Sundance 2018: The 10 movies you need to see

By Chris Nashawaty
January 16, 2018 at 12:00 PM EST

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Sundance Must List

Alex Bailey/Sundance; Dusan Martincek/Sundance; Adam Stone/Sundance; CNN Films/Sundance

It’s time for Hollywood to get the parkas out of storage and head to the slopes of Park City, Utah, where a fresh crop of premieres are set to take over the town during the Sundance Film Festival, which runs Jan. 18-28. Here’s what we’re dying to see.

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Blindspotting

Courtesy of Sundance Institute

How do you follow up something as career-changing as Hamilton? If you’re Tony winner Daveed Diggs, you sit down and write (with Rafael Casal) a buddy comedy to star in about growing up in Oakland.

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The Catcher Was A Spy

Dusan Martincek/Sundance

Paul Rudd returns to Park City with the stranger-than-fiction true story of Moe Berg, a catcher for the Chicago White Sox who became a spy during World War II, helping the U.S. beat Germany in the race to build the A-bomb.

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Damsel

Adam Stone/Sundance

Thanks to the Zellner brothers’ last film, the mysterious Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter, their follow-up — a slapstick Western starring Robert Pattinson and Mia Wasikowska — is one of this year’s most anticipated (and, hopefully, equally bizarre) premieres.

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Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far On Foot

Scott Patrick Green/Sundance

Will Gus Van Sant’s latest be a down-the-middle pitch like Good Will Hunting or an unexpected curveball like Gerry? The marquee-flaunting title of this Joaquin Phoenix drama about a paralyzed cartoonist suggests the latter.

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Hal

Sundance Insitute

Hal Ashby was one of the most colorful figures of the New Hollywood revolution. But despite making Harold and Maude, Shampoo, and The Last Detail, he never had the name recognition of Scorsese, Spielberg, and Coppola. Amy Scott’s doc could right that wrong.

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Lizzie

Sundance Institute

Chloë Sevigny has an ax (and gives 40 whacks) in this psychological thriller exploring the 19th-century case of Lizzie Borden and one of the most notorious murders in American history. Kristen Stewart costars as Lizzie’s Irish housemaid and lover.

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Monsters and Men

Sundance Insitute

Kelvin Harrison Jr., the breakout from It Comes at Night, stars in this timely tragedy about the police killing of a black man, told through the eyes of a witness who filmed the act. Harrison appears in two other entries, the similarly titled Monster and Assassination Nation.

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Our New President

Sundance Institute

Sure to be one of the most provocative offerings of the festival, Maxim Pozdorovkin’s fake-news hot potato tells the story of Donald Trump’s election entirely through Russian media and bold-faced propaganda.

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RBG

CNN Films/Sundance

She’s been a meme and injudiciously outspoken about Trump. Now Ruth Bader Ginsburg can add “documentary subject” to that list. Betsy West and Julie Cohen’s peek behind the curtain at our spiciest Supreme Court Justice may be a crowd-pleaser.

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Yardie

Alex Bailey/Sundance

Idris Elba put his day job on hold to make his feature-directing debut with this bullet-riddled, Jamaican/British gang-world epic adapted from a Victor Headley novel. The Maze Runner‘s Aml Ameen stars. The soundtrack is killer.

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