Release Rundown: What to Watch in May, From Saccharine to Tuner

(L-R) Dustin Hoffman and Leo Woodall appear in Tuner by Daniel Roher, an official selection of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. (Photo courtesy of Sundance Institute)

By Lucy Spicer

Another month behind us and somehow we're already creeping toward summer, nearly in the middle of the calendar year. And things aren't slowing down at Sundance Institute! Sundance Film Festival CDMX 2026 is underway, and spring and summer mean that lab season has rolled around once more, too. Meanwhile, a variety of events are popping up across Colorado for those interested in learning more about the Sundance Film Festival experience.

And, as always, new releases of Sundance Institute-supported films and series are headed to theaters and streaming services, so you can get your indie film fix no matter where you live. This month's batch of new releases features four titles by Festival alums. On the fiction side we have a crime thriller - with breaks for comedy and romance - about a piano tuner with a knack for cracking safes. Also in the fiction space is a horror flick about a medical student whose morbid weight loss trick has haunting side effects. And nonfiction fans have two new releases to choose from too, including a series that premiered at the 2024 Festival about a formerly incarcerated man who started a fitness studio based on prison workouts, as well as a 2026 Festival doc about an Icelandic writer making a time capsule full of memories of his family and a fallen glacier.

Conbody VS Everybody - No stranger to premiering dramatic features at the Sundance Film Festival over the years, Debra Granik (Down to the Bone, Winter's Bone) returned in 2024 with a nonfiction episodic series almost a decade in the making. Filmed over eight years, Conbody VS Everybody follows the efforts of Coss Marte, founder of Conbody, a New York fitness studio that offers prison-style workouts - and Marte would know, since he himself developed the program by working out while he was incarcerated for selling drugs. Now he's an entrepreneur committed to fitness and to a facility that hires formerly incarcerated individuals. Granik's inspiring series chronicles his journey as well as that of his employees as they rebuild their lives in the face of numerous societal obstacles. The first two episodes of this multipart series premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Streaming on the Criterion Channel May 1.

Saccharine - Writer-director Natalie Erika James (Relic, 2020 Sundance Film Festival) returned to the Festival's Midnight section in 2026 with another exercise in horror, this time exploring the dangers that accompany obsessions with weight loss. Hana (Midori Francis) is a medical student stuck in a cycle of binge-eating and restricting when she learns about a mysterious new pill that's helping people shed pounds quickly - very quickly. And Hana's field of study allows her to make her own dupe of the expensive diet meds. Everything looks rosy - she's slimming down, getting noticed by her fitness coach crush (Madeleine Madden) - until increasingly spooky side effects set in. Coming to select theaters May 22.

Tuner - Documentarian Daniel Roher (Navalny, 2022 Sundance Film Festival) ventures into the fiction space with Tuner, a film co-written with Robert Ramsey. Leo Woodall stars as Niki, a piano tuner who has a rare auditory condition that makes him ultrasensitive to sound. He has to wear earplugs at all times, but he's very talented at his craft - just ask his mentor, Harry (Dustin Hoffman). The two mostly spend their days tuning pianos for rich New Yorkers who treat their instruments as set dressing. But during a solo assignment, Niki finds himself in the same place at the same time as some unscrupulous guys trying to open a safe. They're making a lot of noise, and Niki needs quiet to do his job, so he tries to expedite the process, unlocking a precarious new talent of his own. Spanning multiple genres, Tuner premiered at the 2025 Telluride Film Festival before screening in the Spotlight section of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. Coming to select theaters May 22; expanding on May 29.

Time and Water - Director Sara Dosa returned to the Sundance Film Festival in 2026 after premiering her award-winning Fire of Love in 2022 to offer another meditation on how human relationships are linked to the natural world around us. In Time and Water, writer Andri Sn r Magnason mourns both the death of Iceland's glaciers as well as the decline of his grandparents. Just as the glaciers release an archive of memory when their ice melts, so too does Magnason build an archive from photos, home movies, songs, and more to forge a record of a family that lived on and loved a frozen landscape that is fading away. Coming to theaters May 29.

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