The 2026 Sundance Film Festival comes to a close this weekend, but every screening has felt tinged with melancholy. This is the final year the festival—founded by the late Robert Redford—will be held in this small Utah ski town, which annually bursts with buyers, media, movie stars, filmmakers, and cheerful volunteers in chic, festival-issued puffer jackets. In 2027, the whole thing will move to Boulder, Colorado—a location-shift that portends a bit of an identity crisis.
The valedictory mood threatened to overshadow the actual films on the program this year and the sales news was relatively quiet. But my colleague Lisa Wong Macabasco and I managed to see some good movies—and one or two pretty great ones (a typical batting average for Sundance). Here were our favorites, which are either seeking distribution or due to come out later this year. Put them on your to-watch list. —Taylor Antrim
The Invite
The laws of movie karma dictate that Olivia Wilde is due for a comeback, and lo and behold her third film, The Invite, which she directed and stars in, alongside Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz, and Edward Norton, was the hit of Sundance. (It caused a bidding war, won 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 dinner party had me stifling guffaws in my ski jacket. The performances are all full-tilt—Rogen, the highlight, is an acerbic wonder—and the script by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack is witty, controlled, and dryly realistic. The Invite, plus another (lesser) comedy at the festival, I Want Your Sex from boisterous filmmaker Greg Araki, in which Wilde plays an artist dominatrix, should reestablish Wilde as a comedic force in 2026. —TA
The Invite will be released in theaters later this year.
The Moment
The Moment, starring Charli XCX, opens in theaters on January 30.
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