Sundance’s 2023 Lineup: ‘Cat Person,’ Anne Hathaway, and More

After two years of pandemic-induced virtual pivots, the Sundance Film Festival is finally returning to Park City, Utah, in 2023—along with a host of big stars, including but hardly limited to Anne Hathaway, Jonathan Majors, Ben Platt, Alexander Skarsgård, Geena Davis, Tiffany Haddish, Emilia Clarke, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus.  

Indeed, coming off of a relatively quiet festival in which breakouts included the AppleTV+ acquisition Cha Cha Real Smooth and the indie awards contender A Love Song, next year’s Sundance will launch a number of high-profile titles from acclaimed directors, as well as—true to form—a number of potential discoveries in the competition categories. The US dramatic field includes the decades-spanning All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, the feature directorial debut of Raven Jackson—and more notably, backed by top-tier producers in Moonlight Oscar winners Barry Jenkins and Adele Romanski, whose title this fall, Aftersun, stands as one of the year’s most critically adored films. Also in competition is the Majors vehicle Magazine Dreams, costarring Taylour Paige and Haley Bennett, and the Platt-led ensemble piece Theater Camp.

Over in world competition, note Spencer director Pablo Larraín among the producers of the intriguing Chilean Mexican coming-of-age drama Sorcery, and Ben Whishaw leading the first feature from Alice Englert, daughter of Oscar winner Jane Campion (who directed Whishaw in Bright Star), opposite Jennifer Connelly in Bad Behaviour. Whishaw is one of a few actors popping up a couple of times in the year’s lineup: He’s also in one of the festival’s most anticipated titles, Passages, the latest from festival darling Ira Sachs (Love Is Strange, Little Men) that explores attraction and abuse between a trio of characters (Franz Rogowski and Adèle Exarchopoulos also star).

Another MVP of Sundance 2023 is Emilia Jones, who last hit the festival with 2021’s CODA—the first Sundance movie ever to win the best-picture Oscar. Now she’s leading the long-gestating Cat Person, adapted by Michelle Ashord from Kristen Roupenian’s viral New Yorker short story and costarring Nicholas Braun. Jones is also is part of the cast of the ’70s San Francisco ensemble drama Fairyland, produced by Sofia Coppola and also featuring Scoot McNairy, Geena Davis, Maria Bakalova, Cody Fern, and Adam Lambert. Both those films will bow in the premieres section, which also features documentaries on Michael J. Fox (Davis Guggenheim’s Still), Brooke Shields (Lana Wilson’s Pretty Baby), and Judy Blume (Davina Pardo and Leah Wolchok’s Judy Blume Forever). And for fans of Anne Hathaway and/or Ottessa Moshfegh, the former stars in an adaptation of the latter’s novel Eileen, opposite Thomasin McKenzie.