McLean‘s Hometown News Site

Some movies fail because they aim high and collapse under the weight of ambition. Then there are movies like FUNGICIDE, where the ambition itself becomes the entire experience. Not because the film succeeds, but because every decision feels powered by unfiltered enthusiasm that eventually bulldozes past limitations and lands in a bizarrely entertaining experience.

MATININÓ doesn’t treat healing as some easy trip back home. It treats it as labor, argument, imagination, discomfort, performance, memory, and invention occurring simultaneously. Gabriela Díaz Arp’s documentary begins from a place of real pain, but it refuses to confine these women to testimony alone. Instead, it hands them masks, costumes, language, myth, movement, and the authority to reshape what has been carried through generations. That choice gives the film its heartbeat. This isn’t a documentary that simply observes survivors as they explain what happened to them. It’s a film about women taking the raw material of their own histories and building a new world from it.

Sports films often build themselves around visible pressure. Championships, rankings, public expectations, physical exhaustion, and the constant demand to keep performing no matter what’s happening on the inside. FAULT understands that there’s too often something more unsightly beneath all of that. Sometimes the real pressure comes from maintaining the version of yourself that allowed you to survive in the first place. That sits at the center of Misha Calvert’s short film, turning what could have been a straightforward trauma narrative into something far more emotionally volatile.

SARA BAREILLES: GOOD GRIEF doesn’t approach grief as just an emotional arc, which is exactly why its most peaceful moments land with so much force. Josh Alexander’s documentary follows Sara Bareilles as she returns to the recording studio for the first time in seven years, bringing with her a new collection of songs shaped by personal loss, creative uncertainty, and the courage it takes to share pain before you’ve figured out how to manage it. The film isn’t built around a famous artist explaining herself from a safe distance. It stays close to the work, the room, the conversations, and the people trusted enough to be present while something takes shape.

Many documentaries about disability position themselves around education, inspiration, advocacy, or emotional endurance so aggressively that the people at the center begin to feel flattened into something like a symbol long before the audience gets to know them as people. KIDS LIKE ME avoids that because Cynthia Lowen and Jon Cohrs understand something simple but surprisingly rare. Oliver is not interesting because he has a disability. He’s interesting because he’s funny, obsessive, imaginative, dramatic, creative, stubborn, emotionally complicated, and consumed by the idea of making movies. That shapes the entire documentary in the best possible way.

THE YEAR BEFORE THE WAR opens like a warning disguised as a hallucination. Before the film introduces philosophy, war, nationalism, or revolution, it establishes a sense of instability. Ice cracks. Bodies drift through frozen landscapes. Crowds gather with the energy of people unknowingly approaching catastrophe. Dāvis Sīmanis doesn’t frame pre-World War I Europe as a world on the verge of collapse in a historical sense. He presents it as a civilization already infected long before the first trench is dug.

Some filmmakers spend years learning how to smooth out what makes a legend. Brian De Palma spent the beginning of his career throwing everything he could at the screen. HI, MOM! feels less like a carefully assembled studio production and more like a filmmaker testing every boundary he can before someone tells him to stop. That gives the film a strange kind of durability. Even when the movie struggles, and it absolutely does, it never feels cautious. More than fifty years later, that recklessness still carries a charge.

Film noir has always carried a strange relationship with exhaustion. These are movies filled with people who look like they haven’t slept in days, trapped inside systems that stopped caring about them long ago. Everyone lies. Everyone walks into rooms already doomed by choices they haven’t made yet. Even when the stories drift toward romance or procedural vibes, there’s usually a quiet understanding beneath it all that fate has already made its decision before the first scene even starts. That feeling hangs heavily over D.O.A., and it’s the reason the film still feels alive more than seventy-five years later.

HUNGRY gets a surprising amount of mileage out of the fact that hippos are absolutely terrifying animals. Creature features usually lean on sharks, crocodiles, giant snakes, or mutated insects, while hippos rarely get treated like the potentially violent animals they actually are. These things are basically living tanks with terrible tempers, capable of tearing people apart with ease. Writer/director James Nunn recognizes that immediately, which helps the film avoid collapsing into pure self-aware parody. The premise could’ve easily turned into disposable nonsense built entirely around the novelty of a killer hippo movie, but HUNGRY plays the danger straighter than expected. Instead of chasing camp in every scene, the film keeps pushing toward something meaner, uglier, and more chaotic, and that choice gives the attacks far more weight than they probably should have in a movie like this. Instead of following along the line of the increasingly long list of board game adaptations, this one treats it more like a wink and nod to nostalgia instead of what it could have been.

The easiest mistake this version of CAPE FEAR could’ve made would’ve been leaning into nostalgia. Recreating the infamous moments, taking the shortcut of familiarity, or, worse, treating the series as a scene-by-scene remake, or even trusting the legacy to do most of the heavy lifting. Instead, the series drags the material through the dirt, catches it on fire, and lets it come out the other side somewhere far more somber and far more vile. This isn’t a prestige-thriller remix of a recognizable title. It’s psychological horror with its hands wrapped tightly around the audience’s throat for nearly every second.

I’ll be the first to admit, I’m not a big soccer fan, and I’m pretty reserved on what anime I like. So to say that this series has won me over so far is really saying something! DRAGON STRIKER asks viewers to buy into magical soccer matches, dragon-powered attacks, ancient prophecy, and emotionally overloaded kids screaming across glowing stadiums without flinching for a second. What keeps the series from collapsing under all of that is its sincere commitment to the material. A lesser version would’ve relied entirely on chaos and sensory overload. This show understands that the action only lands if the characters treat every victory, rivalry, and emotional breakdown like the most important thing in the world. That sincerity gives the chaos real momentum instead of reducing it to empty visual clutter.

Most shot-on-video horror movies from the late 1990s and early 2000s feel like they were assembled by people who barely wanted to make them (that’s gonna piss some people off, but it's true). You can almost sense the exhaustion baked into every shot. The lighting feels flat, the pacing drags endlessly, the performances feel half-conscious, and the entire production exists purely because somebody realized horror fans will watch almost anything once. THE SCREAMING somehow survives that same chaos of regional microbudget horror because writer/director Jeff Leroy actually seems excited to be there. That enthusiasm matters.

New York has always been one of television’s favorite lies. Not because the city itself is fake, but because so many series built around young professionals treat exhaustion as a personality trait and financial survival as a quirky inconvenience. The apartments are impossibly clean, everyone lands dream jobs by accident, and emotional collapse usually arrives wrapped in a perfectly timed punchline, only to reset the following week. NOT SUITABLE FOR WORK understands that fantasy well enough to weaponize it against itself. The series still delivers the glossy Manhattan chaos audiences expect, but beneath the polished surface lies something noticeably more bitter, anxious, and emotionally restless than the marketing initially suggests. That edge carries the show!

JINSEI feels less like a normal animated film and more like somebody emptying decades of anxiety, loneliness, ambition, media obsession, political dread, personal memory, and existential confusion directly onto the screen before the feeling disappears. There are moments where it barely seems interested in coherence at all. Entire stretches drift through fragmentation, abrupt stylistic pivots, and surrealism with almost reckless confidence. Yet somehow, by the end, the film leaves behind an impression far stronger than many more polished animated features ever manage. That’s because JINSEI understands something a lot of coming-of-age epics don’t, that identity rarely develops in a straight line.

I have to start by saying that this was one of the most easily bingeable shows I’ve ever watched. Most series built around chaos like this want you to choose a side. They might pretend to operate in morally gray territory, but eventually they start nudging viewers toward a favorite, easing one character’s arc while sharpening another's flaws. ALICE AND STEVE never pretend to do that. It commits to the ugliness of the situation from every possible angle, then keeps finding new ways to make everybody involved look slightly worse than they did five minutes earlier. That could’ve turned the series into an exhausting exercise in cruelty. But there was something about Sophie Goodhart’s writing that understood something vitally important! People don’t become irrational because they’re evil; they become irrational because humiliation screws with their judgment. That distinction gives the show a spine unlike most dramadies made for streaming.