Charlie xcx, Natalie Portman and Salman Rushdie lead 2026 Sundance lineup | Sundance Film Festival

New films starring Charli XCX, Natalie Portman and Salman Rushdie will make their world premieres at the Sundance Film Festival next month.

The festival will be held for the last time in Park City, Utah, before moving to Boulder, Colorado in 2027. Over the years, it has been home to premieres of films including Get Out, Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Blair Witch Project, Past Lives, Napoleon Dynamite, Precious and Little Miss Sunshine.

Charli xcx will appear in three films premiering at the 2026 festival, led by The Moment, a mockumentary in which she plays a version of herself. “It’s not a tour documentary or a concert film by any means, but the seed of the idea was conceived from the idea of ​​being under pressure to make a film,” she said of the film. It also stars Rachel Sinnott, Alexander Skarsgård, Kate Berlant and Kylie Jenner.

She will also appear alongside Portman in the black comedy The Gallerist. The film is about a gallery owner trying to sell a dead man at Art Basel in Miami. It was co-written and directed by Cathy Yan, whose last film was Birds of Prey. The cast also includes Jenna Ortega, Sterling K. Brown, Devin Joey Randolph, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Zach Galifianakis.

The singer’s third film is I Want Your Sex, a sexy thriller from Mysterious Skin director Greg Araki, his first film since 2014. It stars Cooper Hoffman as a young man who begins working for a provocative artist, played by Olivia Wilde, and soon finds himself in “a world of sex, obsession, power, betrayal and murder,” according to the synopsis.

Wilde will also premiere “provocative late-night comedy” The Invite, her directorial sequel to Don’t Worry Darling that follows a couple who uncover secrets at a dinner party. She stars with Seth Rogen, Edward Norton, and Penelope Cruz.

Rushdie is heading up a strong section of documentary premieres with Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie, a new film from director Alex Gibney that will feature unseen footage captured by the author’s wife as he recovered from the 2022 attack. “The opportunity to make this film about his recovery — in the broadest sense of the word — comes at a critical time,” Gibney said. “It gives me hope.”

There will also be documentaries on Marianne Faithfull, Britney Greener, Courtney Love, Nelson Mandela, Billie Jean King, and the Harlem Renaissance, as well as John Wilson’s new project, in which he learns how to make a Hallmark movie and uses the same template to try to sell a movie about concrete. Ta-Nehisi Coates will also collaborate with director Dawn Porter on a documentary about wrongful conviction When a Witness Recants while Navalny director Daniel Roher returns with a cautionary film about artificial intelligence.

Olivia Colman, who previously premiered The Father and Jimpa at Sundance, will return with an offbeat romance called Wicker, which sees her star as a “smelly, single and perpetually ridiculous” fisherman who commissions a basket maker to make a husband, leading to “rage, jealousy and mayhem.” The film stars Skarsgård, Peter Dinklage, and Elizabeth Debicki.

With an Oscar for his role in Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, Ethan Hawke will next appear in The Weight, a 1930s drama about gold smuggling co-starring Russell Crowe. Chris Pine will star opposite Jenny Slate in Carousel, a film in which he plays a doctor whose life unfolds. This film will be in competition alongside titles including Run Amok, about a teenage girl who puts on a musical inspired by a shooting that happened at her high school, and the Channing Tatum-starring Josephine about a young girl who witnesses a crime that degrades her.

Sundance has become a major destination for new horror films, with previous years seeing films including Saw, Hereditary and The Babadook premiere. This year sees the release of Buddy, about a young girl who has to escape a children’s TV show, starring The Penguin’s Cristin Milioti and Keegan Michael-Key. It comes from the same production company behind this year’s hit Weapons.

Relic director Natalie Erika James will also return to the festival with Saccharine about teenagers who indulge in a new weight loss craze that sees them eating human ashes.

Other premieres include Madeline Josephine Decker’s new film Chasing Summer starring comedienne Iliza Schlesinger, the comedy Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass with Zoey Deutch and Jon Hamm, The Shitheads starring Dave Franco and O’Shea Jackson Jr. as “two misfit idiots” who transport a rich teen to rehab, and, In the Blink of an Eye, an ambitious time-spanning sci-fi drama. From beloved Pixar director Andrew Stanton.

In the TV section, Riz Ahmed will premiere his new six-part series “House,” in which he plays a struggling actor whose life spirals out of control.

In addition to saying farewell to Park City, the festival will also commemorate its founder, Robert Redford, who died earlier this year. There will be a special screening of his film Downhill Racer and a number of other events.

Last year’s festival saw the premieres of Twinless, Lurker, The Perfect Neighbor, Train Dreams, The Alabama Solution and Sorry Baby.

The festival will be held from January 22 to February 1.