Greetings from the Sundance Film Festival, where it is cold and windy but not snowy for some reason. (Hope you’re digging out okay, East Coast!) The very front-loaded festival’s first weekend is almost over, so I thought I would write to you all about this year’s most pressing question: who is the queen of Sundance 2026? 

By my count, there are two contenders. One is pop icon turned prolific film actor Charli xcx, who has a whopping three films at the festival this year. The other is Olivia Wilde, a director and actor who is most famous for getting in a knife fight with Florence Pugh at the Venice Film Festival until Harry Styles spit on them to get them to stop. Wilde is in only two films here, but she directed one of them, so that’s basically like being in three movies. Only one of these divas can reign supreme over Sundance, becoming the last queen to be crowned in Park City for the rest of time. (Park City has unfortunately been chosen for a mini-rapture, and all of its nightmare rich people are going to be sucked into a vacuum and shot into space. Wait, sorry, did I say ‘unfortunately’?)

Let’s look at Charli’s output first. Her biggest movie here is no doubt The Moment, a mockumentary about the Brat phenomenon co-written and directed by her friend, photographer and music video prodigy Aidan Zamiri. (Who is 29, a fact that has not in the least made me feel terrible and old as I hobble out of screenings on my plantar fasciitis foot.) The Moment was the splashy Friday night premiere here, a buzzed-about event held at the festival’s largest venue, where people waiting to get off the rush line were given neon green “Brat” beanies and hopefully some amount of cocaine-laced Swiss Miss. All eyes were on this high-profile A24 production. But then those eyes actually saw the movie.