Minier‘s Hometown News Site

WALK WITH ME is exactly what its title promises: an invitation to stay present as a marriage reshapes itself around early-onset Alzheimer’s. Shot over four years by filmmaker and casting director Heidi Levitt, the film tracks her husband, Charlie Hess—an artist, father, and community builder—through the incremental changes that a diagnosis brings. There’s no manufactured drama here. Instead, we get the paces of real life: clinic visits, family conversations, small victories, and the tougher days when words slip, plans falter, and the world narrows. The honesty of that approach is the documentary’s power. It doesn’t explain Alzheimer’s so much as it lets you inhabit its slow encroachment, moment by moment.

THE WRONG ARM OF THE LAW sits in that distinct pocket where caper mechanics and manners share top billing. A crew of impostors dressed as police keeps robbing the robbers, forcing London’s crooks and the Yard to cooperate just to restore the “proper” order of things. That inversion is where the film lives—less in a belly-laugh sort of way and more in the absurdity of villains and cops negotiating work rules like rival trade unions.

OLIVE is that rare short film that doesn’t feel confined by time. Thirteen minutes pass, but it leaves an emotional afterglow that lingers like a full-length drama etched into your mind. Written, directed, and co-starring Tom Koch, it’s an intimate portrayal of love, loss, and identity through the lens of Alzheimer’s. This isn’t a film about the disease itself — it’s about the humanity caught inside. And with Lesley Ann Warren delivering a performance of astonishing grace, OLIVE stands as one of the year’s most powerful achievements in short-form storytelling.

GOING TO THE DOGS begins with silence — the kind that hangs heavy over an empty stadium, its lights long gone out. For much of the 20th century, this was the soundtrack of working-class Britain. Greyhound racing wasn’t just a pastime; it was a ritual, a community, a shared language of excitement and release. Director Greg Cruttwell’s documentary treats that history not as nostalgia, but as a question: what happens when a culture built on speed, noise, and adrenaline is forced to slow down and listen?

DOWN CEMETERY ROAD is like a lingering echo — soft, deliberate, and full of buried truths that refuse to stay hidden. Apple TV+ continues its fascination with morally complex thrillers by adapting Mick Herron’s debut novel, turning the sleepy streets of Oxford into a stage for obsession, guilt, and reckoning. It’s something slower and heavier — a meditation disguised as a mystery.

In BROADWAY BOOKS: THE TIPPING POINT, writer-director Carianne King transforms the crumbling foundations of retail culture into the setting for one of the most self-aware and quietly hilarious pilots of the year. Set in a Manhattan bookstore caught between gentrification and extinction, it captures that unmistakable New York energy where hope and futility share the same shelf. It’s a series born from the trenches of part-time jobs, artistic compromise, and that singular mix of intellectual pride and exhaustion familiar to anyone who’s ever spent a paycheck on coffee and a book instead of rent.

Alireza Khatami’s THE THINGS YOU KILL seeps in—an atmospheric riddle where vengeance and grief walk the same path until they’re indistinguishable. On its surface, it’s about a man haunted by his mother’s suspicious death and a gardener coerced into revenge. Beneath that, it’s about the futility of trying to purify pain with more violence. Every frame feels like a confession whispered into a well, knowing the echo will return distorted.

Dan Curtis’ DEAD OF NIGHT plays like a séance conducted through a TV antenna — flickering, imperfect, yet oddly intimate. First aired in 1977 and now preserved through Kino Lorber’s new release, this trio of stories captures the singular magic of broadcast horror: the sensation that something dark could slip through your living room at any moment. It’s uneven, yes, but within its framework lies the DNA of an entire generation’s fear.

HAZBIN HOTEL: SEASON 2 isn’t a continuation—it’s a relapse. A gorgeous, glittering, gloriously depraved relapse. Vivienne Medrano’s chaotic, bloodstained Broadway in Hell returns with sharper claws, higher heels, and more show-stopping numbers than Heaven could ever forgive. After Charlie Morningstar’s little “oops, I accidentally won a war against Heaven” moment, the Hotel is booming. Demons are checking in like it’s a cruise ship for the damned—but most of them aren’t looking for redemption. They’re looking for clout, chaos, and free room service.

DEADMAN’S BARSTOOL is a queer-tinged cocktail of noir, satire, and charisma—served straight up with a splash of sleaze. Written and directed by Dean Dempsey, co-written with Greg Mania, the film was made in 2018 but now finds new life through Anchor Bay’s Blu-ray reissue. It’s a murder-mystery that plays like a warped sermon about lust, power, and the hypocrisy of modern faith, filtered through a lens that reveres John Waters, early Todd Haynes, and the chaotic, anything-goes spirit of downtown New York’s underground art scene. For all its rough edges and microbudget limitations, there’s something magnetic about the film’s boldness—it’s the kind of noir that feels too alive, too sly to moralize, and too aware of its own absurdity to take itself too seriously.

DAN CURTIS’ CLASSIC MONSTERS arrives like a midnight séance—summoning the very foundation of horror storytelling into the comforting glow of the TV. The set puts three of the most ambitious TV horror productions of their time: DRACULA (1974), FRANKENSTEIN (1973), and THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL & MR. HYDE (1968). Produced or directed by Dan Curtis, the man responsible for DARK SHADOWS (so maybe I have a soft spot), these films represent a remarkable collision between the gothic grandeur of Universal’s golden age and the intimacy of 70s television. What Kino Lorber presents here under its Kino Cult banner is not merely a nostalgia trip—it’s a reclamation of television horror as art, which thrives within constraints rather than collapsing under them.

LESBIAN SPACE PRINCESS is the kind of movie that doesn’t just wink at its audience—it throws glitter in their face and asks them to sing along. Directed and written by Leela Varghese and Emma Hough Hobbs, the animated feature is a sugar rush of queer pandemonium that manages to balance its campiness with genuine heart. Beneath its chaotic, candy-colored surface lies something surprisingly heartfelt: a story about anxiety, self-worth, and learning to love yourself even when your brain insists you shouldn’t.

FAMILIAR TOUCH begins the way memory does — halfway through a thought, in motion before you realize where you’re headed. Ruth (Kathleen Chalfant) moves through her house performing small, almost automatic tasks: slicing fruit, turning on a burner, checking a pan that’s already empty. The gestures make sense only because they’ve been repeated for decades. Yet writer/director Sarah Friedland uses these simple actions to pull us into something far less ordinary — a portrait of a woman whose body still remembers a life her mind has started to lose.

STITCH HEAD aims straight for the spot where spooky meets sweet: a PG “horror” that plays with the Frankenstein myth from the kids’ table without talking down to them. High above a little town, a mad professor keeps churning out monsters and promptly forgets about them, leaving his first, smallest creation to hold the whole place together. A traveling showman shows up promising love and limelight, and our stitched-together caretaker is tempted to chase the attention instead of the community he’s already built. That arc—validation versus belonging—gives the film its pulse. It’s more of a comedy adventure with cobweb trim, closer in spirit to a storybook campfire tale than anything actually frightening.