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Sundance ‘26: ‘SHAME AND MONEY’ is a Deeply Eastern European Tale of Scraping By

Shame and Money, writer-director Visar Morina’s pastoral-then-metropolitan slice-of-life drama from the landlocked Eastern European Republic of Kosovo, interrogates what’s left when a family’s livelihood collapses and they’re forced to fend for themselves in a new environment. For Shaban’s hardworking family, upheaval begins when their untrustworthy brother steals the family cow. Their routine of livestock tending, machine milking, and applying balm to ailing udders is thrown into chaos: no milk to sell means no income. Their only solution is to uproot and move from the country to the city. Read More

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Sundance ‘26: ‘BIG GIRLS DON’T CRY’ Experiments with Identity and Fake Friends

We meet 14-year-old Sid Bookman (Ani Palmer) in a video chat room. It’s 2006, New Zealand, still deep in the dial-up age. Talking to a guy online, Sid says she’s 18 and claims her camera’s broken. It’s not. A chubby, shirtless 35-year-old wanks off on the other side. It’s these moments from the early internet that don’t exactly inspire nostalgia. Read More

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Sundance ‘26: ‘SILENCED’ Relitigates the Amber Heard–Johnny Depp Trial Through the Lens of Weaponized Defamation Law

Historically, men would duel to the death when their reputations were tarnished, but international human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson argues that “too many men were dying that way, so they introduced defamation laws.” This was supposed to be a more civilized method—allow legal practitioners to decide what is and is not true regarding reputation and levy fees accordingly—but the rise of the circus of social media has thrown that presumption into question. This begs the question: can the legal system be influenced by social media, especially in an age of bots and the proliferation of the “manosphere”? And if so, how can one limit juror bias and land on anything resembling objective jurisprudence? This is a question that documentarian Selina Miles’ Silenced aims to answer, in part by relitigating the extremely high-profile Amber Heard vs. Johnny Depp abuse case. Read More

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Sundance ‘26: ‘MUM, I’M ALIEN PREGNANT’ Is a Gross, Slimy Kiwi Hootenanny That’s Not Entirely Full Term

Mary (Hannah Lynch) isn’t up to much. Mostly, she loafs around and jerks off to hentai porn. When a new neighbor, Boo (Arlo Green), around her age, shows up, the antisocial underachiever befriends the socially awkward loner because he’s got tentacles on his dong. Turns out he’s probably an alien, as the title unsubtly suggests. And when she winds up preggo (also in the title), the pair turn to their mums to help them navigate this unusually goopy body horror scenario in Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant. Read More

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Sundance ‘26: ‘AMERICAN DOCTOR’ a Charged Account of Gaza’s Humanitarian Breakdown

American Doctor forces audiences to confront the carnage inflicted on Gaza’s civilians, particularly children, early and often. For anyone who somehow avoided footage of dead babies across social media in 2025, the film offers a corrective almost immediately. One doctor argues it would be “journalistic malpractice” not to show the corpses, claiming that omitting them in the name of dignity is actually a form of sane-washing what is going on, a sanitization that  actually only strips the dead of their humanity. The only way to cede dignity, he argues, is to show the truth, no matter how horrifying. Read More

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Sundance ‘26: A Childhood Displaced in Syrian Refugee Doc ‘ONE IN A MILLION’

Aleppo, Syria, 2025. A bombed out shell of its former self. Ten years prior, it was a flourishing city filled with bustling markets, food stalls, prayer, and congregation. Co-directors Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes chronicle that ten year transformation through the lens of Israa, an Aleppo native. Filming for One in a Million began in 2015, when Israa was an 11-year-old child, shortly before her family fled Assad’s Syria for Germany. Read More

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Sundance ‘26: ‘CLOSURE’ Is an Electrifying, Devastating Search for Meaning in Loss

Shot with cinematic flair, Michał Marczak’s Polish-language documentary Closure is a rattling search and rescue: both for an actual missing kid and the soul of the father searching. Following the disappearance of his teenage son Chris, Daniel diligently scours the Vistula River, hoping to either recover his son’s corpse or uncover some hint that he might still be alive. He and his friends spend their free time checking every creek and crag of the Vistula, mucking out the eddies, breaking apart wash-ups, and scouring its embankments for a decomposing body. In the opening scene, Daniel finds what he’s looking for: a corpse washed up on the riverbank. Fortunately, it’s not his son. Closure eludes him still. Read More

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Sundance ‘26: ‘THE LAKE’ is a Dire Warning of an Impending Environmental Meltdown

You may have heard the headlines before: without immediate intervention, an “environmental nuclear bomb” is set to go off in the Western USA, in Utah. The Lake, an urgent, fact-filled documentary from Utah-native and first-time feature documentarian Abby Ellis, starts by providing an alarming statistic: over half of the water in the Great Salt Lake is diverted for human use. Utah is the second driest state in the country but has the second highest water use per capita, mostly for agriculture. Without direct intervention and scaling back of human water use, that bomb is set to go off. And soon. Scientists Ben Abbott and Bonnie Baxter publicly report that without immediate change, the lake has five years before total collapse. Read More

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Sundance ‘26: Commercialism, Competition Breeds Tragedy In ‘THE LAST FIRST: WINTER K2’

In the winter of 2021, a group of 60 climbers—a mix of professional mountaineers, Sherpas, and an uncomfortably large number of novices on a paid expedition—gather at a Himalayan base camp to attempt one of the last unclaimed feats in alpine sport: summiting K2 in winter. The Last First: Winter K2, from documentarian Amir Bar-Lev, charts how this bold collective faces down the mountain, and what it costs them, as competition, commercialism, and outright negligence collide in a perfect storm. Lives are lost, lessons are few, and the takeaway feels grimly simple: mistakes were made. Read More

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‘28 YEARS LATER: THE BONE TEMPLE’ A Funky Continuation of the Infection

After escaping a tumultuous coming‑of‑age under his father’s forceful hand and delivering his ailing mother to her final resting place, Spike (Alfie Williams) has now taken up with a band of satanists. In 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, Nia DaCosta’s sequel to last year’s reinvention of the franchise, a movie that picks up right where the last one left off and carries on its meditative yet unabashedly goofy vibe, Spike finds himself in a new kind of “kill or be killed” situation. Under his eye, Spike is forced to duel a member of Lord Jimmy Crystal’s (Jack O’Connell) death cult that has just taken him in, where survival means becoming part of the tribe. Or, as they put it, one of the fist’s many fingers. As Spike soon discovers, though, being a member of a death cult isn’t much better than just being dead. After all, what’s worse: dying, or losing a piece of your soul in order to survive? Read More