Minier‘s Hometown News Site

Who decides which victories are remembered and which are quietly buried? THE OTHER ROE builds its entire purpose around that question, then answers it with precision, restraint, and clarity. In just sixteen minutes, the film accomplishes what many feature-length documentaries struggle to do: it reframes a foundational moment in American history without grandstanding, and it restores credit where it has been systematically withheld.

At what point does lore stop enriching a movie and start replacing it? That question defines FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY’S 2, a follow-up that clearly understands its audience but struggles to justify itself to those who aren’t diehards. Where the first entry attempted to introduce a broader crowd to Scott Cawthon’s dense mythology, this sequel largely abandons that bridge-building in favor of immersion, recognition, and expansion. For fans, that approach has obvious appeal. For everyone else, it creates a movie that often feels like it’s speaking a language it never bothers to teach.

What are you willing to give up to finally be heard? MIMICS frames that question with a grin rather than a snarl, delivering a genre hybrid that understands its own absurdity without ever treating its characters as punchlines. This film recognizes how desperation and ambition often wear the same face, especially in creative fields where validation feels perpetually just out of reach.

What gets remembered in American sports history, and who decides when innovation becomes acceptable only after it’s been stripped of its original authorship? SOUL POWER: THE LEGEND OF THE AMERICAN BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION frames its entire four-part structure around that question, and it’s at its strongest when it refuses to reduce the ABA to a novelty act or a footnote to NBA dominance.

What happens when the person who knows you best is also the one you’ve actively been avoiding? MAGID / ZAFAR chases this question with relentless intensity, turning it into a pressure cooker for identity, masculinity, and emotional avoidance. In just eighteen minutes, director Luís Hindman delivers one of the most viscerally direct British shorts in recent years, a film that doesn’t just depict tension but manufactures it moment by moment until escape feels impossible.

What does redemption cost when the world stops giving second chances? THE ARTFUL DODGER: SEASON 2 opens with that question already answered in practice, if not yet in words. Jack Dawkins isn’t flirting with consequence anymore; he’s staring straight down the barrel of it. Where the first season was about possibility and transformation, this is about debt, the kind that doesn’t disappear just because you’ve learned new skills or adopted better manners.

What happens when something you made to escape becomes something others used to survive, or worse, to justify harm? That question hangs over NOSTALGIE from its opening, shaping the film not as a tale of faded fame but as a quiet, devastating examination of authorship, complicity, and the myths artists tell themselves to stay afloat. At just nineteen minutes, Kathryn Ferguson’s BAFTA-nominated short manages to feel both intimate and expansive, never rushing its ideas yet never overcomplicating its message.

What do you do when the world feels on edge, and every new technological promise sounds like a threat dressed up as convenience? GOOD LUCK, HAVE FUN, DON’T DIE doesn’t offer comfort, clarity, or solutions. Instead, Gore Verbinski returns to filmmaking by throwing gasoline on that anxiety and daring the audience to keep up. This is a loud, restless, deliberately overstuffed movie that treats chaos as both subject and method, and it never pretends otherwise. Everything you think you know about this film is wrong, and ultimately, in the best way possible.

What happens when the desire to be loved curdles into the desire to disappear? BY DESIGN doesn’t ask that question softly, and it certainly doesn’t bother cushioning the answer. Amanda Kramer’s feature takes an absurdist premise that sounds like a punchline and commits to it with absolute seriousness, using surrealism not as a stylistic lens, but as a blunt instrument for interrogating female interiority, objectification, and the fantasy of frictionless existence.

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.

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.

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.

What happens when a way of life depends on being alone, but survival increasingly demands connection? THE LAST PUESTERO doesn’t try to frame that question as a philosophical exercise. It observes it unfolding in real time through the daily routines, silences, and contradictions embodied by Adonai Jara, a gaucho (a skilled, historically nomadic horseman and cattle herder of the South American pampas (grasslands)) stationed at a remote Patagonian outpost where tradition still holds, but only barely.

What happens when a nation explains its violence through myth instead of responsibility? THE HOLE, 309 DAYS TO THE BLOODIEST TRAGEDY doesn’t ask that question civilly. It drags it into the open, smears it with blood, and dares the audience to look away. Hanung Bramantyo’s film isn’t content to simply unsettle its audience; it wants to indict, and it understands that horror is often the most honest language for doing so.

What does it mean to be American when the definition keeps changing depending on where you stand, how you sound, and who gets to decide? FIL-AM starts with that issue quietly embedded in its bones rather than declared outright, and it trusts the audience to feel the tension long before it names it. Writer-director Ralph Torrefranca frames his short not as a thesis statement about Filipino American identity, but as a lived-in memory shaped by displacement, resentment, and reluctant adaptation.