The 2026 Sundance Movie Competition involves a detailed this weekend, however each screening has felt tinged with melancholy. That is the ultimate yr the pageant—based by the late Robert Redford—will probably be held on this small Utah ski city, which yearly bursts with consumers, media, film stars, filmmakers, and cheerful volunteers in stylish, festival-issued puffer jackets. In 2027, the entire thing will transfer to Boulder, Colorado—a location-shift that portends a little bit of an identification disaster.
The valedictory temper threatened to overshadow the precise movies on this system this yr and the gross sales information was comparatively quiet. However my colleague Lisa Wong Macabasco and I managed to see some good motion pictures—and one or two fairly nice ones (a typical batting common for Sundance). Right here have been our favorites, that are both searching for distribution or resulting from come out later this yr. Put them in your to-watch listing. —Taylor Antrim
The Invite
The legal guidelines of film karma dictate that Olivia Wilde is due for a comeback, and lo and behold her third movie, The Invite, which she directed and stars in, alongside Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz, and Edward Norton, was the hit of Sundance. (It induced a bidding warfare, gained by A24.) A send-up of marriage, bourgeois mores, and early-middle-age sexual adventuring, this hilarious San Francisco-set chamber comedy set at a two-couple banquet had me stifling guffaws in my ski jacket. The performances are all full-tilt—Rogen, the spotlight, is an acerbic surprise—and the script by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack is witty, managed, and dryly lifelike. The Invite, plus one other (lesser) comedy on the pageant, I Need Your Intercourse from boisterous filmmaker Greg Araki, wherein Wilde performs an artist dominatrix, ought to reestablish Wilde as a comedic power in 2026. —TA
The Invite will probably be launched in theaters later this yr.
The Second
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