Though documentaries have dominated Sundance lately, the U.S. Dramatic Competition section has, in recent years, identified major new directors such as Desiree Akhavan, Damien Chazelle, Robert Eggers, Ryan Coogler, and Benh Zeitlin. Many of these entrants are young, up-and-coming artists who’ve made only one or two features. Already this year, buzz has started to emerge around the Chinese-born, American-raised director Lulu Wang and her second film, The Farewell. The movie stars Awkwafina as a Chinese American woman returning to China after her grandmother is diagnosed as terminally ill—a fact that’s kept secret from the matriarch. Wang, who based the film on a story she told on This American Life, said she wanted to use The Farewell to explore the intergenerational nuances of her family.

Other dramas in competition include Chinonye Chukwu’s Clemency, about a prison warden (Alfre Woodard) struggling with her work on death row; Alma Har’el’s Honey Boy, written by Shia LaBeouf, which semi-autobiographically recounts LaBeouf’s life as a child actor and his fraught relationship with his father; Joe Talbot’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco, a story of a man (Jimmie Fails) struggling to reclaim his family home in the rapidly gentrifying city; and Rashid Johnson’s Native Son, a modern reimagining of Richard Wright’s novel starring Ashton Sanders (Moonlight) as Bigger Thomas.

On the comedy side, Jason Orley’s Big Time Adolescence stars Saturday Night Live’s Pete Davidson as a charismatic college dropout who becomes a bad influence on a listless suburban teenager. Paul Downs Colaizzo’s Brittany Runs a Marathon has Jillian Bell (Idiotsitter) playing a messy New Yorker trying to pull her life together by preparing for a big race, and Hannah Pearl Utt’s madcap Before You Know It unravels a long-held family secret on the set of a soap opera.

Some of Sundance’s most memorable recent debuts were works of horror, including Hereditary and The Witch. Genre movies to look for this year include Pippa Bianco’s Share, in which a teenage girl tries to solve the mystery of a disturbing video featuring herself that she doesn’t remember filming, and Julius Onah’s Luce, in which a married couple find out their adopted Eritrean son (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) has a dark secret in his past. There’s also Dan Gilroy’s out-of-competition movie Velvet Buzzsaw, starring his past collaborator Jake Gyllenhaal (Nightcrawler) as an art dealer who starts buying paintings that come to life and kill people. That film will premiere on Netflix a week after Sundance begins, and it looks like an appropriately zany start to the new movie season.

Sundance is full of other big-ticket works premiering out of competition. In Joe Berlinger’s Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, Zac Efron plays Ted Bundy, though the film is told from the perspective of the serial killer’s longtime girlfriend, Liz (Lily Collins), who refused to acknowledge the truth about him. Nisha Ganatra’s Late Night, written by Mindy Kaling, stars Emma Thompson as a legendary talk-show host whose program is upended when she hires her first female staff writer. Gavin Hood’s Official Secrets features Keira Knightley as Katharine Gun, a British whistleblower who tried to expose an illegal U.S.-U.K. spying operation in the months before the start of the Iraq War. The actor Chiwetel Ejiofor makes his directorial debut with The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, a heartwarming biopic about William Kamkwamba, a Malawian 13-year-old who used wind power to save his family from famine.