Los Angeles ? Sundance Film Festival veterans Naomi Watts, Laura Linney and Patricia Clarkson are returning with new movies to the nation’s top showcase for independent cinema.

The festival runs Jan. 20-30 in Park City, Utah.

Naomi Watts is shown in a scene from writer-director Scott Coffey's Ellie

Keanu Reeves headlines the cast list among the dramatic competition, playing a dentist in writer-director Mike Mills’ “Thumbsucker,” about a boy struggling to break an oral fixation for his thumb.

Watts, who co-starred in last year’s dramatic entry “We Don’t Live Here Anymore,” stars in writer-director Scott Coffey’s “Ellie Parker,” a comic tale of a budding Hollywood actress.

Linney, star of past Sundance grand prize winner “You Can Count on Me,” appears in writer-director Noah Baumbach’s “The Squid and the Whale,” a divorce drama set in 1980s Brooklyn. Jeff Daniels co-stars.

Clarkson, whose Sundance films have included “The Station Agent” and “Pieces of April,” appears in writer-director Craig Lucas’ “Dying Gaul,” co-starring Peter Sarsgaard in the tale of a screenwriter in a three-way relationship with a movie executive and his wife.

New this time is Sundance’s world-cinema dramatic competition, added to help foster U.S. interest in films from overseas. Among those films are John Leguizamo in “Cronicas,” about a Miami reporter tracking a serial killer in Ecuador; Peter Mullan and Brenda Blethyn in “On a Clear Day,” following a man’s attempt to swim the English Channel; and “Brothers,” featuring Connie Nielsen in a story of a family coping with a husband’s dispatch to war in Afghanistan.

Other Sundance feature films, including celebrity-driven premieres and midnight flicks, will be announced today.