Welcome back for part two of my Tribeca 2026 coverage!
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Film Festival
Welcome, at long last, to my coverage of Tribeca 2026. I meant to write and publish during the festival, but I hit a snag, so I had to adjust my strategy. I stayed with a high school friend and his husband on Long Island (Hi, Rex and Corey!), and for some reason, I was unable to successfully connect my laptop to their Wi-Fi network. I was able to connect my phone with zero issues.
That meant that I also couldn’t do any internet research on my laptop while writing. I had to look things up with my phone whenever I needed to confirm a bit of information; it was a real drag. I’m sure it was a weird, random setting on my laptop, but I simply didn’t have the wherewithal to figure it out at the time. I tried valiantly to write during the festival, but, unable to format and upload the coverage to my website, I eventually decided to simply enjoy the fest and worry about writing when I got home. Without further ado, let’s go back to early June together for my first out-of-state trip for a festival. Seems like it was only yesterday (insert Wayne and Garth doing the “doodly doo” sound)…
I have exciting news. For the first time in the almost dozen years I’ve been maintaining this website, I will be traveling outside of the state of Texas to cover a film festival. I’m going to Tribeca!
DIFF 2026 is the fifteenth film festival that I’ve covered for this site over the course of 3.5 years. After that much experience, I think I’ve finally become immune to the high-octane excitement that comes with a festival premiere in which a significant portion of the audience worked in some way on the movie being screened.
This is the first year that I got a chance to set my lineup for the festival before writing the usual curtain raiser. So, instead of using the rest of this space to list movies that I hope to see, I want to highlight a few of the titles that I’ll definitely be seeing, barring some unforeseen event, like a nuclear detonation. Without further ado, let’s dive into five of my most anticipated DIFF 2026 screenings!
Welcome back to the thrilling conclusion of my Denton Black Film Festival 2026 coverage!
Welcome to the first part of my coverage of the Denton Black Film Festival, 2026 Edition. The fest was held January 28 through February 1, and extended virtually from the first through February eighth.
I’m kicking off my 2026 film festival coverage with a trip to my old college stomping grounds. Denton, Texas, home of my alma mater, the University of North Texas, is host to the Denton Black Film Festival, the largest fest in Texas that focuses solely on Black-created films and performing arts.
The theme of this year’s fest, True Texas Tales, delivered to the audience, among other things, Depression-era bank robbers, an East Texas murder scandal, an inspiring account of Black excellence in the Jim Crow South, and a (highly whitewashed) look at the state’s most iconic location and historical event.
The mastermind behind the It Came From Texas Film Festival, Dallas-area media relations and publicity veteran Kelly Kitchens, has returned with a six-shooter on her hip and astride her prized pony to deliver the third annual iteration of her celebration of movies made wholly or primarily in the Lone Star State.
If you’re sleeping on the Oak Cliff Flim Festival (OCFF), I’m here to let you know that you’re missing out on one of the country’s most authentic, scrappy, and original celebrations of the moving image. Each of the handful of times I’ve attended the fest – including once as a volunteer over a decade ago, and twice now covering it for this site – I’ve been delighted by its punk-rock aesthetic and complete and total immersion in film culture. The programmers and staff at OCFF schedule quirky, thought-provoking titles that rarely disappoint.
OCFF 2025’s theme, Real Movies for Real Movie People, stresses the idea of human emotion and connection through movies. The fest’s website landing page features a graphic that includes the phrases “Human Cinema, Filling Heads, Connecting Souls, Sparking Feelings.”
Based on my personal belief that the absolute best antidote to small people with small minds – a constituency that only seems to grow by the day here in the good ole US of A – is as much exposure to different cultures, perspectives, ideas, and art as possible.
So, if anything can get me out of my funk, it’s a film festival.
A depressed writer, a group of angry librarians, nuclear waste, and a pioneering comedian all played a part in my cinematic adventures at DIFF 2025, along with a few detours to connect with friends and loved ones, as well as to join in solidarity, for a few hours at least, to others like me who are desperate to stem the tide of the spreading fascism in our country.
On my way to Cinépolis for my first screening of DIFF 2025, I heard a ping from my phone. As I drove, my car’s robot voice delivered the incoming message from a North Texas Film Critics Association colleague. He was letting the NTFCA Discord channel know that he saw one of the DIFF opening films, called Omaha, at Sundance, and that it was his favorite film of that fest. I was, in fact, on my way to see that very movie.
My film festival coverage for 2025 is in full swing with the upcoming Dallas International Film Festival (DIFF). This is an exciting year for DIFF for one particular reason. For the first time in its nineteen-year history, DIFF is now an Oscar-qualifying festival following an announcement last October from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). The Dallas International Film Festival is now one of 181 festivals worldwide – 59 in the US – that has been approved by the AMPAS as a qualifying festival. According to the DIFF 2025 website, “[F]ilms that win qualified awards between October 1, 2024, and September 30, 2025, may be qualified to enter the 98th Academy Awards®, provided that the films meet all the requirements set forth in the official rules for that season.”
Two weeks ago, I signed off at the end of my SXSW 2025 post-mortem by looking ahead to the upcoming Dallas International Film Festival. Please allow me to now pull a Tarantino and go back to the week before SXSW started. In the crush of activity over the four days between what I’m about to describe and the first day of South By – it was a flurry of laundry, the day job (because I’m only given so much PTO in a given year!), and preparing for my trip down to Austin – I barely had time to recover from another film festival (let alone getting anything written about it) before I was out the door again.
But I need to go back even further.
Standing near the entrance of the South Lamar Alamo Drafthouse, waiting to get into my next screening, I noticed something odd. On the street right in front of the theater, where a lone curb forms to separate cars from pedestrians and street from sidewalk, a large, black SUV swiftly pulled up and a flurry of activity followed. The SUV stopped about thirty feet from where I was standing; there was a direct line from the vehicle to the theater doors.
I branched out a little this year at SXSW by attending my first of the many discussion sessions available during the fest, which are held in the Austin Convention Center ballrooms. It wasn’t a movie, but the conversation was certainly movie related, as it was an interview with actor Kyle MacLachlan, hosted by Jenni Kaye, who is a contributor to Letterboxd.