Atlanta‘s Hometown News Site

Disco reached North London with fewer resources, more rain, and little hope of resembling the fantasy sold by the movies it wanted to recreate. THE MUSIC MACHINE responds by placing its glitter above unemployed young adults, cramped flats, cheap drinks, and people who view one dance competition as a possible route toward a different life. The result is neither a convincing musical drama nor an outright failure. It’s a frequently clumsy production whose limitations preserve something far more interesting than the story it was trying to tell.

The camera doesn’t observe Anthony’s transformation so much as become part of the experience alongside it. Metal scrapes, bodies twitch, voices become swallowed by noise, and the image repeatedly threatens to come apart before the character does. TETSUO: THE BULLET MAN is an exhausting 71 minutes by design, though Shinya Tsukamoto’s commitment to sensory punishment becomes both its greatest strength and its most persistent obstacle.

Most of the adults in YOUNG MOTHERS don’t press on with speeches about saving anyone. They prepare bottles, arrange appointments, ask difficult questions, and remain nearby when the answers fall apart. Their work rarely looks dramatic, but Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne understand that dependable care can feel almost radical to someone who has spent her life expecting abandonment.

A necklace of grinning skulls hangs across Zou Qi’s chest, and every one of them is hungry. The image is strange, theatrical, faintly ridiculous, and genuinely threatening at the same time. That combination defines THE NINE DEMONS, a martial arts fantasy that keeps adding blood, colored lights, supernatural children, flying props, and elaborate combat until its modest production can barely contain it.

At this point in reviewing films, it’s not often that I take it upon myself to just watch something that’s already been released, just out there! I recently saw Givan Onuaguluchi-May’s social media push and was instantly pulled into this project. Opening the front door to a stranger is one of those decisions that only feels dangerous after something has gone wrong. LIFE INSURANCE understands how much tension can be pulled from that small act. The short doesn’t need an isolated cabin or some elaborate mythology. It starts with a woman trying to enjoy a quiet meal and two visitors who know how to turn courtesy into access.

THREADS begins its march toward extinction in Iran. Watching it in July 2026, while America is actively bombing Iran, transforms what once appeared to be Cold War background noise into the most unnerving part of the film. Director Mick Jackson doesn’t initially announce that Iran will become the point from which civilization unravels. The crisis enters through car radios, television reports, newspaper headlines, and conversations that receive only partial attention. Ruth Beckett (Karen Meagher) and Jimmy Kemp (Reece Dinsdale) have more immediate concerns. Ruth is pregnant, their families need to meet, a wedding is expected, and neither of them appears prepared for the life taking shape around them.

The most difficult constitutional principles are rarely tested by people we find admirable. They’re tested by figures like Larry Flynt, provocateurs whose conduct can be repellent even when the rights they defend are essential. Miloš Forman’s 1996 biopic understands that contradiction and builds around it, asking whether freedom still means anything when its protections must extend to someone many would rather condemn. Where the film compromises is in making Flynt easier to digest and defend than the real man likely was, softening his cruelties so the principle can stand apart from the person. Thirty years later, that feels even more urgent. In an era increasingly comfortable with deciding that certain voices are too offensive, dangerous, or undeserving to protect, the film’s warning carries greater weight than it did upon release.

I knew the twist, but somehow, 50-plus years after its release, I was still surprised watching this for the first time. Everyone in SOYLENT GREEN looks exhausted, and one bad conflict away from collapse. Detective Robert Thorn (Charlton Heston) pushes through packed stairwells where unhoused residents sleep on landings, enters rooms that offer no relief from the heat, and treats running water as a luxury worth stealing. Director Richard Fleischer doesn’t need towering machines or elaborate futuristic skylines to establish that civilization has failed. He lets the sweat do it.

CAPPS CROSSING: WRONG SIDE OF DEAD keeps changing its mind about the type of danger living in the woods. It begins as a straightforward backwoods slasher, shifts toward a mystery involving old murders, introduces a leading lady trained to study criminal behavior, and eventually twists nearly everything we’ve been told. That restlessness occasionally yields a pleasant surprise, but it also leaves the movie at odds with its own most effective qualities.

DVD menus once made a movie feel larger than the movie itself. Commentary tracks, deleted scenes, production diaries, hidden Easter eggs, and animated menus offered several more hours inside a world that could’ve ended with the credits (it's irritating, because Blu-ray did away with a lot of this, then 4K really put the nail in the coffin, which is wild since those formats have more space.) DEAD MEDIA remembers that experience with affection, although writer and director Joseph Scrimshaw is just as interested in the people who never learned when to eject the disc.

I loved HATCHING, Hanna Bergholm’s first feature, which makes NIGHTBORN feel more like a frustration than a simple disappointment. Hanna Bergholm’s previous film took body horror, family pressures, childhood anxiety, and creature-feature eccentricity and shaped them into something strange without feeling hollow. It had a real emotional connection under the grotesque imagery, and even when it went big, it still felt connected to the pain it was trying to explore. NIGHTBORN has that same ambition. It has a lot of the same strengths, too. What it doesn’t have is the restraint needed to keep its own discomfort from becoming unbearable.

THE WAR GAME is only 48 minutes long, which almost feels wrong after watching it. Not because it needs to be longer, but because Peter Watkins packs so much institutional failure, terror, and moral collapse into less than an hour that the runtime starts to feel like part of the accusation. Nuclear war doesn’t need a three-act structure. It needs minutes, impact, panic, and people realizing far too late that the rules they were handed were written for a fantasy.

Few movie trends burned brighter or expired faster than the rush to imitate SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER. Once John Travolta’s white suit, dance-floor antics, and working-class frustration became an international phenomenon, filmmakers around the world scrambled to capture some part of it. Italian producers moved quickly, turning disco into its own subgenre filled with ambitious young men, romantic problems, spectacular clothing, and enough dancing to cover almost any hole in the screenplay.

Crime films from the early 1970s often feel as if they were made in rooms where nobody bothered to open a window. THE OUTFIT has that same quality, not because the film is lifeless, but because everyone in it seems to have spent years breathing in smoke, debt, resentment, and bad choices. John Flynn doesn’t treat the criminal world as glamorous. He treats it like a job site. Men show up, carry out orders, make threats, settle accounts, and hope they aren’t the next one getting dumped in the ground.

A princess watches her beauty disappear, a corrupt miller burns his competition, and a frightened young man wanders into Hell to collect hair from the Devil’s head. INTO THE FOREST: FOLKTALES AT DEFA is filled with the sort of images that can delight a child during the day and return to haunt their dreams once the lights go out.

SCREAM DREAM is the kind of movie that makes more sense as a curiosity than as a story. That isn’t an insult, though it might sound like one to anyone who expects a horror experience, setups, payoffs, and performances that seem aware of the same movie happening around them. Donald Farmer’s 1989 shot-on-video heavy metal horror film exists in a strange ether, one where the tape grain, dead air, cheap monster effects, basement-level music culture, and wild confidence matter almost as much as the revenge plot.

RELENTLESS belongs to that late-80s style school of thrillers where a pay phone, a loose-cannon detective, and a killer with daddy issues can carry an entire feature without apology. It isn’t subtle, and it isn’t reinventing the thriller genre. It’s a lean, mean genre piece with just enough personality to keep its formula from feeling disposable. The title promises more than the movie can always deliver, but director William Lustig keeps things moving in a way that the weaker pieces rarely do.

Kelsey Grammer has spent much of his career playing men who believe their intelligence should place them in control of every room they enter. LARS SHRIKE WALKS THE NIGHT strips that away while leaving the voice and wounded pride intact. Lars knows his name and believes he has escaped. Those two scraps of certainty aren’t enough to explain the desert surrounding him, the people he encounters, or why reality appears to be changing its rules whenever he begins to understand them. Watching Grammer argue with a universe that won’t acknowledge his importance becomes the movie’s most intriguing joke and its most unsettling idea.

RED SUN has the kind of cast list that almost sounds made up after the fact. Charles Bronson, Toshirō Mifune, Alain Delon, and Ursula Andress in a Western shot in Spain, directed by Terence Young, with a ceremonial Japanese sword pushing the story across the American frontier. That combination gives the film something built in before anyone fires a gun or draws a blade. It’s the sort of production that doesn’t need to be great to be worth seeing. It just needs to let its pieces bounce off each other long enough to make the ride interesting.

The uncomfortable thing about FALLING DOWN is that its starting point doesn’t feel that far from reality. Not the violence, not the cruelty, not the choices William Foster makes once he starts crossing lines, but the exhaustion underneath that first step out of the car. Everyone has had some version of that day. The traffic won’t move. The prices make no sense. The rule you’re asked to follow is stupid. The person in front of you doesn’t care. The system has an answer for everything except relief. Joel Schumacher’s film understands that with alarming clarity, then follows it into the place most people know not to go.

Clara spends so much of WHAT TOMORROW BRINGS pretending she has answers that the smallest moments of uncertainty become the most revealing. She can comfort her younger sister, smooth over an awkward conversation, and act as though another unpaid bill is only a temporary inconvenience. None of that means she knows how to keep a household running while finishing high school and carrying grief she’s never been allowed to process. The movie understands the cruelty of expecting a teenager to become dependable simply because every adult around her has stopped being dependable.

Pickleball is funny before anyone says a word about it. The sound, the court size, the sudden takeover, the way it can turn retirees, former athletes, casual hobbyists, and deeply competitive dads into people fighting for emotional survival over a plastic ball, all make it an easy target. THE DINK knows that, which is both its advantage and its ceiling. Josh Greenbaum’s sports comedy doesn’t reimagine the underdog formula. It understands how far a likable cast, a bruised ego, and a ridiculous game can carry a movie when everyone involved commits to the bit.

Smoke changes the way a place feels before the flames ever arrive. Roads narrow, distance turns unreliable, and every sound starts carrying a warning inside it. CRUEL HANDS understands that part of fear well, using Australia’s 2019 Black Summer bushfires as more than scenery, or disaster-movie spectacle. The fires become a second predator, one that doesn’t care who’s guilty, who’s trapped, or who deserves to make it out.

One of these monsters is almost impossible to find. The other arrives so late that the cowboys have nearly finished their own movie. Rather than weakening Eureka Entertainment’s BEASTS UNLEASHED collection, that shared reluctance to produce the promised creatures becomes part of its appeal. THE BEAST WITH A MILLION EYES and THE BEAST OF HOLLOW MOUNTAIN come from different corners of 1950s genre filmmaking. Both show how imagination, advertising, and limited resources could pull a modest production toward something stranger than expected.

By 1929, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy had already developed the comic partnership that would define the rest of their lives and careers. Stan’s naive confusion, Ollie’s wounded dignity, and their shared ability to turn a minor problem into a spectacular disaster were all firmly in place. LAUREL & HARDY: THE SILENT YEARS gathers nine shorts made as Hollywood was shifting toward sound, capturing the duo at the end of one era without suggesting they needed to change much for the next.