Some New Year’s traditions never get old. In between catching up on 2024 releases and rewatching cozy faves, we’ve been dusting off our watchlists in preparation for a whole new year of cinema loving.

To help kick us off, the Year in Review. (See if you can spot them all!)

The Letterboxd mic will hit the slopes, eager to hear your takes on everything from a sinister pop star to a marriage frayed by cabbages—and meeting those who made them. We’ll be online, too, thanks to Sundance continuing to offer on-demand access (for those geographically in the US). So as we lace up our snow boots and perfect our home viewing setups, we’ve assembled a list of our most anticipated titles at this year’s fest. Watchlists at the ready.

Contributions from: Adesola Thomas, Annie Lyons, Katie Rife, Leo Koziol, Rafa Sales Ross and Zachary Lee.

Bubble & Squeak

Written and directed by Evan Twohy

As someone still thinking about Sarah Goldberg’s centerpiece monologue in Barry and Himesh Patel’s powerhouse Station Eleven performance, I’m ready for an extra big helping of Evan Twohy’s Bubble & Squeak. Adapted from his absurdist comedy play and former Black List script, his idiosyncratic debut stars the pair as newlyweds accused of smuggling illegal cabbages—yes, you read that right—in a fictional European country. Matt Berry, MVP of unorthodox line readings, s the party as the customs enforcer hot on their trail. Place your predictions now on how many syllables he’ll manage to stretch out the central vegetable’s name to—I reckon at least five. AL

By Design

Written and directed by Amanda Kramer

Amanda Kramer has been quietly building a reputation as one of weird cinema’s preeminent auteurs. Her debut feature, Ladyworld, imagines the apocalypse within the feral world of teenage girls, while 2022’s Please Baby Please is a campy gender burlesque set in a pulp-novel version of 1950s New York. With its high-profile premiere in Sundance’s NEXT sidebar, By Design is poised as a breakout film for Kramer. The concept is gloriously nutty: a misunderstood pushover played by Juliette Lewis transforms into a chair, and, according to the official synopsis, “everyone likes her better as a chair”. But the cast is comfortingly familiar: alongside Lewis, Mamoudou Athie (Kinds of Kindness) and Melanie Griffith serve as ambassadors to Kramer’s brilliant, bizarre world. KR

Endless Cookie

Written and directed by Seth and Peter Scriver (Shamattawa First Nations)

This animated feature doc “hangout film” explores the bond between two half brothers—one Indigenous, one white—traveling from the present in isolated Shamattawa to bustling 1980s Toronto. Seth Scriver’s first film, Asphalt Watches, screened at TIFF in 2013, and won Best Canadian First Feature. Letterboxd member Thomas describes that film as “like two skateboarders ate hallucinogenic mushrooms, went hitchhiking, and then animated the entire trip using the Windows 95 edition of MS Paint.” If Endless Cookie is more of the same with a Native angle and more personalized story, I’m in. LK

How to Build a Library

Directed by Chris King and Maia Lekow

Shiro and Wachuka are two Kenyan women determined to transform a former whites-only library into a community space for Nairobi creatives. As the pair fundraise and comb over vestiges of Kenya’s colonial past, directors Chris King and Maia Lekow, who is also a Kenyan musician, draw the viewer’s gaze to decolonization as it articulates itself through dilapidated spaces, modern friendships and a beloved homeland. Spiritually akin to Mati Diop’s latest feature Dahomey, How to Build a Library contends with prescient questions about what artifacts of the imperial past are worth preserving in collective memory, which deserve altogether to be discarded and replaced. AT

Last Days

Directed by Justin Lin, written by Ben Ripley

Whether he was Fast & Furious franchise, has always anchored his greatest blockbuster spectacles by narrowing in on the interiority of the human beings at their center. His new film, Last Days, harkens back to the scale of his modest 2002 Sundance breakout feature Better Luck Tomorrow.

Lin trades in the Dodge Chargers and Tokyo streets for a more grounded story, dramatizing the life of Christian missionary John Allen Chau, who traveled to the uned tribe of North Sentinel Island with the hope of spreading the Gospel. Directors Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss released a documentary in 2023, The Mission, focusing on Chau—but Lin’s film fictionalizes the narrative, tapping into the thriller genre elements. Lin will hopefully explore not just the religious but also ethnic and cultural layers to this tale of devotion gone awry, lacing his eye for spectacle with patient and introspective character work. ZL

Life After

Directed by Reid Davenport

Three years ago, director Reid Davenport arrived in Sundance with one of the most impressive debuts of recent years, the poignant, deeply affecting I Didn’t See You There. The film won the US Documentary Directing Award at the festival that year, and now Davenport returns with a doc about Elizabeth Bouvia, a disabled Californian woman who sought the right to die in 1983 but disappeared from public view after years of contentious trials. Bouvia’s story is the starting point for a questioning of the fragile state of US healthcare and the autonomy of a disabled individual, told through the eyes of a director who makes films through a disabled lens in a still staggeringly ableist industry. RSR

Move Ya Body: The Birth of House

Directed by Elegance Bratton

Beautiful things happen by accident all of the time. The creation of house music is no exception. In Move Ya Body: The Birth of House, director Elegance Bratton (The Inspection) traces the origins of house to the death of disco, via Chicago’s underground DIY music scene and the ingenuity of house pioneer Vince Lawrence and his music collective, Z Factor. This doc—Bratton’s third—mixes archival footage and first-person interviews to visualize the relationship between Mayor Richard J. Daley’s segregated Chicago and the emergent house sound developed in queer, Black and Latin subcultures. Local sounds that would go on to become a global phenomenon. AT

Middletown

Directed by Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss

If you need your annual fill of movies that feature scrappy and resourceful youth exposing the exploitative and destructive machinations of greedy corporations, Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss have you covered with Middletown. After winning hearts at last year’s Sundance with Girls State, the duo is back with another incisive story of adolescent activism and advocacy, this one centering on upstate NY teens who make a student film documenting a toxic waste conspiracy poisoning their community; the film also flashes forward to hear the now adult students reflect on the legacy of their work. Art about ecological grief is more urgent than ever, and Middletown looks to critique corporate malfeasance, while reminding us that we all can play a part to steward this Earth better. ZL

Opus

Written and directed by Mark Anthony Green

Between 2024’s Trap and Smile 2, pop-star genre fare is having a moment—though debut filmmaker Mark Anthony Green seems more keen on the insidious power that fame belies than any parasocial gilded cage. Premiering in the Midnight section, Opus follows a young writer (Ayo Edebiri) lured into the web of a reclusive pop-star-turned-cult-leader (John Malkovich). Juliette Lewis, Murray Bartlett and Amber Midthunder also feature in the “Say less!” cast. I, for one, can never get enough horror musicals, so original music penned by Chic legend Nile Rodgers and longtime Beyoncé collaborator The-Dream promises to be the catchy cherry on top. Bring on the synths! AL

The Wedding Banquet

Directed by Andrew Ahn, written by Ahn and James Schamus from a film by Schamus, Ang Lee and Neil Peng

Andrew Ahn’s 2016 feature debut, Spa Night, premiered at Sundance, but Letterboxd probably know him better for a movie that went straight to Hulu: 2022’s Fire Island, co-starring Asian American comedy powerhouses Bowen Yang and Joel Kim Booster. Yang returns for The Wedding Banquet; Ahn’s reimagining of Ang Lee’s 1993 queer rom-com of the same name, the film blends raucous comedy and poignant reflections on community and culture in a way that recalls not only Lee’s original but also Ahn’s previous work. The cast, led by Yang alongside Lily Gladstone, Kelly Marie Tran, Joan Chen and Minari’s Youn Yuh-jung alongside in-demand Korean newcomer Han Gi-chan (Where Your Eyes Linger), isn’t bad either. KR

Zodiac Killer Project

Directed by Charlie Shackleton

There’s nothing new or novel about the true-crime genre, but it did have a resurgence in the late 2010s, driven in part by hit streaming documentaries like The Jinx and Making a Murderer. Zodiac Killer Project lifts the curtain on these series, revealing the cynical wizardry underneath. Part semiotics lesson and part director’s commentary—and funnier than either of those descriptions imply—this sardonic, candid film features multimedia artist Charlie Shackleton (Paint Drying, an experimental 607-minute film with a Letterboxd page that has taken on a life of its own) narrating his failed attempt to cash in on the trend with a prestige documentary on the Zodiac Killer. Along the way, he deconstructs the tropes and tricks of the genre, as well as his own complicated fandom of it. KR