15 movies to watch (and watch for) at Sundance 2022

Often, the best movies to emerge from Sundance come flying out of left field: Though we’d never forget Boyhood or Manchester By The Sea, both from decidedly well-known directors who decided to debut their latest masterpieces in Park City, the festival is arguably more reliable as a ground zero for new talent. (Last year, for example, our favorite film of the fest was a microbudget breakthrough.) Nonetheless, each year it’s impossible not to try to handicap this sprawling field of premieres and identify in advance the ones that might become our new obsession, the new reason to look forward to this annual pilgrimage to Utah (or, last year and this new one, a virtual simulacrum of the ski town that Robert Redford calls home).

Keep reading for our list of 15 movies from the 2022 virtual Sundance that we can’t wait to see. And if you hurry, you might be able to see them, too: With the festival going fully remote again tonight, anyone in the States can purchase a ticket, at least until these virtual screenings sell out.

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John Boyega plays an ex-Marine who takes hostages at a bank—but not for money, as it gradually becomes clear. Boyega—who stepped in when original star Jonathan Majors had to leave the project because of his busy Marvel schedule—was excellent in his last major starring role, the Small Axe installment Red, White, And Blue, and the premise here sounds Dog Day Afternoon intense. If that’s not enough to pique interest, the film also boasts the final screen appearance of the late Michael K. Williams.

After Yang

We here at The A.V. Club adored Columbus, the lovely first feature by filmmaker and video-essayist Kogonada. So naturally we’re excited for his follow-up, a science-fiction drama set in a future when childlike robots serve as babysitters for families that can afford them. Colin Farrell plays the patriarch of one such clan, whose efforts to repair the eponymous, malfunctioning nanny-bot help him realize some big things about his himself. After Yang premiered at Cannes last summer, where it scored mostly glowing reviews; it’s playing virtual Sundance as part of the festival’s invaluable Spotlight program.

Cha Cha Real Smooth

Someone please help Cooper Raiff name his movies. The indie filmmaker’s debut was much more charming than its title, Shithouse, would ever lead one to believe. Having won the top prize at SXSW for that campus comedy, Raiff now leaps to post-college life—and to the Sundance big leagues—with this new film about a shiftless graduate (Raiff himself) who gets into the bar mitzvah business and starts dating a single mother (Dakota Johnson). It’s named for dance sensation “Cha Cha Slide,” but we won’t hold that against it.

Downfall: The Case Against Boeing

Yes, we’re bummed not to be in Park City this year. Maybe Downfall will make us grateful for that—after all, we’d have to board an airplane to get there. This latest documentary from Rory Kennedy, who made the excellent Last Days In Vietnam, goes behind the scenes of the recent scandal at Boeing, following journalists and activists as they uncover the shocking corporate greed and coverups that led to two deadly jet crashes in 2018. Sounds damning—and also like another reason not to book a flight right now.

Happening

Like After Yang, this is another highlight of an earlier festival: Audrey Diwan’s tense drama about a teenager trying to secure an abortion in 1960s France won the top prize, the Golden Lion, at Venice last year. Sundance has a reputation for programming frothy or quirky crowdpleasers, but Happening decidedly does not fit that bill. Our own Leila Latif wrote this in September: “Even without the backdrop of breaking news giving it a special, unfortunate timeliness, the film would remain devastating and beautifully made, with a phenomenal central performance by Anamaria Vartolomei.”

A House Made Of Splinters

As usual, Sundance’s World Documentary program spans multiple continents and subjects; this year’s crop includes movies about missionaries in Finland, virtual reality, and Sinéad O’Connor. But we’re most intrigued, sight unseen, by this Danish doc about the inner workings of an orphanage in war-ravaged Ukraine. Director Simon Lereng Wilmont confronted the same conflict through the perspective of a single child in his last nonfiction film, the internationally acclaimed The Distant Barking Of Dogs. His approach here appears to be both wider and more institutionally focused.

jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy

Regardless of where one falls on the current music (or political leanings) of Kanye West, there’s little denying the footprint the rapper has put on popular culture these past two decades. The three-part documentary jeen-yuhs offers an intimate overview of his entire career, going back to the very start, when Clarence “Coodie” Simmons—one half of the directing duo Coodie & Chike—started filming a young, ambitious West as he chased his hip-hop dreams. The trilogy, which the filmmakers have likened to a Steve James epic (they cite Hoop Dreams as the inspiration to keep shooting for so long), drops on Netflix a week at a time starting in February. The first installment, titled Vision, will premiere at Sundance on Sunday.

A Love Song

One of the reliable pleasures of Sundance is seeing veteran character actors get a moment in the spotlight, nabbing the rare starring role in an indie showcase for their time-tested talent. That’s the appeal of first-time director Max Walker-Silverman’s A Love Song, which casts the great Dale Dickey and the great Wes Studi as childhood sweethearts, now both widowed, who reunite after decades apart. Fans of these eternally reliable supporting players—you know their faces, even if you don’t know their names—should nab a ticket. (The film is among the handful of titles premiering tonight.)

Master

It’s always cool to see Sundance make room in its prestigious U.S. Dramatic lineup for an honest-to-Satan horror movie, rather than relegating the spookier fare exclusively to the midnight slate. Like The Witch, which previously overcame such genre bias to compete against less frightening films, Master has apparent echoes of Salem, though its focus isn’t religious hysteria but rather the insidious legacy of racism—a subject it tackles through the plot of three Black women navigating a haunted New England university. Regina Hall stars in this first feature from HBO alum Mariama Diallo.

The Princess

If The Crown or Spencer have rekindled your fascination with Princess Diana, along now comes a nonfiction look at her life in the spotlight. The Princess, which is screening virtually as part of this evening’s opening night schedule, is assembled entirely from archival footage of the Princess Of Wales, and is said to feature no talking heads or even disembodied interview voices—a radical strategy that might make the film equally appealing to fans of adventurous documentaries, no Royal Family obsession required.

Riotsville U.S.A.

Speaking of docs made up exclusively of archival footage, this year’s program also includes Riotsville U.S.A., which uses snippets of unearthed training footage to capture the American military’s response to the protests of the ’60s—namely, how the Army turned a military base into a model city, staged riots it could respond to, and then burned the whole thing down. Sundance has a very good track record for programming documentaries that speak to the proverbial issues of the day. This one seems to acknowledge and demonstrate that the issues of the day have been issues for a very long time.

Sharp Stick

There aren’t a lot of major established directors premiering films at this year’s Sundance, which is going even heavier than usual on first-time or relatively unknown filmmakers. In terms of pure name recognition, Girls creator and star Lena Dunham might be the heaviest hitter. She’s returned with her first feature since Tiny Furniture a dozen years ago—a drama about a twentysomething caregiver (Kristine Froseth) looking to lose her virginity to the father (Jon Bernthal) of the child she looks after. Like Kanye West, Dunham has a habit of letting her public remarks overshadow her work; even if you don’t share our affection for her HBO series, it’s hard not to be excited for the cast of Sharp Stick, which also includes Taylour Paige, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Scott Speedman.

Watcher

Maika Monroe starred in two of the best horror movies of the last decade, It Follows and The Guest. Director Chloe Okuno made one of the better entries in this fall’s V/H/S/94. The two have joined forces for this new thriller, which casts Monroe as a failed actress who moves with her husband to Bucharest and finds herself spying on the neighbors, while also becoming increasingly paranoid that she’s being watched, too—maybe by the serial killer authorities report is stalking the city. Sounds very Rear Window; we’ll be fixing our binoculars on it at some point over this next week.

When You Finish Saving The World

Jesse Eisenberg rose to prominence thanks in part to his role in an essential Sundance movie, The Squid And The Whale. So it makes sense that he’d choose the fest as the right place to launch his first feature as a director, based on his award-winning Audible play about the complicated relationship between a teenage internet celebrity (Finn Wolfhard) and his social-worker mother (Julianne Moore). Eisenberg is a sensitive, precise performer, almost no matter what project he’s appearing in. We’re definitely curious to see if those qualities extend to his work behind the camera too.