Our 12 Most Anticipated Sundance Movies

This week, the bulk of the /Film crew is heading to Park City, Utah for the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. This means that the coming days will be full of reviews and reactions from the year's first major film festival, a place where major movies premiere, gems are discovered, and the basic shape of the entire year in film begins to take shape. If this Sundance is like every other Sundance, we will see some of the best movies of 2018 and discover some incredible new talent over the next week – it's our job to put them on your radar.

But that begins tomorrow. Today, the team is en route. Today, we're writing about our 12 most anticipated Sundance movies, the films that we're making sure we see no matter what. And that means you should know about them, too.

Paul Rudd is playing a major league baseball catcher who is recruited by the the World War II equivalent of the CIA to stop a German scientist from building an atomic bomb for the Nazis. Even though Rudd has recently become a Marvel Comics superhero on the big screen, we've never really seen him tackle a role like this, and that's an exciting prospect, especially in the hands of Sundance veteran director Ben Lewin (The Sessions) and Saving Private Ryan screenwriter Robert Rodat. Plus, when the cast also features Jeff Daniels and Guy Pearce as seasoned spies and Paul Giamatti as a Dutch physicist, along with Mark Strong and Sienna Miller appearing. You can't help but want to see this movie as soon as possible. Plus, I like that old school style title that calls back to movies of the 1950s. (Ethan Anderton)

Along with coming-of-age movies, I've always been interested in movies that team adults with precocious children. In this case, Maggie Gyllenhaal plays a kindergarten teacher who becomes fascinated by a five-year-old boy in her evening poetry class. In order to make sure this young poet lives up to his full potential, she does whatever in takes in order to ensure that he doesn't end up in the kind of mundane life that has turned her numb. This is a cliched Sundance description through and through, but the presence of Gyllenhaal is extremely promising. Plus, I have a bit of a personal interest in this film as a poet friend of mine, Kaveh Akbar, was asked to write poetry for this movie. (Ethan Anderton)

It's practically impossible for me to avoid a Nicolas Cage movie, especially if it's going to be a Nicolas Cage movie where Nicolas Cage goes full Nicolas Cage. What I mean by that is: the type of unhinged, wild-eyed, shrieking performance Cage delivers so well. Mandy pits Cage against a supernatural sect that murdered the love of his life. The still image for the film is literally a shot of Cage's puzzled face covered in blood, so there's no freakin' way I'm missing this flick. (Chris Evangelista)

Kelly MacDonald plays a suburban mother named Agnes who discovers a passion for solving jigsaw puzzles which "unexpectedly draws her into a new world – where her life unfolds in ways she could never have imagined." The hobby turns into an obsession and Agnes finds herself in the unexpected world of puzzle competitions in a "quest for self-awareness." As someone who has got sucked into so many peculiar hobbies (board games, magic...etc.), I can certainly relate to the idea of falling into this type of rabbit hole. And of course, I've always loved Kelly MacDonald's performances. Director Marc Turtletaub is best known for producing films such as Little Miss Sunshine, Colin Trevorrow's Safety Not Guaranteed, Liev Schreiber's Everything is Illuminated, and Jeff Nichols's Loving. I never saw his 2013 directorial debut, Gods Behaving Badly, but the premise here is more than enough to have my attention. (Peter Sciretta)

The directorial debut of writer/director Boots Riley features a terrific cast: Lakeith Stanfield (Atlanta), Tessa Thompson (Thor: Ragnarok), Armie Hammer (The Lone Ranger), and Steven Yeun (The Walking Dead). Stanfield plays a telemarketer who discovers a "magical selling power living inside of him," and Hammer plays his "cocaine-snorting, orgy-hosting, obnoxious, and relentlessly optimistic" boss. If you're not interested in this movie based on that information alone, I don't know what to tell you. While Riley is still an unproven talent behind the camera, he's an intensely political poet, rapper, and producer, and this movie has the potential to launch him to an entirely different playing field. He's certainly assembled a hell of a team for his first time behind the camera – Stanfield is an excellent performer and a perfect fit for this film's "macabre universe," Thompson is intrinsically watchable in anything she does, and after seeing Hammer play such an internal character in last year's Sundance smash Call Me By Your Name, I'm fully on board with a film that gives him a chance to go wildly over the top. (Ben Pearson)

Ever since he burst on the scene with his energetic and moving breakout portrayal of Eazy-E in 2015's NWA biopic Straight Outta Compton, actor Jason Mitchell has been on my list of actors to watch. In my mind, he's been better in smaller movies like Mudbound (which debuted at Sundance last year and just may contain Mitchell's best performance so far) than in bigger blockbusters like Kong: Skull Island, and that's why I'm especially excited to see him return to the indie world in Tyrel. In the movie, Mitchell plays a character named Tyler who "spirals out of control when he realizes he's the only black person attending a weekend birthday party in a secluded cabin." Sounds like this one's going to be a hotbed of social commentary, and after Get Out burned so brightly in 2017, I'm sure Hollywood executives are wondering if Tyrel is going to be the next big thing. Writer/director Sebastián Silva is a Sundance veteran, and this sounds like the most pointed and purposeful film he's made yet. (Ben Pearson)