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More 2026 Sundance Quick Takes
Louis Paxton's The Informer As Sundance 2026 wraps and the curtain drops on Park City, the Sundance 2026 awards have been announced. Films fortunate enough to be so honored by Sundance juries gain valuable visibility, boosting their chances at finding greater audiences. Several of the films mentioned in my first round of coverage won awards. However, many of the premieres at Sundance you will likely hear very little about. As director Eugene Hernandez commented at the awards ceremony, out of 16,000 submissions, 150 films were selected for this year’s Sundance. How many festival attendees, no less reviewers, are able to see more than 20-30 of these? This is why I think it’s a good idea to take a brief look at some of the other outstanding Sundance premieres this year.
The quirky crime thriller Tuner follows Niki, a young piano tuner with acute absolute pitch, as he makes his rounds among an upscale New York clientele. At the film’s outset, we meet his aging, hard-of-hearing mentor and wife (Dustin Hoffman, Tovah Feldshuh), ersatz parents who will soon recede into the background of this genre trope mashup. There are East European gangsters, Asian drug traffickers, safecracking, robbery, extortion, a killing, an encrypted wire transfer, a romcom meet-cute, even an onstage music competition. There’s a theft of heirloom watches with a Holocaust motif. There are music bona fides too: the opening is cut to Herbie Hancock and the Headhunter’s “Watermelon Man” (Hancock has a later cameo); another sequence is cut to Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman”; names like Mussorgsky and Ravel are dropped in dialogue. Quite a lot to juggle, yet somehow director Daniel Roher succeeds in keeping all balls in the air while delivering a star-making turn for actor Leo Woodall as Niki. You might recognize Roher as the director Navalny, which won the U.S. Documentary Audience Award and Festival Favorite at Sundance 2022, also the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. Roher even had a second film at Sundance this year, The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, which I didn’t see, so I can’t comment on it.
Amazingly, pitch-perfect hearing was central to a second film at Sundance, the documentary Joybubbles. Josef Carl Engressia Jr. was born in 1949, blind from birth but with absolute pitch and the ability to whistle a perfect 2600 hertz tone. This became a magical power in 1963 when Bell Telephone introduced touch-tone dialing, which utilized multiple sound frequencies to direct calls anywhere in the world. By simply whistling into a phone, Engressia could “dial” scot-free. In those days, long distance calls were incredibly expensive and usually brief. If not careful, monthly phone bills could top hundreds of dollars, if not thousands. Not surprisingly, Engressia became popular in college before he was busted for selling calls for a dollar. (In the 1970s, handheld “blue boxes” that generated these frequencies to hack the phone system became popular with “phone phreaks,” including a young Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, cited in the film.) Engressia’s dream to work for the phone system was never fully realized, but he did develop a following for inspirational messages he posted on his phone answering machine. Living alone, determined to reclaim his inner 5-year-old, he legally changed his name to Joybubbles and eventually made his way to the University of Pittsburgh’s Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood Archives, where he watched (listened to, actually) hundreds of episodes. The film ends with his lonely death, but Joybubbles’ uniquely loving, uplifting spirit is one you won’t soon forget.
“Give me the ball” says interviewee Billy Jean King in Give Me the Ball, producing a yellow-green tennis ball for the camera, evidently a comfort object clutched offscreen during her lengthy closeup interview, the backbone of this essential documentary about how one determined woman athlete changed the world. Once the world’s number one female tennis champion, in the 1970s she single-handedly toppled patriarchal control of American women’s sports, first by demanding tournament pay equal to male champions and later by founding both the Women’s Tennis Association and the Women’s Sports Foundation. There was also her mega-famous televised defeat of self-proclaimed male chauvinist Bobby Riggs in 1973, an event watched worldwide. Looking into the camera and therefore directly at us, King narrates her own story with the candor and confidence of late adulthood, describing a lifetime effort to dominate on the court and, off the court, to resolve her own needs and desires. Produced and directed by veteran doc makers Liz Garbus and Elizabeth Wolff for ESPN Films’ sports series 30 for 30, Give Me the Ball should be soon available on ESPN+. Not to be missed.
Another sports-themed doc bowing at Sundance is Amir Bar-Lev’s The Last First: Winter K2, equal parts extreme climbing methodology and ineluctable tragedy. K2 is the second highest mountain on earth, at the border of Pakistan and China, thought impossible to scale in the depths of winter. Ascending to the top of K2 in winter would be considered a “first” and therefore one of the last firsts available in the competitive world of extreme mountain climbing, since the tallest peaks from Everest on down have already been conquered. Bar-Lev introduces us in stages to an expert three-man American-Pakistani crew, a larger experienced Nepali outfit, and a swelling contingent of aspiring but amateur mountaineers organized by a Dutch promoter. A total of 60 climbers who hope to be the first to top K2 in winter eventually collect at the first base camp—the first flashing red danger signal. Eventually five are dead and European survivors traumatized. The Last First: Winter K2 is gripping cinema, no less compelling because it’s a documentary.
Hanging By a Wire documents the finger-biting sixteen-hour rescue in 2023 of six students and two adults stranded in an upside-down cable car (with no doors!) a thousand feet in the air above a rugged valley, after two of the main cables snapped. Thank goodness for our age of cheap amateur camera drones, which captured hours worth of closeups of the trapped victims during the ordeal, and cell-phone cameras, which captured growing crowds of anxious parents and onlookers. When Pakistani army helicopters largely failed—only one student had been airlifted away by sundown— it fell to local cable and zipline experts, who by means of pulleys and harnesses, slid themselves in the dark along the one remaining but failing cable to reach the wrecked cable car, plucking out the remaining individuals and carrying them to safety. Interviews with the survivors themselves, their fathers (no mothers), and several police and military figures, including a female police chief who gets promoted after the rescue, round out the account of what happened. (Except for the female police chief, there are no women in the mix, reflecting Pakistani social norms.) Nevertheless, as someone who has filmed in that area (after the devastating 2005 Kashmir earthquake), I was thrilled to see and hear from warm Pakistani faces in a film directed by New York-based Pakistani director Mohammed Ali Naqvi. We see too little from that amazing corner of the world, one of the cradles of civilization.
The Incomer is fabulous in the original sense, meaning like a fable. It leans comic but also belongs to the wild-child genre. Two adult siblings, brother and sister, with feral tendencies have grown up alone on a remote Scottish island without parents or anyone else. The island is deserted and they are the sole inhabitants, at least until a government agency sends a middle-manager type to evict them, played by scrawny, ginger-haired Domhnall Gleeson. Brandishing a cellphone, which the siblings have never seen, Gleeson’s character convinces them at first that he’s a wizard, a necessary move because the siblings are about to throw him off a cliff. Donning primitive seagull costumes, flapping about and squawking menacingly, the siblings comprise a wacko two-person cult against the outside world. What ensues is by turns twisted, silly, even borderline poignant, as Stockholm syndrome takes hold and Gleeson goes somewhat native. The 2026 Sundance jury that awarded the NEXT Innovator Award to director/screenwriter Louis Paxton called The Incomer “boldly original” and “deeply humane,” a work where “deadpan humor, animation, and myth collide.”
Initial reviews of the farcical Chasing Summer have not been kind. Script, by lead actor Iliza Shlesinger, who in real life is a successful standup, tells the story of Jamie, a forty-something international disaster aid worker who upon getting dumped in a comically humiliating way by her fellow aid worker boyfriend, tentatively returns after twenty years to the small Texas town she grew up in, only to confront unresolved relationship issues that have haunted her since high school. Director is Josephine Decker, who’s made quite a name for herself with seriously edgy work. (She directed Shirley, inspired by author Shirley Jackson’s life, with Elisabeth Moss and Michael Stuhlbarg.) Impetus behind the criticism seems to be disappointment that a challenging experimentalist like Decker would direct a crude farce like this, but in fact Shlesinger and Decker both grew up in Texas and have more than enough purchase on the subject matter. I grew up in Tennessee and had a step-mother very much like Jamie’s brassy, sassy sister Marissa (Cassidy Freeman). Such characters do exist, even if they seem overly broad on screen. Coastal and continental reviewers may pooh-pooh this film, but remember folks, it’s a farce. The opening scene is a video collage of international disaster coverage with an audio track of what sounds like someone orgasming. That should clue you in.
To say that Frank & Louis is a prison drama barely touches the surface of this superb work, one of the finest at Sundance. It’s a deliberation on a volatile man’s pride, rage, and relationship to truth, and equally a haunting depiction of the slow but incessant plundering of the mind that is Alzheimer’s. Convicted murderer Frank, played memorably by British actor Kingsley Ben-Adir, to improve his chances of an early release must take on a job as caretaker for truculent Louis, who remains in prison despite worsening dementia. Louis, by turns fierce and lost, is played by Rob Morgan in a performance that can only be described as devastating. Casting of Frank & Louis is pitch-perfect, as is Judith Kaufman’s accomplished cinematography. This Swiss production, though set in an American prison, is the first English-language production of Swiss director Petra Volpe, who co-wrote. She’s someone to keep an eye on.
Sundance regular Ethan Hawke has won acclaim playing scruffy obsessives like abolitionist John Brown in The Good Lord Bird and “truthstorian” Lee Raybon in FX’s The Lowdown. In The Lowdown, Hawke’s Raybon is also a struggling single father with a shrewd, self-possessed 13-year-old daughter. In Padraic McKinley’s The Weight, which premiered at Sundance, Hawke again plays a struggling single father with a self-possessed daughter, this time maybe six and button-cute. The year is 1933, the place rural Oregon, and Hawke’s Depression-era character, Samuel Murphy, is hanging by a fraying thread. He has no job, can’t pay rent, is evicted, gets beaten, cruelly jailed, then sent to a brutal work camp. His daughter is put up for adoption. This is merely the setup for a tense wilderness thriller that involves a party of convicts hiking for days with backpacks full of heavy gold bars, hence The Weight. Hawke demonstrates once again why he is perhaps his generation’s finest actor, while Russell Crowe as the scheming camp boss adds another indelible villain to his growing portfolio of supporting roles. Did I mention this production was filmed in Germany?
Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is a hoot, a breezy string of hit-or-miss comic bits that, taken as a whole, functions much like one of those 1930’s screwball comedies featuring ditzy but quick-witted comediennes. In this case, the delightful screwball is Zoey Deutch, last seen as Jean Seberg in Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague. The plotline’s MacGuffin—the contrivance of a “pass” to have sex with a celebrity before an impending marriage—could almost have been lifted from a pre-Hays sex comedy. Jon Hamm is the credible sex-pass objective of Deutch’s Gail Daughtry character, while Hamm’s Mad Men colleague John Slattery provides madcap support. Occasional surprise cameos are a bonus. Visually G-rated, this is a film that nevertheless relegates the sex act to little more than a silly lark. Definitely not for bluenoses.
“If you want to nuke your life, do crack,” says Courtney Love in Antiheroine, her wrecked voice audible proof. At Park City, Love failed to show for her bio-doc’s debut. If you’ve worked with actors or musicians with severe substance abuse disorders (I have), you know that you can rely only on their unreliability, that sobriety is no cure-all. Footage of Love’s early performances with Hole confirm her considerable talents as songwriter, musician, performer, and singer, but Antiheroine fails to avoid story-arc clichés typical of docs about self-destructive rock musicians: abuse, rise, fall, recovery, redemption. In Love’s case, that last arc appears incomplete.
In Sundance’s Episodics section, three half-hour episodes of The Screener, an “independent TV series” were screened (out of five completed), and I can’t wait to see the rest, or another season, for that matter. Hands down, this series is a hit, if picked up. The premise is that an indie Iranian-American director, who has spent ten years completing her first feature and is looking for distribution, agrees to a VIP screening at a big Hollywood talent agency, where a pliant projectionist copies her DCP to a thumb drive and before you can say “piracy,” the copy makes its way to the internet. Adding salt to the wound, the female director plays a role in her own film, which contains nudity, which would prove anathema to her conservative Persian family were they to see it. Kumail Nanjiani, as the imperious agency head, heads an extraordinary cast that includes creator/co-director Jim Cummings as the beleaguered L.A. district attorney who agrees to bring a white-collar RICO case against the talent agency as the stakes continue to escalate. PJ McCabe is co-writer and co-director. Further information about The Screener is available here. Come on, someone pick this up!
Contributing editor David Leitner has director, producer, and DP credits in eight Sundance premieres, including 1989 Grand Jury and Audience Award winner for documentary, For All Mankind.
