Chris Jones
Entertainment Editor
Chris Jones, from Washington, Illinois, is the Mail Entertainment Editor covering Movies, Television, Books, and Music topics. He is the owner, writer, and editor of Overly Honest Reviews.
What happens to a sense of self when every hour of the day becomes organized around keeping another human alive? REMOVAL OF THE EYE begins from that muted panic, not as a conceptual exercise, but as lived reality, captured in real time by filmmakers Artemis Shaw and Prashanth Kamalakanthan as they document the first year of parenthood without the comfort of distance or hindsight. This isn’t a film about learning lessons or arriving with an understanding of clarity. It’s about survival, and the fragile hope that meaning will emerge once the exhaustion lifts.
What happens when permission becomes emotional leverage? BIGHT, with that question hanging in the air, spells out its consequences, positioning itself not as provocation but as an uncomfortable examination of how easily desire can be weaponized when boundaries are treated as suggestions rather than safeguards.
What does it mean to owe your life to a sacrifice you never asked for? HOME explores that unspoken question and allows it to echo across decades, cultures, and roles without ever demanding an answer. Marijana Janković’s feature debut draws directly from lived experience, but it resists the trappings of autobiography as self-explanation. Instead, the film positions memory as something fragmented and unresolved, shaped as much by absence as by presence.
What happens when doing the right thing for your child means reopening wounds you never fully processed yourself? JIMPA places the core of its story around that uneasy question, placing a mother, her nonbinary teenager, and her aging gay father in the same emotional sphere and refusing to let any of them escape without consequence. Rather than building toward a single answer, director/co-writer Sophie Hyde’s deeply personal film settles into the discomfort of competing truths, asking how love, autonomy, and responsibility coexist when family history refuses to stay quiet.
What does it mean to bring back a show that shaped generations without letting nostalgia do all the work? THE MUPPET SHOW (2026) enables that question to hang over every joke, musical number, and backstage meltdown, returning to the original Muppet Theatre while fully aware that reverence alone won’t carry it forward. Rather than trying to reinvent itself, the special treats legacy as something to engage with, not tiptoe around, and that confidence becomes its guiding principle.
What happens when an explicit phenomenon is filtered through the mechanism of a major Hollywood studio, flattened into a palatable fantasy, and then asked to carry the weight of an entire culture’s unresolved hang-ups about sex, power, and desire? That question defines FIFTY SHADES: 3-MOVIE COLLECTION.
What does immortality look like when it no longer feels like power? NADJA opens inside that question and never allows the audience to escape it. Michael Almereyda’s 1994 vampire film doesn’t treat eternal life as myth, but as a condition shaped by boredom, longing, and misdirected need. Seen now in its newly restored Director’s Cut, the film feels less like an artifact and more like a transmission from a moment when American independent cinema briefly allowed genre to fracture into something personal.
What does it say about modern ‘courtship’ when intimacy becomes a test of endurance rather than connection? LURE doesn’t flirt with that question; it drags it into the open and spills blood around it. Oliver Cox’s feature debut is a deliberately confrontational horror film, one that takes the structure of reality dating television ala THE BACHELORETTE and strips it of any pretense of romance, revealing the transactional cruelty lurking just beneath the surface.
What happens when a character built for laughter is asked to carry the weight of years that passed without an audience? AÍDA Y VUELTA answers that question without flinching. Rather than presenting itself as a victory lap or a nostalgia grab, Paco León’s film approaches its legacy head-on, acknowledging both the affection people still feel for these characters and the realities that time, grief, and economic pressure impose, whether anyone is watching or not.
How does the body and soul carry the weight of war long after the fighting stops? THE SOUNDS OF THINGS ABLAZE answers that question not through detailed explanation, but through sensation. In just under seven minutes, Hayat Najm’s animated short captures the aftershocks of violence as something lived physically, instinctively, and involuntarily, transforming trauma into movement rather than memory.
What does it mean to belong somewhere when even death refuses to make that decision simple? 2m² opens with a deceptively modest premise and steadily reveals itself as one of the more quietly disarming documentaries I’ve seen in some time, using a single profession to examine migration, identity, and the uneasy compromises that define life lived between cultures. There’s something about following along in a process that lets you see those final moments that will make you look at things differently. (‘How Much Land Does a Man Require?’ is the English title of an 1886 short story by Leo Tolstoy. In contemporary terms, the answer could be: 2m² – the size of a grave.)
What does resistance look like when survival itself becomes a radical act? IN THE ROOM doesn’t approach that question through historical overview, but through presence, conversation, and an unflinching willingness to sit with discomfort. Directed by Brishkay Ahmed, the documentary brings together five Afghan women whose lives have been shaped by visibility, backlash, exile, and courage, not as symbols, but as people reckoning with what it means to speak when silence is safer.
What happens when a crime story stops caring whether the crime is solved, or even whether it matters? CONRAD & CRAB – IDIOTIC GEMS opens with the promise of an investigation but dismantles it piece by piece, replacing that push with observation and paying off with patience. Claude Schmitz has no interest in building suspense in the traditional sense; instead, he’s far more invested in what happens when people drift through lives they’re no longer especially good at performing. This is an intentionally loud movie, and it works because it knows that it is.
What do we owe the people we used to be, and how much of that debt is still unpaid decades later? EVERYTHING FUN YOU COULD POSSIBLY DO IN ALEDO, ILLINOIS builds its entire identity around that question, then refuses to answer it with cynicism, irony, or exaggerated quirk. Instead, it opts for something rarer and riskier in contemporary indie comedy: sincerity without apology. There’s heart, a lot of heart here in this film, and it's clear from start to finish!
What happens when a film can’t decide what kind of movie it wants to be, and how much does that indecision matter when the heart and costumes absolutely nail it? DOCTOR PLAGUE raises that question almost immediately, then proceeds to circle it for the remainder of its runtime without ever landing on an answer.