As festival season kicks off across the country, USA Today is asking readers to vote for their favorite music festival in the United States. Austin's own SXSW, Austin City Limits Music Fest and Fun Fun Fun Fest are all vying to be named the best music festival in the country.
The top 20 festivals were determined by USA Today's panel of experts, including Alex Young, founder of Consequence of Sound; Vito Valenetti, co-founder of Music Festival Junkies; and Chip Conley, founder of Fest300 and a board member for Burning Man. The fate of each festival will be determined by the number of votes cast by readers through mid-April.
Austin ties with Chicago for the most festivals on the list. The Windy City is represented by Lollapalooza, Riot Fest and Pitchfork Music Festival. Although heavy-hitters like SXSW and ACL Fest are no-brainers for a list like this, Fun Fun Fun Fest's inclusion is a big compliment to the festival and the city. It's the smallest of the three local contenders, but well-loved by locals and out-of-towners alike. In fact, as of Monday afternoon, it was ahead of SXSW in the poll.
At press time, Riot Fest was in first place, followed by the beloved New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and the Electric Forest Festival in Rothbury, Michigan. All of the big-name festivals are in play, including Lollapalooza, Bonnaroo and Coachella.
Voting remains open until noon on Monday, April 13. You can vote once per day for your fave.
ACL has become one of the biggest names in the festival game.
Photo by Daniel Cavazos
ACL has become one of the biggest names in the festival game.
Robert Pattinson and Zendaya will be seen together a lot at the movies in 2026, with mega-films like The Odyssey and Dune: Part Three coming out later in the year. But fans can get a much more intimate look at the two stars in a film that offers a unique take on relationship struggles, The Drama.
Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Pattinson) are a New York couple who are engaged to be married. After a quick-but-effective montage of their courtship, the story joins them as they are just days away from their wedding. As they get all the details like music, flowers, and food finalized, a visit to the caterer with married friends Rachel (Alana Haim) and Mike (Mamoudou Athie) proves fateful.
A few too many drinks leads to each member of the group deciding to divulge the worst thing they’ve ever done. While each story is slightly shocking, Emma’s takes the cake, so much so that Charlie starts to question their relationship. As they get closer to the wedding date, Charlie finds it increasingly difficult to get beyond Emma’s revelation, with each real or imagined conversation threatening to derail their previously tight bond.
Written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli, the film is provocative, funny, and cringey as it tries to get to the center of human dynamics. Charlie, Rachel, and Mike have starkly different reactions to Emma’s story, and the way those play out over the course of the film provides, well, the drama. The harder Charlie tries to justify Emma’s past, the more his underlying feelings start to eat at him, causing friction not just between him and Emma, but in other parts of his life, as well.
Strangely, especially for a character played by Zendaya, Emma recedes more than expected. Her explanations for her previous actions are timid at best, and she mostly seems to be waiting for Charlie to forgive her instead of questioning why she needs forgiveness. Borgli favors the male side of the equation, and in so doing he doesn’t dig as deep into the root of the issue as he could have.
Still, the downward spiral at the center of the story has a propulsive nature to it, and each successive step proves to be both hard to watch and impossible to turn away from. It also helps that Borgli manages the tone well, keeping interactions between characters relatively light so that the film doesn’t turn into one like Marriage Story.
Pattinson, who gets to use his own British accent for once, put on an interesting performance that is much better than his last two roles in Mickey 17 and Die My Love. He has good chemistry with Zendaya, who manages to shine despite being laden with a role that doesn’t play entirely to her strengths. Haim and Athie do good work in small roles, while Hailey Grace and Hannah Gross make an impact in brief appearances.
The situation in which Emma and Charlie find themselves in The Drama is not one to be wished on anyone, but it’s presented well by Borgli, keeping tensions high for the bulk of the film. Despite the two main characters not beinggiven completely equal footing, the story finds a way to get to a satisfactory ending.
