10 Most Anticipated Movies from Sundance Film Festival 2024

It’s safe to say that the Sundance Film Festival, being the biggest film festival in the United States and in the top 3 biggest film festivals in the world, has made quite a reputation for itself. The movies that premiere at Sundance at the beginning of the year are a good way to forecast what some of the best movies of the next year will be and even predict some nominations for the next Oscars.

From Pedro Pascal, Kristen Stewart, and Saoirse Ronan to Kieran Culkin and Steven Yeun, fresh off their Emmy awards for Succession and Beef, there’s many celebrity actors and stars whose new movies will see their first exclusive audiences at this year’s 40th edition of Sundance.

The 10-day event in Salt Lake City, Utah, is an exciting time for everyone in the film industry. The festival is officially underway on January 18, and we’re here to kick off the festival program by compiling a list of the top 10 most highly anticipated movies that will premiere at Sundance 2024 over the next few days. The list is in no particular order.

10. Freaky Tales

With his roles in The Last of Us, Game of Thrones, and The Mandalorian, Pedro Pascal has become one of the most beloved actors of the last year. He stars in Freaky Tales, a new film premiering at Sundance, consisting of 4 different character stories set the underbelly of 1987 Oakland that get intertwined together.

Freaky Tales will be a multicultural combination of rap battles, criminal misfits, NBA athletes, skinheads, and 1980s hip-hop nostalgia, as the characters will be dealing with themes of racism, corruption, violence, and much more. It’s an exciting blend of genres and human stories that promises to be an action-packed ride.

9. Love Lies Bleeding

Kristen Stewart has 2 highly anticipated premieres coming up in the Sundance lineup this year. The first of them is the crime romance drama Love Lies Bleeding, where she plays a gym manager in New Mexico, called Lou, who falls in love with a bodybuilder, Jackie. Their relationship is dragged into a web of crimes that threatens to destroy everything.

Stewart will also be honored with the Visionary Award at the festival. After these two movies, she has announced that she is planning to direct her own first feature film, based on Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir The Chronology of Water, and she refuses to make any other film before this one.

8. Love Me

The second premiere with Kristen Stewart is an intimate sci-fi story that stars her alongside Emmy-winning actor Steven Yeun. It already sounds promising just based on the star power the two actors have, but the premise makes it sound that much more fascinating.

Love Me takes place long after human extinction, and it’s allegedly about a satellite and a buoy that meet online and fall in love over billions of years. The film will be a philosophical exploration of virtual and real life as the two characters navigate falling in love and figuring out what love is based on the accumulated archived web data that they have.

7. I Saw the TV Glow

A mind-bending and mysterious movie about a supernatural TV show that can give you a glimpse of another world. That’s what I Saw the TV Glow is about, and the unique and intriguing premise might deliver one of the most interesting movies of this year’s festival program.

The director Jane Schoenbrun is known at Sundance for being great at exploring themes of the dark side of digital life, the spooky and the creepy parts of being connected through the online world. I Saw the TV Glow has the potential to turn into another cult classic in the genre. We’ll just have to wait and see.

6. A Real Pain

A-List actors Kieran Culkin (famous for Succession) and Jesse Eisenberg (famous for The Social Network and Now You See Me) are the two leads in the upcoming film A Real Pain. They play two cousins, David and Benji, who are on a road trip through Poland to honor their grandmother and their dark family history. In the meantime, old tensions between them start boiling.

Jesse Eisenberg not only stars in the film but also wrote and directed it, making this his second directorial project to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival.

5. A Different Man

Sebastian Stan, famous for his roles in the horror movie Fresh and as Winter Soldier in the Captain America Marvel movies, has a new film coming up, called A Different Man.

In A Different Man, Stan plays Edward, an actor who undergoes intense surgery to fix his disfigured face condition. After the medical procedure fixes his face, he ends up losing on his dream role, and he spirals into obsession to get it back. Sebastian Stan continues to prove himself as a versatile actor who will tackle material from any genre and any twisted psychological place that is required.

4. The Outrun

The Outrun stars Saoirse Ronan in the lead role, diving into a complicated character whose life spiraled out of control in London due to addiction and alcoholism. She returns home to her native Scottish island roots to find herself again and seek recovery.

Saoirse Ronan was last featured in the Sundance film festival lineup in 2015 with the movie Brooklyn, which ended up earning an Oscar nomination for her performance. If the Irish actress continues on that same path with The Outrun, this might be her next huge role in the conversation.

3. Thelma

June Squibb is an actress who received an Oscar nomination at 84 years old for the movie Nebraska. Now, she is 94 years old and the lead character in the new movie Thelma, the unexpected action hero story we didn’t know we needed.

Thelma revolves around Thelma Post, a grandmother who finds herself tricked by a phone scammer, pretending to be her grandson. She sets out on a journey across the city, determined to take back what is hers, ready for the adventure. She will not let her age get in the way, and she might just turn into the next big action movie star.

2. Sasquatch Sunset

This movie is about exactly what the title suggests: a year in the life of a family of sasquatches in the wilderness. Jesse Eisenberg, who stars in another Sundance film, A Real Pain, is also playing in this one, along with actress Riley Keough.

There’s not much more that we know about this from the Sundance festival program. Directors David Zellner and Nathan Zellner have been premiering many of their films at the festival in previous years, so their work has become a staple that’s always highly anticipated by audiences.

1. Presence

Steven Soderbergh is considered to be a legendary filmmaker in the history of Sundance. His earlier films became groundbreaking at Sundance in the 1990s, revolutionizing independent cinema as we knew it. He is coming back with his new mysterious horror film, called Presence.

The script is written by David Koepp, another legend in the industry, famous for writing the first Spider-Man movie, Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, and other iconic titles.

Presence takes place entirely in one location: a suburban house, which a new family moves into. Soon, the family realizes they might not be the only ones in the house. We don’t know any more details than that, but the names involved in this film are making audiences incredibly excited for how amazing this might be.