Chris Jones
Entertainment Editor
Chris Jones, from Washington, Illinois, is the Mail Entertainment Editor covering Movies, Television, Books, and Music topics. He is the owner, writer, and editor of Overly Honest Reviews.
What makes a neighborhood feel safe, and how quickly does that illusion fall apart once doubt creeps in? The ’Burbs takes that question and stretches it across eight tightly constructed episodes, using comedy not as a release valve but as a delivery system for discomfort. This isn’t a lazy remake, nor is it a nostalgia trap desperate to coast on the past. Instead, it’s a deliberate reworking of an idea that still feels uncomfortably relevant: the belief that danger always comes from somewhere else.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What happens when permission becomes emotional leverage? BIGHT, with that question hanging in the air, spells out its consequences, positioning itself not as provocation but as an uncomfortable examination of how easily desire can be weaponized when boundaries are treated as suggestions rather than safeguards.
What does it mean to owe your life to a sacrifice you never asked for? HOME explores that unspoken question and allows it to echo across decades, cultures, and roles without ever demanding an answer. Marijana Janković’s feature debut draws directly from lived experience, but it resists the trappings of autobiography as self-explanation. Instead, the film positions memory as something fragmented and unresolved, shaped as much by absence as by presence.
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.
What does it mean to bring back a show that shaped generations without letting nostalgia do all the work? THE MUPPET SHOW (2026) enables that question to hang over every joke, musical number, and backstage meltdown, returning to the original Muppet Theatre while fully aware that reverence alone won’t carry it forward. Rather than trying to reinvent itself, the special treats legacy as something to engage with, not tiptoe around, and that confidence becomes its guiding principle.
What happens when an explicit phenomenon is filtered through the mechanism of a major Hollywood studio, flattened into a palatable fantasy, and then asked to carry the weight of an entire culture’s unresolved hang-ups about sex, power, and desire? That question defines FIFTY SHADES: 3-MOVIE COLLECTION.
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.
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.
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.
How does the body and soul carry the weight of war long after the fighting stops? THE SOUNDS OF THINGS ABLAZE answers that question not through detailed explanation, but through sensation. In just under seven minutes, Hayat Najm’s animated short captures the aftershocks of violence as something lived physically, instinctively, and involuntarily, transforming trauma into movement rather than memory.