Sundance 2023 Must List: The 20 movies to see at this year's festival

After two years as a virtual online event due to COVID complications, the legendary Park City gathering for indie film lovers comes off the couch with its first full-blown in-person festival since 2020.

Come opening night this Thursday, we'll be on the ground with reviews, interviews, news, and more. But in advance, here are 20 of the most intriguing projects on deck, from a viral New Yorker story, to tales of gay luchadores, pubescent supermodels, and (we hope) a major discovery or two.

01 of 20

Magazine Dreams

Before he comes out swinging in Creed III this March — and slips into the Marvel multiverse as Kang — Lovecraft Country's Jonathan Majors takes on another kind of physicality as an amateur bodybuilder struggling to connect, from a 2020 Black List script by writer-director Elijah Bynum (Hot Summer Nights); Zola's Taylour Paige costars. — Leah Greenblatt

Premieres Friday, Jan. 20

02 of 20

Cat Person

First published in the New Yorker, Kristen Roupenian's 2017 short story was delicate yet powerful: specific to the details of aggressive millennial dating, but suggestive enough to resonate as a #MeToo corollary. Emilia Jones (CODA) and Nicholas Braun (Succession) star in the movie version, directed by one of the co-writers on Booksmart, and, it's been whispered, shaped into more of a thriller. — Joshua Rothkopf

Premieres Saturday, Jan. 21

03 of 20

Infinity Pool

The more Cronenbergs working, the better. Even though the king of body-horror recently returned to squishy form with last year's Crimes of the Future, son Brandon (Possessor) continues to show promise as a voice of his own, equally drawn to extremes. This time, he's got Pearl's Mia Goth in the mix, which is only a good thing. — JR

Premieres Saturday, Jan. 21

04 of 20

Little Richard: I Am Everything

There is nothing small about the life of one of popular music's most enduring — and least understood — iconoclasts. Producer Lisa Cortés (All In: The Fight for Democracy) goes deep on both the man and the myth in her directing debut, already set for release on CNN and HBO Max. — LG

Premieres Thursday, Jan. 19

05 of 20

Landscape With Invisible Hand

Writer-director Corey Finley's secret subject, already explored twice with sharp results in Thoroughbreds and Bad Education, is class. One can hope that Finley's latest — a sci-fi pivot concerning the haves and have-nots after a (mostly) benevolent alien invasion — will serve up more of what he does exquisitely well. — JR

Premieres Monday, Jan. 23

06 of 20

Bad Behaviour

Jennifer Connelly is a former child star in search of enlightenment; Ben Whishaw is the spiritual guide she lands on, and Australian actress Alice Englert (You Won't Be Alone) plays her onscreen daughter and — twist! — also directs. — LG

Premieres Saturday, Jan. 21

07 of 20

Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie

Fox's tireless war again Parkinson's disease has, over the years, become more defining than his too-brief span behind the wheel of a DeLorean time machine. Documentary director Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth, It Might Get Loud) shapes the actor's life story into the rousing profile it deserves. — JR

Premieres Friday, Jan. 20

08 of 20

Passages

Sundance stalwart Ira Sachs (Frankie, Love Is Strange) is known for his intimate micro-budget indies; here he goes bigger (and, by all accounts, gets wildly horny) in a romantic drama starring Ben Whishaw and the great German actor Franz Rogowski as longtime lovers, and Blue Is the Warmest Color's Adèle Exarchopoulos as the woman who comes between them. — LG

Premieres Monday, Jan. 23

09 of 20

You Hurt My Feelings

Ah, Sundance: movies about neurotic novelists, side-eyed marital tensions, and hurt feelings. We wouldn't have it any other way, and this one contains all of the above, plus Julia Louis-Dreyfus and The Crown's Tobias Menzies, shepherded by the queen of small-scale urbane psychodrama, writer-director Nicole Holofcener. — JR

Premieres Sunday, Jan. 22

10 of 20

My Animal

If you see one queer werewolf romance this season, you might want to make it Animal, starring Bobbi Salvör Menuez and Bodies Bodies Bodies' Amandla Stenberg in a hyper-contemporary thriller that may or may not howl at the moon. — LG

Premieres Monday, Jan. 23

11 of 20

Judy Blume Forever

Forever isn't such a long time, not when it comes to the quietly groundbreaking Blume, the Superfudge author who trailblazed honest young-adult fiction before that term was even coined. She makes a modest, appealing subject, but her letter-writing superfans turn this profile into something powerfully emotional. — JR

Premieres Saturday, Jan. 21

12 of 20

Cassandro

Oscar-winning documentarian Roger Ross Williams (Music by Prudence) makes his narrative debut with Gael García Bernal in the title role of Saúl Armendáriz, the real-life amateur wrestler from El Paso whose sexuality made him an unlikely pioneer in a sport already not exactly lacking for flamboyant color. — LG

Premieres Friday, Jan. 20

13 of 20

A Thousand and One

The bond between a mother and son is the foundation of many a Sundance stunner, and this entry, the feature directorial debut of A.V. Rockwell, looks to follow suit. It's about a troubled single parent (Coming 2 America's Teyana Taylor) who steals her own six-year-old from foster care in order to rebuild a life together. — JR

Premieres Sunday, Jan. 22

14 of 20

Eileen

Last Night in Soho's Thomasin McKenzie is a shy loner in1960s Boston who falls in with a seductive work friend played by Anne Hathaway in an adaptation of the sticky, pitch-black novel by My Year of Rest and Relaxation author Ottessa Moshfegh. (Moshfegh also cowrote last year's quietly affecting Jennifer Lawrence drama Causeway, but don't expect a tonal repeat here). — LG

Premieres Saturday, Jan. 21

15 of 20

All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt

Produced by no less a bold-type name than Moonlight's Barry Jenkins (the film is financed by taste-making distributor A24), this Mississippi-set coming-of-age drama sounds like the arrival of a major new voice, attuned to nuances of weather and rural tensions like a young David Gordon Green. She is writer-director Raven Jackson. — JR

Premieres Sunday, Jan. 22

16 of 20

Sometimes I Think About Dying

Daisy Ridley is a depressive cubicle drone in rural Oregon drawn to a new coworker (Dave Merheje) who makes her feel alive — or at least less like dying — in a feature-length expansion of the 2016 short by Rachel Lambert (In the Radiant City). — LG

Premieres Thursday, Jan. 19

17 of 20

birth/rebirth

Is this image too much of a giveaway? Suffice to say, this entry arrives in the Midnight section (one that famously launched The Blair Witch Project, The Babadook, It Follows, and Hereditary). It also takes its cues from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Don't go reanimatin' the dead — unless, of course, you're making a future horror favorite. — JR

Premieres Thursday, Jan. 19

18 of 20

The Pod Generation

Rachel (Game of Thrones' Emilia Clarke) and Alvy (Chiwetel Ejiofor) are a couple struggling with fertility in a near-future world; are artificial wombs the answer? Only Sophie Barthes' creeping social satire knows for sure. — LG

Premieres Thursday, Jan. 19

19 of 20

Rotting in the Sun

Writer-director Sebastián Silva (The Maid, Tyrel) has a dependably perverse sense of humor; his films knock your jaw slack with riskiness. In Silva's latest, he plays a snide, drug-addled version of himself: a depressed artist forced to take a vacation on which he comes into contact with a likes-thirsty influencer.— JR

Premieres Sunday, Jan. 22

20 of 20

Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields

Documentary filmmaker Lana Wilson — who brought the Taylor Swift story Miss Americana to Sundance three years ago — turns her lens on Shields, another icon of young womanhood with her own cautionary tales of precocious adolescence and pop-culture maelstroms to tell. — LG

Premieres Friday, Jan. 20

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