The Best of Sundance 2026: Top Films, Breakouts, and Award Winners from the Final Park City Festival

February 6, 2026 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews, Lists, Most Popular Tagged All About the Money, American Doctor, Big Girls Don't Cry, Closure, Everybody to Kenmure Street, Frank & Louis, Ha-Chan Shake Your Booty, Hold Onto Me, How to Divorce During the War, If I Go Will They Miss Me, Josephine, Mum I’m Alien Pregnant, Night Nurse, Nuisance Bear, One in a Million, Rock Springs, See You When I See You, Seized, Shame and Money, Silenced, Sundance, Sundance 26, Take Me Home, Tell Me Everything, The Gallerist, The Incomer, The Invite, The Lake, The Last First: Winter K2, The Musical, The Weight, Time and Water, Undertone, Union County 2 Comments

Sundance 2026 delivered one last cinematic dump (in a good way, like powder on a snow-barren mountain) before packing up and leaving Park City for good. From chilling headphone horror to sex comedies with emotional rot, audacious midnight freakouts to quietly devastating documentaries, this year’s lineup proved that the festival still has what it takes to be one of the preeminent film festivals in the world. Although I didn’t get a chance to see everything I had hoped to see (Leviticus top on the list of those I’ll be anxiously awaiting), I still managed to watch more Sundance premieres this year (35 total) than nearly any other year covering the festival. As should then be assumed, I have a pretty good handle on what was what so I full more than qualified to give a complete rundown of the best films from Sundance 2026. Read More

Sundance ‘26: ‘THE MUSICAL’ Is Elite Crash Out Cringe Comedy

January 31, 2026 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews, Most Popular Tagged Alexander Heller, Gillian Jacobs, Giselle Bonilla, Rob Lowe, Sundance 2026, The Musical, Will Brill 3 Comments

Doug Leibowitz (Will Brill) is an ostensibly mild-mannered but deeply disillusioned middle school theater teacher and once maybe promising playwright. When the Cedarhurst Middle School teacher is forced to confront the reality that his ex-girlfriend Abigail (Gillian Jacobs), who he thought he was still “on a break” with, has started dating the smarmy, aggressively politically correct school principal Brady (Rob Lowe), Doug suffers a near-total mental breakdown. In a bid for revenge and recognition, Doug decides to tank the school’s reputation, and alongside it Principal Brady’s, as the two are competing for a blue ribbon of academic excellence. To do so, Doug shelves his class’s production of West Side Story in favor of a secret musical he wrote about 9/11. Read More

Most Anticipated Films of the Sundance Film Festival 2026

December 10, 2025 by Matt Oakes Posted in Lists, Most Popular Tagged American Doctor, Carousel, Frank & Louis, Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, Hanging by a Wire, I Want Your Sex, In The Blink of An Eye, Rock Springs, Run Amok, Saccharine, See You When I See You, Sundance, Sundance 2026, The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, The Gallerist, The History of Concrete, The Incomer, The Invite, The Musical, The Shitheads, Union County, zi 2 Comments

Sundance Film Festival 2026 officially announced its lineup on December 10 and the reveal already feels weighted with more significance than usual. This will be the festival’s final year in Park City before it relocates to Boulder—a move that ends decades of proximity to the epic Wasatch slopes and closes the chapter on a place that helped define Sundance’s identity as much as the films themselves. It also arrives in the shadow of Robert Redford’s passing. As the festival’s founder and longtime steward, Redford shaped the trajectory of American independent cinema. His absence gives the 2026 Sundance festival a real end-of-an-era energy. Read More