The 2018 Sundance International Film Festival announced its lineup today, one featuring 110 films from 29 countries. As usual, the films range from small indies starring unknowns to bigger indies featuring very big names. Here are some of the highlights we’re most looking forward to.
Idris Elba will premiere his directorial debut, Yardie, based on Victor Headley’s novel about a young boy in Jamaica who sees his brother get assassinated and later becomes part of London’s drug underworld.
Comedian Bo Burnham will also make his directorial debut with Eighth Grade (called The Coolest Girl in the World elsewhere online), a film he also wrote about a young girl at the end of her eighth-grade year as she readies to start high school.
Several members of the original Broadway cast of Hamilton have films debuting at Sundance, including Daveed Diggs (Lafayette/Thomas Jefferson) and Jasmine Cephas Jones (Peggy/Maria Reynolds) in the comedy Blindspotting, which was co-written by Diggs and Rafael Casal, who also co-stars. Anthony Ramos, who played Laurens and Philip Hamilton in the musical, will appear in Monsters and Men, written and directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green. The film follows the aftermath of the death of a black man at the hands of the police and also stars John David Washington, son of Denzel.
Fresh off her Emmy win for The Handmaid’s Tale, director Reed Morano will premiere her apocalypse film I Think We’re Alone Now starring Peter Dinklage as a man who believes he’s the last person on Earth and Elle Fanning as a second survivor who ruins that.
Another dystopian film, Sorry to Bother You, stars Atlanta‘s Lakeith Stanfield as a telemarketer who enters a “macabre universe,” along with Tessa Thompson, Steven Yeun, and Armie Hammer.
The Chloë Sevigny and Kristen Stewart-led film Lizzie will also make its debut. The film revisits the story Lizzie Borden working from the theory that Borden had a romantic relationship with the family’s live-in maid who helped her dispose of the bodies.
The Miseducation of Cameron Post, based on the novel of the same name by Emily Danforth, stars Chloë Grace Moretz and American Honey star Sasha Lane and follows a teen girl sent to gay conversion therapy.
Finally, Paul Dano will make his directorial debut with Wildlife, a film he co-wrote with longtime girlfriend Zoe Kazan based on Richard Ford’s novel. Wildlife will star Carey Mulligan and Jake Gyllenhaal.
You can view full list of all 110 films debuting at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival at the Sundance Institute’s blog.
