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Sundance ‘26: ‘SEIZED’ Is a Chilling Case Study in the Erosion of Press Freedom

On August 11, 2023, police in Marion, Kansas, a town where “everyone knows everyone” isn’t just a saying, it’s civic policy, raided the offices of the Marion County Record. They seized computers, phones, and personal devices, even searched the homes of the paper’s staff. A day later, 98-year-old newspaper co-owner Joan Meyer died. Her doctor cited stress from the raid as a contributing factor. So begins Seized, Sharon Liese’s clear-eyed examination of tensions between local government and its hardnosed media outlet boiling over, and in the process, becoming overnight national news. Read More

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Sundance ‘26: ‘TELL ME EVERYTHING’ Severs Familial Ties Amid the AIDS Crisis

Tell Me Everything unfolds like a memory. Or a bad dream that has grown nostalgic with time. From its oversaturated aesthetic to the buoyant Israeli disco influences and gaudy ’80s production design, writer-director Moshe Rosenthal’s Hebrew-language film is soaked in the specificity of time and place. It hopscotches through timelines in Tel Aviv to tell the coming-of-age story of 12-year-old Greek-Israeli Boaz (Yair Mazor), just before his bar mitzvah, and the young man he’ll grow to become. Read More

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Sundance ‘26: A Narcissist Elite Rebels Against Being ‘ALL ABOUT THE MONEY’

An extremely wealthy benefactor decides to buy up a plot of land and provide housing for a small faction of self-proclaimed communists in Alford, Massachusetts in the powerful, provocative, and infuriating documentary from Sinéad O’Shea, All About the Money. Her film begins with what should be a startling statistic—that the top 1% of Americans own more wealth than the bottom 90% combined—but we’ve become so familiar with this figure that it lacks the sting it should. Enter 0.01%-er Fergie Chambers, the heir of a long line of media billionaires, who – both accurately and ironically – believes that America’s wealth inequality is fundamentally destructive. And so the wealthy individual does something unconventional about it: a small-scale effort to oversee the function of a community that doesn’t have to worry about money. Read More

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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: ‘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: ‘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