The POWDER Staff Discusses Their Favorite Ski Movies of the Year
Welcome to 2026. In the spirit of the New Year, we—the POWDER crew—decided to make note of the recent ski movies we loved most. This isn’t a judged, finely-tuned selection, because none of us has watched all of the countless ski movies that came out at the end of 2025. Instead, for this list, we each wrote about the movie that, personally, we found the most entertaining or impactful.
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Ornada
Matt Lorelli: There’s nothing like a live ski movie premiere to get the preseason juices flowing, but many films have felt stale in recent years.
I was just starting to grow incredibly tired of watching familiar 40-something-year-olds ski the same lines they did 20 years ago when BAM, Armada Skis dropped Ornada and melted my face off.
Complimented by a live score played by a band that seemed too good to be involved with a ski movie, the world premiere of Ornada in Salt Lake City, Utah, felt like a fever dream. Kids, teens, young adults, and senior citizens all bobbed their heads in unison as Sammy Carlson popped pillows while MC Dillon Cooper rapped with passion. Cheers shook the venue when skiers such as Quinn Wolferman, Rell Harwood, and Toby Rafford landed a big line or trick.
21-year-old phenom Olivia Asselin’s various street segments sent a group of crusty parkrat teenagers into a frenzy. I think I heard them say the word “bro” at least a hundred times in disbelief.
I’ve used this phrase too many times, but the energy was, indeed, palpable.
No offense to the legends who carried ski movies throughout the aughts and teens, by the way, but Ornada felt like the fresh start the ski movie industry was desperate for.
I haven’t watched the film since that initial screening in SLC, but small moments are seared into my brain months later. If that’s not enough to be my personal ‘Ski Movie of the Year’, then I’m not sure what is.
The live-scored performances of Ornada are over, but the film will be released in 2026 with a recorded version of the score. You must watch it. I beg of you.
The Edge of Reason
Izzy Lidsky: Back in 2020-ish, Cody Townsend and Michelle Parker released a film called The Mountain Why that chronicled the two of them biking from their houses in Tahoe to Mt. Hood, Mt. Rainier, and El Dorado Peak to check off more of Townsend’s FIFTY Project lines. Long story short, it was one of the most impactful ski films I’d ever seen, singlehandedly convinced me to buy a gravel bike, and still lives rent-free in my mind.
Despite the impact of it, I never became an avid FIFTY watcher, but rather enjoyed seeing episodes here and there at Salomon’s QST film tour when it would come to town or when they featured particularly interesting lines or fellow athletes.
When asked to write about my favorite ski film of the year, my first thoughts were of films that got me excited to ski, broke the traditional film mold in some way, or were just plain old sick. Titles like ORNADA (Armada Skis), Flipbook (Parkin Costain), Lines (Mallory Duncan),Cold Calls (Blank Collective), and Slipstream (Alex Armstrong) floated around in my brain as films I loved watching.
Then, the QST film tour’s stop in Bend this fall came to mind. Here, we were treated to another of Townsend’s films that left me thinking about it for days and weeks to come. The Edge of Reason follows Townsend and his wife and fellow professional skier Elyse Saugstad to Norway in the Spring of 2025 as they meet up with Nikolai Schirmer in search of new freeride lines and a return to the type of freeskiing that made their careers. Upon arriving in Norway, they get a call with the news of their friends’ passing in an avalanche. The news completely changes the energy of the trip, and Townsend and Saugstad are left confronting questions about risk vs. reward in the mountains just as they set out to ski new terrain.
The film was a truly vulnerable look at how someone like Townsend or Saugstad considers these things when their job is entwined with the mountains and more broadly into that of how professional athletes manage risk. It was also edited by Mike Douglas, who has an editing style I really enjoy and an amazing way of telling a story, so message aside, it was beautifully done.
I love shred porn as much as the next skier, but I find that the films that stick with me are the ones that make me really feel something and think maybe there’s more to skiing than we often consider. The Edge of Reason was deeply relatable, having lost friends in the mountains and questioned my own decisions more than a few times, and I cried my eyes out watching it.
The Jetskis Movie
Ian Greenwood: The Jetskis Movie was made over the span of five years—an absurdly long ski movie timeline—meaning the creators, presumably, had a massive bank of footage to draw from. As a result, there’s little, if any, filler across the movie’s brisk 20-minute runtime. Each shot is impressive and creative in its own right. Dull moments are rare, and the team behind it has honed the gritty street skiing lane they operate in. As one YouTube comment below the video that I resonated with put it: “My attention span is just fine.”
The Jetskis Movie may not, like some other ski movies, be FOMO-inducing—I won’t be jumping down a stairway without wearing a helmet any time soon, for instance (I’d rather go ski powder in Japan). But it is a potent and much-needed dose of something I can’t quite put into words. Is it passion, ski bummery, or the tired buzzword ‘authenticity’? I’m not sure. Regardless, the opening shot, which shows a doomed skier coming up short after soaring over a canal, sets the punk-inflected tone that struck me. Soon, I found that it was worth sticking around for the rest of the wild ride.
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