What Critics Are Looking Forward to at Sundance 2020

Some of the biggest names at the festival are directors who first established their reputations amid Utah’s snowy banks. Dee Rees, who debuted 2011’s Pariah and 2017’s Oscar-nominated Mudbound at Sundance, is unveiling her new feature, The Last Thing He Wanted, based on Joan Didion’s 1996 novel of the same title. It follows a journalist (played by Anne Hathaway) who becomes embroiled in the world of arms dealing while trying to help her dying father (Willem Dafoe). The film was produced by Netflix, which also distributed Mudbound; Rees has praised the company as a necessary change agent for the industry.

Other returning Sundance favorites include Josephine Decker (Madeline’s Madeline), whose Shirley is an unconventional biopic of the horror writer Shirley Jackson, with Elisabeth Moss as the title character and Michael Stuhlbarg as her husband Stanley. In the film, the couple’s young houseguests become inspiration for Jackson’s next story. Decker loves to explore the liminal area between art and reality, which makes this premise all the more exciting. Eliza Hittman is also back this year after screening Beach Rats at Sundance in 2017. Her new project, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, is similarly bold and intimate, but comes with a political thrust: It’s a magnificent, hard-hitting portrayal of a Pennsylvania teenager who treks to New York for a safe and private abortion.

The Sundance veteran Miranda July (who screened her previous two films, Me and You and Everyone We Know and The Future, at the festival) is returning for the first time since 2011 with Kajillionaire. This project, more high-concept than her earlier work, stars Richard Jenkins and Debra Winger as veteran con artists whose daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) runs afoul of their next mark (Gina Rodriguez). There’s been an equally long wait for new work from Sean Durkin since his stunning debut with the cult thriller Martha Marcy May Marlene. Durkin’s follow-up is The Nest, about an American entrepreneur (Jude Law) and his wife (Carrie Coon) who move to an isolated British manor; what happens next is mostly secret, but the movie should thrive on tension and atmosphere.

Plenty of offerings by less well-known filmmakers are already drawing attention as well. One of the most hyped titles is A24’s Zola, an adaptation of an extremely viral Twitter thread about a wild trip to Tampa taken by two exotic dancers (Riley Keough and Taylour Paige). Janicza Bravo (Lemon) wrote and directed, with the acclaimed playwright Jeremy O. Harris co-scripting; if this film breaks out as anticipated, no tweet will be safe from Hollywood development agencies. Buzz is swirling around Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari, also from A24, which stars Steven Yeun as the patriarch of a Korean family that moves to Arkansas in the 1980s to start a farm. Yet another appealing project is Bill Benz’s delightful The Nowhere Inn, a mockumentary in which Carrie Brownstein attempts to make a concert movie about the musician St. Vincent.