Danvers‘s Hometown News Site

TENEMENT starts with a moment: a Japanese-Cambodian manga artist flies to Phnom Penh after her mother’s death to reconnect with family and, hopefully, with a part of herself that distance turned abstract. She rents an apartment in a crumbling housing block once filled with memories her mother never fully shared. Relatives welcome her, neighbors are intrigued, and this old apartment seems eager to help the healing process along. Then the walls begin to talk—just not in a language that comfort understands.

SOMEONE DIES! is proof that lo-fi sci-fi can still feel fresh when it leads with personality. Set almost entirely inside a creaky Houston apartment, the film builds a butterfly-effect satire out of a desperate dad, an ominous letter, and a time-warping contraption that looks like it was assembled during a garage-sale speed run. It’s proudly rough around the edges by design, and that handmade quality becomes part of the joke. When characters insist the device is “teleportery, witchcrafty,” you believe them because the film’s world embraces the ridiculous without apology.

LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER arrives with a reputation larger than its running time. As the first (of many) feature adaptations of D.H. Lawrence’s legendary novel, this 1955 version wears its history in every frame: a French production translating a very English scandal, built in the language of a studio romance rather than raw transgression. Seen today, it fascinates less as provocation and more as a window into mid-century decorum, the careful ways filmmakers worked around censors, and how a love story about class and the body could be shaped into something both daring for its moment and undeniably acceptable.

Reza Dahya’s BOXCUTTER runs, breathes, and sweats through the city it calls home. Toronto isn’t a backdrop here; it’s the film’s heartbeat, the constant that is pushing its characters to chase validation, redemption, and maybe even a version of success that feels like theirs. An aspiring rapper named Rome loses the only copy of his music hours before a chance encounter with a superstar producer. The film handles this moment with a deeper dive than expected, allowing it to become a study of insecurity, identity, and the desperate hunger for recognition in a city that’s still fighting to be seen.

THIS TOO SHALL PASS lives in that liminal stretch between what teenagers swear they’re ready for and what adulthood actually demands. Set to a distinctly 80s pulse, it follows 16-year-old Simon and his close friends as they sprint toward the Canadian border for a taste of freedom, expecting a postcard of rebellion and getting a messier, more genuine weekend instead. The hook is familiar: a road trip that doubles as a reckoning. What elevates it is how rarely the film settles for an easy out. It lets immaturity be loud, friendship be complicated, and consequences arrive without preaching. For a film packaging its nostalgia in hooky, mixtape-ready textures (with all the cliches in tow), it’s surprisingly honest about how much growing up hurts.

It’s almost impressive how The Salem Chronicles manages to take a premise that should write itself—a detective uncovering his family’s cursed bloodline in the most haunted town in America—and yet makes it feel like punishment. Not the “fun” kind of punishment. The cinematic equivalent of being stuck in traffic while someone lectures you about the power of cinema. Thomas J. Churchill once again proves that quantity does not equal quality. The man pumps out films faster than most people change their underwear.

IN OUR BLOOD is the kind of horror-adjacent thriller that creeps up on you while insisting it’s only documenting what’s already there. Framed through a documentary style lens—literally, via a cinematographer’s camera and a filmmaker’s phone—the story follows Emily, a director attempting to reconcile with her estranged mother while shooting the process. When the mother vanishes, the film pivots from intimate vérité to a progressively unnerving investigation, testing how far film-making can go before it becomes complicity. The premise isn’t just clever; it weaponizes point of view to turn everyday coverage into an ethical minefield.

BAD BOY opens with the echoes of Britain’s largest cash robbery, the infamous 2006 Securitas heist. But instead of glorifying the crime or fetishizing the chaos, the film takes a humanistic detour—centering not on the criminals themselves, but on one man forever caught in their shadow. Jeremy “Bad Boy” Bailey, an MMA fighter once accused and later cleared of involvement, serves as the focal point for Terry Stone and Richard Turner’s latest documentary, which explores how public perception can outlast even the harshest legal verdicts.

THE JEWISH NAZI? begins with an image so unsettling it almost feels like a deception: a boy in a Nazi uniform, arm raised in salute, eyes wide with confusion. That image—both horrifying and heartbreaking—anchors this powerful documentary from Australian filmmaker Dan Goldberg. The story it tells, of Alex Kurzem, a Jewish child who survived the Holocaust by posing as “Hitler’s youngest soldier,” isn’t just one of history’s strangest footnotes. It’s a meditation on survival, memory, and the blurred boundaries between truth and self-preservation.

TEARS BURN TO ASH is more like a dream caught in the in-between—a story that exists in the hours before dawn, when grief and identity intertwine. Natalie Murao’s fifteen-minute short is an intimate portrayal of a Japanese Canadian woman navigating loss while confronting the cultural fracture of her own reflection. It’s a film that doesn’t just explore displacement; it embodies it.

LOST WAX begins with silence—the kind that comes after something has vanished and the world doesn’t yet realize it’s missing. A girl disappears from her apartment complex, and the only person who truly grieves for her is Osas, a “stranger” who barely knew her. What follows is a tender and haunting reflection on empathy, displacement, and the fragile ways human beings find to mourn one another.

BROTHERS opens like a confession. It’s quiet, deliberate, and intimate in a way that feels invasive—an unfiltered glimpse at a moment that should remain private. The premise: two grandsons arrive to confront their grandfather with a choice that will change all their lives. But simplicity can be deceptive. Director Ross Syner crafts a stripped-down chamber piece here about morality, guilt, and what it means to protect someone when every option leads to loss.

LET’S CALL THE WHOLE THING OFF offers us the charm of a romcom that doesn’t hide from the messy truth of relationships. Elizabeth Guest, who writes, directs, and stars, takes what could’ve been a formulaic “runaway bride” setup and reshapes it into something far more self-aware—a love story about how easy it is to mistake chaos for connection. The result feels personal, vulnerable, and still funny, proving that sincerity and satire can coexist without one swallowing the other.

WERK treats the modern marketing agency like a pressure cooker disguised as a break room. Shot with the looseness of a doc crew embedded among “creatives,” the series leans into the chaos that happens when deadlines, egos, client briefs, and clashing generations try to share the same room. The hook is simple: a small crew follows The Digital Creative Group across meetings, mishaps, and minor revolutions. The pleasure comes from how quickly the veneer of office shine scrapes away and how precisely this team’s shared illusion of control collapses under the camera’s attention.

#SHAKESPEARES SHITSTORM is not a movie that asks to be loved; it dares you to walk out, then tries to win you back by being so committed to its own rancid aesthetic that resistance turns into a weird kind of admiration. Another creation from Lloyd Kaufman’s Tromaville is a gleefully disgusting riff on The Tempest. As with so much of Troma’s history, the boundary isn’t the line you cross—it’s the runway you run down headfirst. The film’s new 4K release provides the perfect excuse to revisit an entry that doubles as a manifesto: cinema as an inside joke, protest, and plumbing emergency.