We spent four days running around Park City, Utah, seeing movies and talking to celebrities. Look below for a full rundown of VF’s trip to the Sundance Film Festival.
The 2026 Sundance Film Festival kicked off January 22 in Park City, Utah, marking the end of an era before the acclaimed independent-film festival moves to Boulder, Colorado. This was also the first Sundance without the guidance of Robert Redford, the towering Oscar winner and independent-film champion who founded the Sundance Institute, which took control of the former US Film Festival to hold its first fest in 1985. An impressive lineup of films was set to compete and premiere at Sundance this year, as well as a number of starry reunions honoring notable Sundance premieres from throughout the festival’s history—from Little Miss Sunshine to Wet Hot American Summer.
Read below to see on-the-ground photos and commentary from John Ross, Hillary Busis, and Carly Walsh, as well as analysis and commentary from the rest of the Vanity Fair team throughout the 2026 festival’s whirlwind first days.
Our Essential Guides
- See where Sundance is moving next year
- See the films we’re most excited to watch at the fest
- See our advice for how to attend Sundance in style
The sun will soon set in Park City—and though Sundance isn’t over yet, this liveblog is. We’ve partied with Charli xcx, the queen of the festival; we’ve seen Benson Boone do a flip; we’ve stood in line and stood in line and stood in line, and occasionally even watched a few movies. (My final count is 13.) So please, everyone, raise a glass for the festival’s final spin in Utah—and raise your voices for Sundance’s rallying cry: “Next year in Boulder, Colorado!”
The second-to-last movie I saw at Sundance—or last, depending on whether I have the strength for one more 9p.m. screening—was Chasing Summer, a coming-of-middle-age comedy from director Josephine Decker. Before the screening, star Iliza Shlesinger described the film as “a love letter to millennial nostalgia,” which had my interest piqued—but the film itself didn’t quite hit the way I wanted to. Though needle drops from Bowling for Spup and Sum 41 are always appreciated.
Why It’s Time For Sundance to Leave Park City
David Becker/Getty Images
For its final year in Park City, Sundance delivered an exceptional program. Everyone I have spoken to, agents, producers, publicists, and fellow journalists, has commented that this year’s slate of films exceeded expectations. That was a final gift the Sundance programmers gave Park City and its home state, Utah.
Last year, there was major concern amongst festival-goers that Sundance would move to a place that couldn’t capture the magic of Park City. But when they announced they were moving to Boulder, an artsy city just thirty minutes from Denver and a college town, many anxieties were relieved.
After attending my final Sundance in Park City, after over ten years of attending this festival here, I’m ready to move on. The people and volunteers in Park City are all wonderful. But the practicality of not having enough housing, the sheer distance between screening venues, and the fact that it can take a literal hour to go from Main Street to the Eccles Theater, where the big films premiere, has made Sundance one of the most difficult festivals to navigate. Cannes is expensive to get to, but once you are there, you can walk to pretty much everything. TIFF is in a major city. Telluride is a much smaller festival, and they limit the number of tickets they sell to keep everything manageable on the ground. Park City is unable to keep up with Sundance’s needs as a festival. They are in the business of selling as many passes as possible to get as many people to see these independent films. With two theater venues shutting down in the past few years, the festival has had to work very hard to create enough screening venues for the number of films they program.
“We had these different pillars or lenses through which we looked at all the different cities we visited,” Sundance’s Festival Director, Eugene Hernandez, told me. “Boulder is 35 minutes on a highway from Denver, which is a major airport. Boulder is a city with a great creative community. The idea of being able to bring the festival into one community is very exciting for us. Because it does create the opportunity for people to, if they want to, walk around and experience what the community has to offer – the restaurants, the culture that’s already there.”
When speaking with Hernandez, I could sense his excitement about the opportunity to leverage a larger city to his advantage. At first, the idea of leaving Park City seemed impossible for people who had been going to Sundance for years. Sundance IS Park City. Now, I’m not so sure. Boulder gives the festival a chance to grow and makes it easier for festival-goers to navigate their schedule.
So it is time to say goodbye to Park City, even if it’s bittersweet.
I admire the spirit of Run Amok, a black comedy about a 14-year-old girl putting on a musical about the school shooting that took her mother’s life—at the high school where it happened. (How’s that for a logline?) But while the movie starts out strong, it goes in too many directions, and can’t quite figure out whether it’s going for broad satire or something more earnest.
“It’s decidedly strange to spend all day sitting in a dark room, eating popcorn, when it feels like the rest of the country is on fire,” my colleague Hillary Busis writes in her latest dispatch from Sundance.
Over the weekend, the festival’s “bubble” was pierced as news of Alex Pretti’s killing, and an assault on Max Frost, made headlines. Read more in Hillary’s report.
Sundance’s Eccles Theater is actually the auditorium at Park City High School—which is in session today, since to locals, it’s just a regular Monday. As I wait to enter, I keep marveling at the teenagers here walking around not wearing coats. (Related: I have been standing here for a very long time.)
Where did everyone go?!
Well, it seems like everyone left Park City? Just got to Main Street, where it’s a lot easier to get around. Understatement. No uber areas! We are free!
Good morning from Park City! After recording a new episode of Little Gold Men with John Ross and Rebecca Ford—watch for it in your feeds Thursday—I am, you guessed it, once again standing in line for a movie. And this time, for a nice change of pace, the line is outside!
I’m thrilled to report that the cameo-strewn Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is a very good time, provided you like the David Wain/Ken Marino school of comedy—silly, non-sequitur driven, sometimes self-satisfied. (Guilty as charged.) I had a great time watching it—maybe not as good a time as Wain and Marino did making it with almost all their friends from Wet Hot American Summer, but then again, who but them could?
The GDU Begins
I wasn’t able to attend the screening (as I had a very important Alec Baldwin conflict), but I was able to make the post-premiere Q&A.
The energy in the theater was light; I could tell everyone had spent the runtime laughing (so hard they were crying, according to some users on X)!
David Wain, Ken Marino, Zoey Deutch, John Slattery, and a slew of cast members, including friends of Wain and Marino’s from their NYU/Wet Hot days, came barreling onto the stage, ready to answer questions about their well-received comedy. One of the first questions asked? “Which came first, The Celebrity Sex Pass or The Wizard of Oz?” “As we kept working on the story, we were like ‘Oh, we can use this kind of structure to guide us,” said Marino.
(I didn’t see the film, but the discourse while waiting for Ubers outside centered around: Who was who?!)
Deutch later talked about why she took the role, noting: “Well, I’ve been a fan of theirs [Wain and Marino] for a long time. And I had heard about the script from a couple different people…I thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever read. And I begged him a for a part. And I signed on for 10 more of them. It’s actually the first 11 picture deal in history. Super lucrative.”
“The GDU begins,” David Wain quipped.
As Hillary noted above—the film seems to be a romp. (I love using the word romp, and it’s most accurate here!)
This was a deeply moving film, Hillary. I feel like we were at two different screenings? Psych! It’s a 100-jokes-per-minute comedy that audiences will devour.
Alec Baldwin Playing Chess at Sundance? Sure!
When I received an email invite for a “blindfolded chess match” against Alec Baldwin, I immediately hit reply. “I would love to go”—SEND
I pulled up to the privately-emailed address earlier tonight, a spacious, very-Utah house sitting at the end of a long driveway. (Ubers were confused, but that’s nothing new this weekend. Uber chaos.)
After signing in, I was ushered into a living room, where match-goers were enjoying drinks and light bites. Then, it started.
Game face: on
With his drink sitting next to him, Alec readied himself for the match against the star of Netflix’s ‘Queen of Chess’—premiering here at Sundance later this week—Judit Polgár. Before blindfolding Polgár (to even the playing field), Baldwin quipped: “If I win, I get to buy Warner Brothers. If you win, you get to buy Warner Brothers,” and “I have a whole Hungarian strategy.”
Then, with a Chess.com emcee on the mic that seemed to get on Baldwin’s nerves (a hand gesture was made at one point), the match began. Baldwin bantered throughout, saying, “to be awarded the point, to make it more even…you must answer a movie trivia question…’Who directed Casablanca?’”
He put up a good fight, but the match was over before it begun. Polgár, as we’re all soon to learn in the forthcoming doc, is a chess legend. (Chess Queen!)
After the match ended, the two took questions. Baldwin talked the entertainment business: “The great thing about this business…is the people you get to meet.”
And Sundance: “I’m a huge fan of Sundance. I can’t believe Bob [Redford] is gone, he was always so kind to me.”
And later talked about his kids having a penchant for chess: “My three older boys, they play…They don’t hesitate, they give it to me…if I play chess with them…but I usually win.” Then joked: “My kids can be very cruel…We go shopping the other day, and my kids are all born and raised in Manhattan…I said, ‘I think you should get this coat in this color.’ And my third oldest son looked at me and goes, ‘What do you know, you’re from Long Island.'”
There is a lot of talk about how this is Sundance’s last year in Park City. Today I heard from my Uber driver that many blame Salt Lake City’s local government for not negotiating with the festival to stay. “They are very conservative,” he told me. “They see Sundance as a bunch of liberals coming into their State. But the people wanted Sundance to stay.” He has lived in the Salt Lake City region for over 30 years and believes that locals mostly saw the festival as a positive thing for Utah.
Others I’ve spoken to have felt less strongly about the issue, but there is a general feeling amongst locals, and certainly the volunteers, that the festival’s move is a loss for Utah.
“That was incredible,” the woman two seats away from me said at the end of Knife, Alex Gibney’s documentary about Salman Rushdie—based on Rushdie’s own account of his recovery after an onstage knife attack that almost killed him (and robbed him of his right eye) in 2022. Clearly, the audience agreed. Rushdie and Gibney received a long ovation before taking the stage following the premiere, along with Rushdie’s wife, novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths. (Griffiths, who filmed Rushdie throughout the aftermath, gets a cinematography credit on the film.)
Why did Gibney want to make this film? “As Jerry Maguire said, They had me at ‘Salman Rushdie,’ he told the crowd. “I thought he said ‘show me the money,’” Rushdie wryly replied. The celebrated author’s sense of humor is an essential ingredient in the film, where he also shows remarkable vulnerability. Or as Rushdie put it in the Q&A: “I never expected to show that much of my body. I’m a novelist!”
But Rushdie was also thoughtful and serious, particularly when asked about how eerily the film resonates with the present moment—when political violence is all too present in American life. “All of us now are feeling the risk of violence,” he said. “All of us are feeling that danger is just around the corner. And maybe this one experience can be a way for people watching the film to think about these larger things. It’s a good moment for a film like this to be out there…
“I think it’s about a larger thing of which this is an example: Violence is that thing. Violence unleashed by the unscrupulous, using the ignorant. I really think that for the authoritarian, culture is the enemy. The uncultured and ignorant and tyrannical don’t like it.”
During a stop in Salt Lake City earlier this month, someone who recognized my name from this publication (I know, I couldn’t believe it, either!) buttonholed me to express their sadness that as of next year, Sundance will leave Park City for Boulder, Colorado.
My protestations that Vanity Fair didn’t have a hand in the festival’s decision weren’t taken seriously, and my fond mention of Boulder as the setting of iconic Robin Williams sitcom Mork And Mindy also fell flat. But I was finally able to shake my complaining companion out of their misery when I said “Would you rather they’d moved it to Cincinnati?”
Like Boulder, Cincy is the home of a great sitcom that also premiered in 1978. Unlike Boulder, it is in Ohio. As someone who has spent a significant amount of time in the Queen City, I was just as surprised as last year’s Sundance attendees that the town made the finalists’ list—but alas, the place once known as Porkopolis was not the ultimate pick.
John Ross explains how it all worked out:
There are security screenings outside every theater at Sundance—but just now is the first time here that I’ve been scanned by a metal detector wand before getting in a line. I asked the security guy if they’re doing this for every screening at the Ray Theatre, or if it’s an extra measure of caution because of the premiere we’re here to see: Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie. He had no comment.
Tammie Rosen, who spent years leading communications for the Tribeca Film Festival before coming to work at Sundance in 2017, died of cancer in December at the age of 49. The festival is paying tribute to her by showing this image in the carousel that appears before each screening—a moving touch that I know others in the industry appreciate, too.
If I Go Will They Miss Me is a promising debut feature from writer-director Walter Thompson-Hernández. He won an award from Sundance in 2022 for his short of the same name, then expanded it into a feature-length film—a family drama about a young boy’s relationship with his father who has recently returned home from prison. This film features beautiful visuals, great performances from its cast, including Danielle Brooks, and cements Hernández as an up-and-coming director to watch.
A small protest against ICE is taking place on Park City’s Main Street, with about seven people marching down the thoroughfare to demonstrate opposition against the agency. “ICE is better crushed” read one sign, while another read “We are not the enemy, we are the people.”
The protesters were nearly outnumbered by the neon-clad security guards along their path, as well as the mounted law enforcement agents that followed behind. “Down with ICE” called one protester, while another cried “You have a voice, use it.”
Christian Joel Young, the 28-year-old man accused of assaulting Congressman Max Frost at a Park City party Saturday, will remain in custody for now, Summit County Judge Richard Mrazik has ruled. Young poses “a substantial danger to any other individual or to the community, or is likely to flee the jurisdiction of the court if released on bail,” Mrazik said of the alleged attack at High West Distillery, which had been closed to the public for a private party from high-powered agency CAA.
Buttoned up
If the ICE Out pins you’re seeing on stars like Natalie Portman and Olivia Wilde look familiar, you aren’t wrong. The buttons went wide at this year’s Golden Globes, when Ariana Grande, Bella Ramsey, and Natasha Lyonne wore the accessory, while others including Mark Ruffalo, Wanda Sykes, and Jean Smart donned the arguably less assertive message “be good.”
The pins were created by Nelini Stamp of advocacy group Working Families Power and Jess Morales Rocketto, the executive director of Latino-bosting org Maremoto, the AP reported at the time; the pair then distributed the buttons to celebrities and influencers in their social circles. Those allies passed the pins out at “fancy events” prior to the Globes, encouraging the recipients to don the buttons at the televised ceremony.
It’s unclear if Stamp and Rocketto mounted a Sundance-specific campaign or if the stars brought those pins from home. But speaking to Variety on the red carpet before a screening of The Invite, Wilde suggested that her pin was just the tip of her advocacy. “I’m appalled and sickened,” she said. “We can’t go another day just sort of accepting this as our new norm. It’s outrageous. People are being murdered. And, I don’t want to normalize seeing people being murdered on the internet. On film…It’s hideous. And so if we can do anything out here to support the movement to cast ICE out, to delegitimize this unbelievably criminal organization, then that’s what we should be doing.”
Olivia Wilde at the premiere of “The Invite.”
Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images
While waiting in line to see The Gallerist this morning, I got to chatting with the woman standing in front of me, an attorney who was wearing two Minnesota state flag pins—one on her shirt, and one on her coat. She’s from Minneapolis, and has been uneasily tracking the news from home while attending panels and screenings. ”The shooting yesterday happened a block and a half away from my mom’s house,” said the attorney, who asked me not to use her name. She told me that her grandmother, who was active in the civil rights movement, has been sitting on her front porch with a whistle. The nonagenarian can’t walk—but felt she couldn’t just sit by without trying to help.
“And here we are watching movies,” I said. The attorney shrugged. “And posting a lot,” she answered. But even if she weren’t at Sundance, she added, watching a bunch of movies would “probably be my trauma response anyway.” How’s that for a festival tagline?
