the festival’s last hurrah in Park City, Utah.
The slate includes documentaries on basketball great Brittney Griner, Nelson Mandela, Salman Rushdie, Courtney Love and Billie Jean King. There are starry features with the likes of Natalie Portman, Jenna Ortega, Seth Rogen, Channing Tatum, Danielle Brooks, Olivia Colman, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Alexander Skarsgård and Ethan Hawke. Olivia Wilde directs her first feature since Don’t Worry Darling, in The Invite. Judd Apatow chronicles comedian Maria Bamford’s mental health journey. And Gregg Araki will be back in Park City with a restoration of his 2004 coming-of-age drama Mysterious Skin and a new film as well.
“It’s a broad, eclectic and bold programme,” Sundance public programming director Eugene Hernandez told The Associated Press. He said the lineup for the festival's final year in Park City “really honors that well with this mixture of new, exciting voices paired with some really, really great familiar faces from Sundances past that I think will create a great alchemy for this really unique edition in Utah.”
Ever a festival of discovery, of the 90 features culled from 4,255 submissions, 40 percent are from first-time directors. The programmers laugh when they hear people say things like “that’s a Sundance movie,” as if it’s one, easily categorisable thing.
“I look at the films in this program and say, ‘You tell me what a Sundance film is’ because they’re so different,” said programmer John Nein.
Some great comedies
This year’s slate includes more than a few exciting comedies in unexpected places. Cathy Yan directed and co-wrote The Gallerist, a satirical look at the art world and attempting to sell a corpse at Art Basel Miami, with a large ensemble including Portman, Ortega, Sterling K. Brown and Zach Galifianakis. David Wain also has Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass about a woman out to even the score after her fiance uses the “free pass,” starring Zoey Deutch and Jon Hamm.
Programmer Kim Yutani said she thinks Wicker, about a woman who asks a basket maker to weave her a husband, starring Colman and Skarsgård, will be a big crowd pleaser.
Timely documentaries at Sundance
Sundance has become famous for its documentary programming, many of which go on to be nominated for and win Oscars. This year is likely to be no different.
One that might make waves is When A Witness Recants, in which author Ta-Nehisi Coates revisits the case of the 1983 murder of a boy in his Baltimore middle school and learns the truth. American Doctor follows three professionals trying to help in Gaza. All About the Money looks at heir-turned -communist Fergie Chambers. Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell take on artificial intelligence in The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist and Sentient is about animal testing.
Those include Jane Elliott Against the World, about an Iowa schoolteacher who taught anti-discrimination in 1968, and Seized, about the police raid on the Marion County Record in Kansas.
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