The Sundance Film Festival isn't just a celebration of cinema: it's also a shopfront, a place where the best streaming services can find the next generation of must-sees for their services.
Netflix has been particularly busy this year, buying the rights to lots of exciting new movies, including heart-wrenching documentaries and gleefully gruesome horror movies.
Here are five of the most significant selections that we're most excited to see from Netflix's 2024 Sundance Film Festival shopping haul. Keep an eye on our new Netflix movies list to find out when these will be available.
Skywalkers: A Love Story
Don't watch this one if you have vertigo. Skywalkers: A Love Story is a documentary about daredevil couple Angela Nikolau and Ivan Beerkus who saved their ailing relationship by climbing one of the world's tallest buildings... As you do.
As the official synopsis puts it: "A daredevil couple journey across the globe to climb the world’s last super skyscraper and perform a bold acrobatic stunt on the spire." It took seven years to make, and the climactic climb is the couple's last.
According to Variety, it's "full of amazing, terrifying, transfixing verité shots of young daredevils scaling the spindly spires that shoot out of the tops of skyscrapers. Yet it’s also a tumultuous love story".
Will & Harper
Will Ferrell's friend Harper recently came out as trans, and in this documentary Ferrell goes on a road trip with her in the hope of understanding what it's like to be trans in the US today.
Despite initial community concerns that this could be one of those "rich old dude spends time with a marginalised person and cries a bit, now give me an Oscar" projects, the reviews of this one have been largely positive.
The movie currently has 100% on Rotten Tomatoes from the 14 critic reviews so far. It's part Trans 101, part honest documentary, about some of the realities of being trans that scaremongering headlines and politicians don't want you to think about.
It's What's Inside
Although Sundance is well known for its documentary strand, it's also a great place for horror fans – and $17 million later, It's What's Inside is taking its low budget but high concept horror to Netflix.
According to Variety the film is "a pretty effective genre calling-card: gleamingly shot and spikily cut, brashly acted by actors accepting of their role as pretty pawns in an elaborate narrative game of strategy".
Horrorbuzz says it's "ingenious" and Silver Screen Riot says it's "utterly transfixing... [it] smashes together the college reunion comedy, puzzle box thrillers and a Shane Carruth-esque level of science-fiction precision".
Ibelin
From the director of The Painter and the Thief, which won the Jury Prize at Sundance in 2020, Ibelin tells the story of Mats Steen, a Norwegian gamer who died of a degenerative muscular disease at the age of 25.
The title comes from the name of his avatar in World of Warcraft, the online community where he made lots of friends. The film re-enacts some of his online life and features many of the gamers whose lives he impacted.
Daughters
The word "Oscar" is already being used around this heartwarming and heartbreaking documentary, which follows four girls reuniting with their incarcerated dads. It won the Audience Award for the US Documentary section at Sundance and is widely considered to be a likely Oscar contender next year.
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