Armington‘s Hometown News Site

It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll, but I Like It

Rolling Stones: Let's Spend the Night Together (4KUHD)

What does it mean to watch a band at full strength when you already know what they’ll become decades later? LET’S SPEND THE NIGHT TOGETHER doesn’t just document the Rolling Stones’ 1981 U.S. tour; it captures a rare moment when scale, stamina, and self-mythology briefly aligned without fully calcifying into legacy management.

Trust Is the Real Experiment

Honey Bunch

What does it mean to help someone you love when the cost of that help is never defined? HONEY BUNCH has that question deeply embedded in its premise, then spends nearly two hours refusing to let the audience resolve it. Rather than positioning itself as a puzzle-box thriller or a pure body-horror production, the film commits to something more emotionally destabilizing: a love story in which devotion is both the pulse and the exposure.

Hollywood Learns to Argue With Broadway

Broadway on the Big Screen-6-Film Collection [Blu-ray]

What happens when Broadway’s most enduring myths are frozen in celluloid, then revisited decades later, not as nostalgia pieces but as living documents of performance, desire, and contradiction? That’s the challenge at the heart of BROADWAY ON THE BIG SCREEN, a six-film collection that doesn’t ask you to love every note or every choice, but instead invites you to sit with how wildly different these adaptations are in tone, ambition, and intent.

Neo-Noir by Way of Constraint

Misdirection

What does a home-invasion thriller owe its audience when it’s built almost entirely on escalation? MISDIRECTION answers that question with a focus on nostalgia while creating its own path forward, if not always with depth. This is a lean, tightly wound genre piece that understands its limitations and chooses momentum over overstatement, even when that choice occasionally exposes thin character shading or narrative shortcuts.

When Grief Takes Root, It Doesn’t Let Go

The Arborist

How long can grief sit inside a person before it starts shaping everything around them? THE ARBORIST builds its entire identity around that question, using folk horror not as a gimmick but as a framework for emotional decay. This isn’t a film interested in jump scares or cheap provocation. Instead, it settles into the dirt below you and waits, allowing unease to accumulate, as rot does, slowly and invisibly, until it becomes impossible to ignore.

Why Maus Still Provokes Resistance

The Hell of Auschwitz: Maus by Art Spiegelman (Récit de l'enfer d'Auschwitz - Maus d'Art Spiegelman)

How do you revisit a work that already reshaped how history is told without diminishing its impact on the world? THE HELL OF AUSCHWITZ: MAUS BY ART SPIEGELMAN approaches this challenge carefully, refusing to position itself as a definitive statement on Maus and instead framing the graphic novel as a living object that continues to provoke, educate, and agitate select people decades after its publication.

Predators Thrive Where Trust Is Assumed

Teacher's Pet

What happens when a system designed to shape young minds becomes a hunting ground instead? TEACHER’S PET takes a premise that feels uncomfortably plausible and refuses to treat it as a metaphor or exaggeration. Writer/director Noam Kroll’s psychological thriller frames the academic environment not as a refuge, but as a system built on trust, authority, and access. These very conditions make it vulnerable to exploitation.

A Film That Understands the First Year Never Really Ends

Removal of the Eye

What happens to a sense of self when every hour of the day becomes organized around keeping another human alive? REMOVAL OF THE EYE begins from that muted panic, not as a conceptual exercise, but as lived reality, captured in real time by filmmakers Artemis Shaw and Prashanth Kamalakanthan as they document the first year of parenthood without the comfort of distance or hindsight. This isn’t a film about learning lessons or arriving with an understanding of clarity. It’s about survival, and the fragile hope that meaning will emerge once the exhaustion lifts.

Comfort Can Still Be Uncomfortable

Jimpa

What happens when doing the right thing for your child means reopening wounds you never fully processed yourself? JIMPA places the core of its story around that uneasy question, placing a mother, her nonbinary teenager, and her aging gay father in the same emotional sphere and refusing to let any of them escape without consequence. Rather than building toward a single answer, director/co-writer Sophie Hyde’s deeply personal film settles into the discomfort of competing truths, asking how love, autonomy, and responsibility coexist when family history refuses to stay quiet.

Vampirism Stripped of Power Fantasy

Nadja

What does immortality look like when it no longer feels like power? NADJA opens inside that question and never allows the audience to escape it. Michael Almereyda’s 1994 vampire film doesn’t treat eternal life as myth, but as a condition shaped by boredom, longing, and misdirected need. Seen now in its newly restored Director’s Cut, the film feels less like an artifact and more like a transmission from a moment when American independent cinema briefly allowed genre to fracture into something personal.

Bloodlines, Branding, and Brutality

Lure

What does it say about modern ‘courtship’ when intimacy becomes a test of endurance rather than connection? LURE doesn’t flirt with that question; it drags it into the open and spills blood around it. Oliver Cox’s feature debut is a deliberately confrontational horror film, one that takes the structure of reality dating television ala THE BACHELORETTE and strips it of any pretense of romance, revealing the transactional cruelty lurking just beneath the surface.

Returning Home Without Pretending It’s Easy

Aída y vuelta (Aida: The Movie)

What happens when a character built for laughter is asked to carry the weight of years that passed without an audience? AÍDA Y VUELTA answers that question without flinching. Rather than presenting itself as a victory lap or a nostalgia grab, Paco León’s film approaches its legacy head-on, acknowledging both the affection people still feel for these characters and the realities that time, grief, and economic pressure impose, whether anyone is watching or not.

Nostalgia Without the Sugar Coating

Everything Fun You Could Possibly Do in Aledo, Illinois

What do we owe the people we used to be, and how much of that debt is still unpaid decades later? EVERYTHING FUN YOU COULD POSSIBLY DO IN ALEDO, ILLINOIS builds its entire identity around that question, then refuses to answer it with cynicism, irony, or exaggerated quirk. Instead, it opts for something rarer and riskier in contemporary indie comedy: sincerity without apology. There’s heart, a lot of heart here in this film, and it's clear from start to finish!

A Series Squeezed Into a Feature Frame

Special Unit – The First Murder (Rejseholdet – Det første mord)

How do you dramatize the birth of a police force while confronting the corruption it was created to challenge? SPECIAL UNIT – THE FIRST MURDER tackles that question head-on, positioning itself not simply as a period crime thriller but as a foundational myth shaped by compromise, ambition, and institutional rot. Christoffer Boe’s reimagining of Rejseholdet’s (an actual elite police unit in Denmark tasked with assisting local police in solving serious, complex crimes across the country) origins isn’t concerned with nostalgia or comfort; it’s about the uneasy reality of power forming under pressure.

Education That Doesn’t Feel Like Homework

Why Dinosaurs?

Why do dinosaurs endure when so many other childhood fascinations fade with age? WHY DINOSAURS? doesn’t treat that question as a rhetorical hook; it treats it as a genuine mystery worth unpacking from every angle. From the outset, the film makes it clear that this isn’t a traditional nature documentary concerned with extinction events or anatomical breakdowns. Instead, it positions dinosaurs as a shared cultural language, one that bridges science, imagination, nostalgia, and identity across generations.

Suspicion Served With Champagne

Death on the Nile (4KUHD)

How much tension does a murder mystery really need if the cast is good enough? DEATH ON THE NILE answers that question with a kind of confidence that feels almost rebellious by modern standards. Rather than leaning hard on suspense or dread, the film treats murder as an excuse for character, atmosphere, and theatrical indulgence. It isn’t in a hurry to disturb you, and it isn’t particularly interested in urgency. What it offers instead is a carefully staged social exercise where everyone looks guilty and extraordinary, and the pleasure comes from watching the pieces move rather than from fearing where they’ll land.

Comedy As a Survival Mechanism

André Is an Idiot

What does it mean to confront your own mortality when you can’t even come to terms with your day-to-day life? ANDRÉ IS AN IDIOT opens with that question hanging in the air, not as a philosophical exercise, but as a practical problem its subject insists on solving out loud. From the first moments, a scene that you’ll never forget, the film lets you see who André is. The film establishes its core narrative early on. This is a documentary about dying, but it is not interested in reverence, restraint, or distance. Instead, it’s about agency; specifically, what agency looks like when it’s slipping away and the only thing left to control is how you show up.

Nostalgia Without the Safety Net

Mustard Man

What do you do when adulthood shows up before you’re ready and doesn’t bother knocking? MUSTARD MAN opens on that question and never even wants to pretend to give you all the answers, which turns out to be one of its strengths without question. This is a film less interested in milestones than in drift, less focused on triumph than on the space between adolescence and something permanent. The film is a coming-of-age story that offers the audience a chance to feel the experience rather than just watch it on camera.

An Epilogue That Rewrites the Past

The Long Way Home: Remastered and Expanded

What does it mean to capture a moment that history itself later refuses to honor? THE LONG WAY HOME: REMASTERED AND EXPANDED arrives less as a rediscovered relic than as a time capsule reopened. Originally released in 1989 and long unavailable, Michael Apted’s documentary about Russian rock icon Boris Grebenshchikov returns with a new restoration and an added epilogue that reframes everything that came before. What once played as an optimistic portrait of cultural exchange now carries the weight of lost possibility.

History Felt Through Silence and Responsibility

Birdie

What does it mean to hold a family together when history has already pulled it apart? Set in 1970s Virginia, BIRDIE places its emotion squarely on the shoulders of a sixteen-year-old Nigerian refugee navigating the aftermath of the Biafran War (Nigerian Civil War). Writer/director Praise Odigie Paige approaches this moment not as a history lesson or a chronicle on trauma, but as a deep coming-of-age story shaped by absence, restraint, and longing. The result is a short film that feels both carefully composed and emotionally intimate, less interested in dramatic escalation than in the slow accumulation of unspoken tension.

Friendship Forged Through Persistence

Pike River

How long can grief survive before it turns into resolve? PIKE RIVER doesn’t rush toward that question; it sits with it, returning again and again to the space where mourning and anger overlap. Rather than framing the 2010 mining disaster as a singular tragedy with a singular emotional arc, director Robert Sarkies and writer Fiona Samuel treat it as an ongoing open wound, one that reshapes lives not through shock, but through attrition. The film’s power comes from its refusal to simplify that process.

A Mythology That Stays Just Out of Reach

Worldbreaker

What happens when a film has all the pieces of a compelling sci-fi genre story but never quite figures out how to assemble them? WORLDBREAKER opens with a premise that feels deliberately pared down: a father and daughter living in isolation after a global catastrophe, training for a “threat”. Directed by Brad Anderson, whose past work has shown an aptitude for psychological tension and claustrophobic dread, the film aims to blend post-apocalyptic survival with an intimate coming-of-age arc. The ambition is clear; the follow-through is less consistent.