With The History of Concrete, John Wilson takes the least interesting subject imaginable — the dull gray composite used for sidewalks, overpasses and that great big church in “The Brutalist” — and crafts what’s likely to be the most entertaining documentary of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.

It’s a script and a production tightly built around its performers, both superb individually, but most importantly, warmly attentive to each other on screen, and capable of sharing a silence.

This is not an autobiography. Take Me Home is instead a deeply felt examination of the challenges so many face when familial love is swamped by economic reality. The director puts a lot on her characters’ shoulders to illustrate how unsupported and isolated illness and disability can be.

Alvarado’s doc is standard in construction but lively in tone, reflecting his subject’s engagement with the sociopolitical challenges faced by Chicanos in the 20th century.

Edler and editor Barbara Bascou maintain a sense of urgency in this two-hour film by foregrounding human convictions and frailties amid a surfeit of increasingly ugly rhetoric.

It’s a cutting, audacious, and at times astonishing movie.

If you think The Ballad of Judas Priest, from co-directors and Priest fans Tom Morello and Sam Dunn, is going to be anything other than an ode to everything that’s great about the British headbangers, you’ve got another thing coming.

As an atmospheric freakout, Backrooms is extraordinarily effective.

Popov delivers a boisterous tale of a woman coming into her own, told with real humor and heart.

With its many references, Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice takes a cue from its lead character Nick, who sees the past as something to build on rather than recycle, and ends up delivering quite a good time.

Gugu’s World is such a crowd pleaser that it deserves to be seen widely by audiences. They’ll be in for a real treat.

A lively, knife-sharp, impeccably researched and reported documentary that answers every conceivable question you’ve ever had about crypto, and does so in a way that’s brisk and funny and illuminating rather than intimidating.

An assured melange of dramatic re-creation, archival material and interviews, it is a uniquely entertaining venture.

One of the oddest and most illogical murder cases of modern times is recounted in intimate, incredible detail in the classy, disturbing drama A Cry in the Dark [from John Bryson's Book Evil Angels].

Dhont has a tactile, compassionate sense of how men — queer men especially, but not exclusively — watch other men, and Coward, by turns breathtakingly violent and sweetly, shiveringly sensual, thrives on that understanding, encouraging audiences to share in its pleasure.

It’s been a while since Bardem had a role this straight-up that he could sink his choppers into. He is always a formidable presence, but since Esteban is himself a force — charismatic and manipulative, ruthless but cunningly quiet about it — for a while we just feel like we’re watching Javier Bardem in all his handsome, magnetic and unmistakable aggro Javier glory. The subtle power of his performance, and it’s a terrific one, is that it takes us a while to grasp the kind of mind games Esteban is a master of.

Fatherland is an incisive and ambitious movie that wants to lay bare the torn soul of Germany after World War II. It’s also a portrait of family demons and literary celebrity. The film has been made in a spirit of nearly fetishistic meticulousness; it’s as subtle as a fine wine. Yet Fatherland, as an experience, is so steeped in ideas that in the end it’s more heady than haunting.

At 99 minutes, A Woman’s Life is brisk and concentrated, but it never feels glibly selective with regard to its protagonist, permitting us access to Gabrielle at her most impressive, her most unbearable and her most disarmingly ordinary.

Nagi Notes, however, happily sees the director returning to the form of his 2016 breakout Harmonium, with the precision of its characterization and the balance between heartfelt emotional candor and pensive silence in its finely worked script.

Though it can be genuinely wearying and not a little depressing to spend 148 minutes in the company of a man so deeply wrongheaded and in such maddening self-denial (even Paulette, complicit in her own way in her husband’s ambition will eventually insist that he stops calling her his little lady) it is certainly instructive and horribly relevant.

The Esiris cast a perceptive eye over the elite social constellation that has fallen into orbit around this dutiful but unfulfilled society wife, and have nothing but compassion for her as she spins slowly around and around at its center: loved by some, resented by others, admired by all — and totally alone.

Atonement comes to a place that, in a lesser film, might appear sentimental but in this one is bracingly real. You can feel the movie burning away the fog of war.

Come for the arch, bitchy humor promised by the title and the director’s general social media brand; stay for the unabashed sweetness of the enterprise; leave with the distinct sense that there’s more to Firstman than his online persona.

In telling this one family’s story and examining their connection to the land they were born into, Dosa makes an affecting documentary about a looming danger that many are ignoring.

It has the disposition of a vintage buddy movie and an underdog tale, one that celebrates human determination and the notion of advancement through science.

Performed with gusto by Richard E. Grant and Claire Foy, as a couple of Georgian grotesques sacrificing everything to host the aspirational dinner party of their dreams, it derives an odd poignancy from the smallness of its stakes, and the severity of its consequences.

It is strong meat for the heavy drama addicts, tellingly produced and played to develop tight excitement.

The fight sequences (choreographed by Raffaelli) are especially creative, with the combatants using any available object, including a priceless Van Gogh painting, to get the job done.