Charli XCX in Aidan Zamiri’s The Moment (2025)

“As some of you may know,” wrote Charli XCX in her newsletter last month, “I’m currently feeling more inspired by film than I am by music. Film is where my creative brain seems to be gravitating.”

This year alone, she’s appeared in Pete Ohs’s low-budget melodrama Erupcja, Romain Gavras’s sociopolitical satire Sacrifice, and Julia Jackman’s feminist fable 100 Nights of Hero. Reviewing Erupcja, the New Yorker’s Richard Brody wrote that “Charli XCX may not have much movie experience, but she dominates the action with classical canniness, her energetic yet poised performance showing keen awareness that movie acting favors minimal strain, because the camera can transform thought into action.”

On Wednesday, Sundance announced that ninety features are lined up for its 2026 edition, and three of them star Charli XCX. Talking to Deadline’s Glenn Garner, Gregg Araki describes her role in I Want Your Sex, his first feature in more than ten years, as “the opposite of Charli,” a “really bitchy and mean” pre-med student who is “the worst girlfriend ever” to Elliott (Cooper Hoffman), the young upstart artist Erika (Olivia Wilde) has hired to be her sexual muse. “I feel like it’s so hard to read the news,” says Araki, “and we’re living in such a nightmare hellscape, that I really wanted to do a movie that was kinda pop, and fun, and sexy. The way I describe it is a sort of sex-positive love letter to Gen Z.”

Charli XCX has a smaller role in another comedic stab at the art world, The Gallerist, directed by Cathy Yan (Dead Pigs, Birds of Prey). Natalie Portman stars as a gallery owner, Da’Vine Joy Randolph as one of her artists, Zach Galifianakis as an art influencer, and Catherine Zeta-Jones as a high-flying dealer. The story involves an attempted sale of a dead body at Art Basel Miami.

“But most personal is The Moment,” writes Chris Cotonou in the cover story of the new issue of A Rabbit’s Foot, “a satire mockumentary directed by the talented Aidan Zamiri. It is a story borne from Charli’s experiences following the surreal phenomenon of Brat and what followed, with characters inspired by the very real people in Charli’s environment at that time.” The cast includes Rosanna Arquette, Kate Berlant, Jamie Demetriou, Hailey Benton Gates, and Alexander Skarsgård.

“It’s a 2024 period piece,” Charli XCX tells Cotonou. “The Moment is on the nose, but the last thing I want is to play a version of myself. My biggest goal is to disappear, for people to not see Charli XCX in my performances. I’ve paid the price for some decisions in music and I don’t want to do that with film—because I love film much more than music.”

Looking Back—and Ahead

Sundance’s forty-first edition (January 22 through February 1) will be its last in Park City, Utah, before the festival moves to Boulder, Colorado, and its first since the passing of cofounder and guiding spirit, Robert Redford. In October, Sundance announced a Park City Legacy program that includes screenings of Reginald Hudlin’s House Party (1990), Barbara Kopple’s American Dream (1991), Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin (2005), and Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’s* Little Miss Sunshine* (2006).

The festival will also host the world premiere of Once Upon a Time in Harlem, a film William Greaves (Symbiopsychotaxiplasm) shot at a cocktail party for Harlem Renaissance artists and intellectuals that he hosted at Duke Ellington’s townhouse in the summer of 1972. One of the three cameramen that evening was Greaves’s son David, who has directed the new restoration.

Among the other films lined up for the Premieres program are Josephine Decker’s Chasing Summer, written and produced by comedian Iliza Shlesinger, who stars as a woman returning to her humble hometown in Texas; Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, starring Zoey Deutch, Jon Hamm, and John Slattery and directed by David Wain (Wet Hot American Summer); Jay Duplass’s See You When I See You, the story of a comedy writer mourning his sister; The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, starring John Turturro, Giancarlo Esposito, Will Price, Tatiana Maslany, and Steve Buscemi and directed by actor Noah Segan (Wake Up Dead Man); Macon Blair’s The Shitheads, a comedy produced by star Dave Franco; and John Wilson’s The History of Concrete and more documentaries with subjects ranging from Brittney Griner to Billie Jean King, Courtney Love to Maria Bamford.

The Episodic section will offer new work from Riz Ahmed, Jim Cummings, and Nicole Holofcener, and discoveries await in the U.S. and World Dramatic and Documentary competitions and the Midnight program. Filmmaker’s Scott Macaulay notes that one “surprise title in the NEXT section is zi, by Kogonada, his independent follow-up to his big-studio picture, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey. Set in Hong Kong, it costars his Columbus lead, Haley Lu Richardson. Says [Sundance director of programming Kim] Yutani, ‘Kogonada brought this project to us and said he was just doing it guerilla-style in Hong Kong. He, his actors, and a very small team went there and just started shooting this project, and you can see his vision. He doesn’t have the constraints of a structure around him and is making a film he truly wants to make.’”

Don’t miss out on your Daily briefing! Subscribe to the RSS feed.