Podcast

Sundance 2026 #5

Take a load off: Bilge Ebiri, Tim Grierson, and Madeline Whittle close out the fest, discussing The Weight, When a Witness Recants, Chasing Summer, and more

Ethan Hawke appears in The Weight by Padraic McKinley, an official selection of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute

It’s late January, and the intrepid Film Comment crew has been on the ground reporting from an extra special edition of the Sundance Film Festival—the last to take place on the snowy slopes of Park City, Utah, the festival’s home since 1981, before moving to Boulder, Colorado in 2027. For the past week, we’ve gathered the best critics on the scene to talk about each day’s premieres on the Podcast.

For our final Podcast from Sundance 2026, critics Bilge Ebiri and Tim Grierson and programmer Madeline Whittle joined Film Comment Editor Devika Girish to close out the fest, discussing Padraic McKinley’s The Weight (2:56), Noah Segan’s The Only Living Pickpocket in New York (24:26), Dawn Porter’s When a Witness Recants (28:46), Jason Osder and William Lafi Youmans’s Who Killed Alex Odeh? (34:34), Josephine Decker’s Chasing Summer (47:20), Walter Thompson-Hernández’s If I Go Will They Miss Me? (1:05:46), Hossein Keshavarz and Maryam Ataei The Friend’s House Is Here (1:10:28), Rafael Manuel’s Filipiñana (1:14:05), and more.

This story is part of the Winter-Spring 2026 issue of Film Comment.

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