Stanford‘s Hometown News Site

LOVELINES is the kind of 1980s teen comedy that seems less like it was written than pieced together from everything the era assumed young audiences wanted thrown at them at once. Rival high schools, pranks, horny side characters, fist fights, a Battle of the Bands, a forbidden romance, a protective brother built like a human wall, and Michael Winslow running a mysterious phone service all compete for control of the same 93 minutes. The movie rarely finds a strong enough reason for all of this to exist together, but there is still something weirdly watchable about how much it crams into the frame. It’s more like a half-busted jukebox that keeps skipping to the strangest possible track, and sometimes that’s enough to make it harder to dismiss than it probably deserves.

DI’ANNO: IRON MAIDEN’S LOST SINGER doesn’t examine Paul Di’Anno like a trivia answer in Iron Maiden history. It treats him as a man whose voice helped define a movement, whose life was scarred by bad decisions and bad luck, and whose final years deserved more than a footnote beneath the shadow of a much larger band. That distinction matters because this documentary could easily have become another fan-service extension of metal mythology, built around famous names, archival clips, and a familiar rise-and-fall. Director Wes Orshoski aims for something more intimate, following Di’Anno through a late-life stretch marked by failing health, financial desperation, humor, anger, gratitude, and a return to the stage that feels both triumphant and painful to watch.

AUDITION is one of those horror films whose reputation can almost work against it. The shockwave of it has traveled farther than the movie itself, turning certain images, sounds, and twists into the kind of cultural shorthand that makes new viewers feel as if they already know what they’re walking into. That familiarity doesn’t lessen the impact, though. If anything, it makes Takashi Miike’s patience feel even crueler. AUDITION doesn’t survive and thrive because of one infamous stretch. It survives because the entire film is built like a lie someone tells themselves until reality finally pushes back.

MARLOWE has the appeal of a movie caught between inheritance and reinvention. It carries the name of one of detective fiction’s great private eyes, borrows its bones from Raymond Chandler’s THE LITTLE SISTER, dresses itself in late-sixties Los Angeles, and then hands the role to James Garner, an actor whose natural portrayal works both for and against the material. The result isn’t one of the essential Philip Marlowe films, and it never quite shakes the feeling that it’s living in the shadow of stronger noir predecessors and more adventurous revisionist detective stories that would arrive soon after. There’s enough charm and curiosity here to make MARLOWE an enjoyable, if uneven, piece of transitional noir.

GOAT GIRL really explores the deepest ideas in the confusion adults leave behind when they expect children to accept the world without explanation. Writer/director Ana Asensio’s sophomore feature has a clear affection for childhood wonder, but it’s not interested in treating that curiosity as empty or pure. Elena, played by Alessandra González, is eight years old, preparing for her First Communion in 1988 Madrid, and trying to understand death, faith, class, prejudice, family tension, and the rules adults enforce with very little patience. That’s a lot for one film to carry, and GOAT GIRL is most successful when it lets those ideas thrive through Elena’s emotion, her questions, and the uncomfortable silences that follow.

THE VOICES OF OUR MOTHER understands that horror is more volatile than a family home after a medical emergency. A parent’s decline has a way of dragging old roles back into place, forcing adult children to become caretakers, witnesses, rivals, and frightened kids again, sometimes within the same window in time. Writer/director Mark O’Brien’s supernatural horror film uses that pressure as its foundation, then turns it into something darker. The house doesn’t just hold memories. It holds an accusation. It holds an obligation. It holds the kind of resentment that can outlast the people who caused it.

The funny thing about PETER ASHER: EVERYWHERE MAN is that the title itself sounds like an exaggeration at first, until they start sharing the receipts. Peter Asher wasn’t merely nearby when modern popular music kept changing shape. He was in the room, at the microphone, behind the glass, near the contracts, beside the artists, and often connected to the next major shift before anyone understood what it would become. Directors Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine don’t approach him like a household name everyone already knows. They treat him as the rare figure whose name may not always be familiar, even though his fingerprints are all over the artists, careers, rooms, and relationships that shaped multiple generations.

The first emotional breaking point in AFTER THE ACT isn’t presented as a confession. It’s more of a temperature change. Sam and Mia are in the same apartment, sharing the same routines, moving through the same space, and yet something has already shifted before anyone says it out loud. That is where Sarah Jayne Portelli and Ivan Malekin find the film’s most effective lensing. They’re not looking for the explosive aftermath of betrayal as much as the quieter, more uncomfortable stretch before language catches up to instinct. Someone senses a lie. Someone else tries to manage the room. A relationship that has become too familiar starts looking strange in its own reflection.

BLIND LOVE is most compelling when it treats repression as something physical, not just emotional. Shu-yi doesn’t simply seem unhappy in her marriage; she moves through her life like someone who has learned how to make herself smaller in every room she enters. The house is organized, the family image is intact, and the future has already been planned by everyone except the woman expected to keep it all from collapsing. That’s where Julian Mei-Yu Chou’s film finds what makes this film work, bleed, and hit like a ton of bricks in the exhaustion of a person who has become so used to performing that desire feels less like a romantic possibility than a threat to the entire system around her.

WHITE PALACE is one of those 90s adult dramas that feels rarer for me to discover now, not because every choice in it works, but because it’s actually willing to let grown people make uncomfortable decisions without soothing everything down into an ending where everyone is happy. The film is messy, sexual, class-conscious, occasionally awkward, and much more interesting when it lets its characters sit inside their contradictions than when it tries to push a square peg into a round hole. It’s not a perfect film, but it has enough bruised feeling and enough heat between Susan Sarandon and James Spader to remain more memorable than its uneven storytelling should allow.

The story UNFORTUNATE FORTUNE explores works so well for a short because it doesn’t need a lot of explanation to start pulling the viewer in. A man is down on his luck, desperation has narrowed his options, and a visit to a fortune teller promises some kind of answer, opportunity, or escape. That’s enough. The film doesn’t need an elaborate mythology or a heavy backstory to make the situation feel familiar. The appeal comes from how quickly the premise taps into something. People don’t usually look in-depth at their own fate because life is going well. They seek it when control has already slipped away.

I’ve been a fan of this franchise from day one. Wes Craven’s satirical brainchild of the genre he cemented was so far ahead of its time that it even allowed for a parody of itself to exist with the SCARY MOVIE franchise (which was SCREAM’s original title). Unfortunately, SCREAM 7 is the point at which affection for the franchise does more work than the movie itself. That’s a rough thing to admit about a series that has meant so much to modern horror, especially one built on being smarter and more self-aware than the films it was taking a knife and you slit 'em from groin to sternum. For years, even the weaker SCREAM entries had some reason to exist. They could struggle on their own, repeat themselves, or lean too hard on familiarity, but there was usually an angle, a target, or a new anxiety worth poking at. This one feels different. SCREAM 7 doesn’t feel like a franchise trying to find a new reason to survive. It feels like a franchise trying to convince itself that survival is enough.

IT’S DOROTHY! understands that Dorothy Gale stopped belonging to a single book, a single movie, an actress, or a single generation a long time ago. She began as a girl from Kansas trying to get home, but over the last 125 years, she’s become something far more resilient. For some people, she’s a childhood memory. For others, she’s Judy Garland wrapped in gingham, talent, and the depths of cruelty that Hollywood offered at the time. For others, she’s the icon THE WIZ, RETURN TO OZ, WICKED, stage productions, television specials, queer-coded legends, Black cultural reclamation, or proof that even the most familiar stories can keep opening new doors when different people are allowed to claim them.

PROTECTOR knows exactly what kind of movie it wants to be, which makes its weaker choices more frustrating, but it’s also why I give the film the credit it gets. This is a lean, violent, rescue-driven action thriller built around a mother with military training, a kidnapped daughter, and a criminal network begging to be torn apart. That idea needs pressure, clarity, momentum, and a lead who can sell physical punishment without turning the whole thing into parody. Milla Jovovich handles her side of that bargain far better than the movie handles its own.

NEVER CHANGE! takes an instantly recognizable nightmare, the fear of being forced back into high school, and turns it into a strange, surprisingly pointed, yet also an undeniable 90s throwback comedy about people who never got the ending they thought they were owed. The setup is ridiculous. In 2008, the graduating class of North Meadows High School had its senior year cut short by a disastrous tornado. Now those former students are in their mid-30s, with jobs, families, regrets, stalled relationships, faded ambitions, and emotional baggage they’ve had years to pretend they outgrew. Then they’re ordered to return home and finish high school once and for all.

I had no clue what to expect going into this, and I’m still not entirely sure I get it all. There are films built to persuade audiences, films built to entertain them, and films built to make viewers feel trapped inside somebody else’s emotional state for two and a half hours. YES belongs firmly in that last category. Nadav Lapid doesn’t approach this story like a careful political dramatist trying to guide audiences toward a specific conclusion. He attacks the screen with panic, rebellion, exhaustion, rage, absurdity, music, screaming, and sensory overload until the entire movie starts feeling less like a traditional narrative and more like a prolonged spiritual collapse caught on camera.

Most vampire stories still gravitate toward some level of elegance. Even when the creatures themselves become monstrous, there’s usually some trace of gothic romanticism lingering around them. Castles. Velvet. Seduction. Wealth. BLOOD & RUST walks in the complete opposite direction. This is a vampire movie that smells like stale coffee, old fryer grease, cigarette smoke trapped in your jacket, and abandoned American industry. Its monsters don’t rise from aristocratic shadows. They crawl through the dying veins of a forgotten Ohio town where everybody already looks drained before the vampires even arrive.

There’s something deeply unnerving about a documentary that refuses to reassure the viewer. SUBURBAN FURY never gives the comfort of certainty, conclusions, or emotional closure. Instead, Robinson Devor builds the entire film around instability, specifically the instability of memory, self-mythology, political identity, and personal truth. The result feels less like a conventional documentary and more like sitting across from someone who may be confessing, performing, manipulating, rationalizing, or all four simultaneously.

Every friend group worth having has that person who insists the night isn't over yet. The bar is closing, everyone's exhausted, half the group wants to leave, and somehow they still manage to convince everybody that the next stop is where the real fun starts. FIND YOUR FRIENDS feels like an entire movie built around that moment. It captures the intoxicating rush of chasing one more adventure long after common sense has packed up and gone home, then follows that vibe into increasingly dangerous territory until the line between a party and a nightmare completely disappears.

There’s a point early in EASY GIRL where the atmosphere feels almost suspiciously carefree. Two young women drift through bars, apartments, and strangers’ bedrooms with the kind of reckless abandon movies usually package as liberation. The nights are loud, the clothes are flamboyant, and the consequences seem temporarily buried beneath cigarettes, glitter, flirtation, and alcohol. Writer/director Hille Norden lets that illusion breathe just long enough for viewers to settle in before slowly exposing how unstable the foundation underneath it really is.

Gabi Asfour, Angela Donhauser, and Adi Gil have spent decades building a fashion label that refuses to follow the rules, and THREEASFOUR: FULL CIRCLE understands that the most interesting part of their story has never been the clothes alone. Sean Ono Lennon and Brian C. González use the designers' work as an entry point into something much larger, exploring friendship, artistic conviction, cultural identity, and the challenge of remaining true to a creative vision. The world constantly pressures artists to become more marketable, more accessible, and easier to categorize. The result is a documentary that values the people behind the designs as much as the designs themselves.

One bad day would be manageable. ROLLING starts with about six of them stacked on top of each other. Alice “loses” her job, gets hit with another rent increase, confronts a landlord who represents everything wrong with her situation (and landlords in general), and then watches a terrible decision create an even bigger problem. From there, the film turns into a frantic scramble for survival, but what makes it work isn't the escalating chaos. It's the feeling that every disaster grows out of frustrations that were already simmering beneath the surface long before the first body hits the floor.

Spy fiction has spent decades teaching audiences to associate a certain level of competence with invincibility. The elite operative enters a room, reads everyone and everything in the room instantly, takes endless levels of punishment like it’s an inconvenience, and keeps moving forward like a machine. Even when those stories pretend to acknowledge trauma, the damage usually functions as just a twist in the story, rather than a true limitation. QUIET ECHOES IN THE DARKNESS pushes against that ideal almost immediately. Jack Caldwaller may be the most capable person in the room, but author Mason Trask never lets readers forget the physical and psychological cost attached to maintaining that reputation. A choice like that ends up defining the entire novel.

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.