Tremont‘s Hometown News Site

FURIOUS does something unique; it takes anger and puts it under a microscope. Who gets to carry it, who gets punished for showing it, and who learns to turn it into a weapon. That gives this eight-episode drama more of a charge than the usual hunter-and-hunted thriller setup. The series still has crime scenes, bodies, agency friction, and the pull of two women moving toward each other from opposite sides of the law. Underneath all of that, though, FURIOUS is most interested in what happens when justice starts to look too small for the damage being measured. And in the end, the series makes you question everything that came before it in the best way possible.

Clara spends so much of WHAT TOMORROW BRINGS pretending she has answers that the smallest moments of uncertainty become the most revealing. She can comfort her younger sister, smooth over an awkward conversation, and act as though another unpaid bill is only a temporary inconvenience. None of that means she knows how to keep a household running while finishing high school and carrying grief she’s never been allowed to process. The movie understands the cruelty of expecting a teenager to become dependable simply because every adult around her has stopped being dependable.

People become unusually talkative in times of grief. They reach for reassurance, advice, optimism, or a story about someone else, often because sitting with another person’s pain feels unbearable. STILL LIFE understands how those attempts at comfort can leave a grieving person feeling even more alone, especially when everyone around them seems desperate to steer the conversation toward something simpler.

Pickleball is funny before anyone says a word about it. The sound, the court size, the sudden takeover, the way it can turn retirees, former athletes, casual hobbyists, and deeply competitive dads into people fighting for emotional survival over a plastic ball, all make it an easy target. THE DINK knows that, which is both its advantage and its ceiling. Josh Greenbaum’s sports comedy doesn’t reimagine the underdog formula. It understands how far a likable cast, a bruised ego, and a ridiculous game can carry a movie when everyone involved commits to the bit.

Seth A. Smith doesn’t treat poverty like background noise in PERMANENT DAMAGE. He treats it like a bad smell in the walls, the kind everyone pretends they can live with until the whole building starts turning against them. The film is part crime story, part romance, part landlord-from-hell comedy, and part surreal working-class nightmare, but the thing holding it together is simpler than any genre label. People are tired, broke, cornered, and one bad choice away from something they can’t take back.

Smoke changes the way a place feels before the flames ever arrive. Roads narrow, distance turns unreliable, and every sound starts carrying a warning inside it. CRUEL HANDS understands that part of fear well, using Australia’s 2019 Black Summer bushfires as more than scenery, or disaster-movie spectacle. The fires become a second predator, one that doesn’t care who’s guilty, who’s trapped, or who deserves to make it out.

One of these monsters is almost impossible to find. The other arrives so late that the cowboys have nearly finished their own movie. Rather than weakening Eureka Entertainment’s BEASTS UNLEASHED collection, that shared reluctance to produce the promised creatures becomes part of its appeal. THE BEAST WITH A MILLION EYES and THE BEAST OF HOLLOW MOUNTAIN come from different corners of 1950s genre filmmaking. Both show how imagination, advertising, and limited resources could pull a modest production toward something stranger than expected.

By 1929, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy had already developed the comic partnership that would define the rest of their lives and careers. Stan’s naive confusion, Ollie’s wounded dignity, and their shared ability to turn a minor problem into a spectacular disaster were all firmly in place. LAUREL & HARDY: THE SILENT YEARS gathers nine shorts made as Hollywood was shifting toward sound, capturing the duo at the end of one era without suggesting they needed to change much for the next.

I really had no clue what to expect here. I didn’t know anything about the film going in; all I had seen were the poster and some stills. Revenge stories usually know where they’re headed long before the characters do. IS GOD IS takes a familiar route and drags it through family histories, mythic rage, dark humor, and a whole lot of fire until the path feels less like justice and more like inheritance. Aleshea Harris adapts her own stage play into a film that’s often bold, frequently strange, and carried by two lead performances that understand anger as something more complicated than an action-movie fuel source.

“Opportunity begets opportunity.” The wise words fall out of Will’s mouth in a rare moment of lucidity. He, along with his friends Caro and Felipe, have ventured to a remote vacation home to seek that opportunity they feel they so desperately deserve. Waiting for them there is their estranged collaborator, Sam, who is a little preoccupied.

ATTACK ON PARADISE has a relatively simple focus, with a building, a mother, a son, a gang problem, a police raid, and enough bodies in motion to make every stairwell feel like a bad decision. Bob Colaers’ action thriller takes one of the oldest genre delights, a trapped hero fighting through hostile territory. It drops it into an Antwerp apartment complex that has become less a home than a pressure cooker. There’s a familiarity here, but the film makes this story its own.

What are some basic expectations you have when going to watch a movie? The screen is supposed to be self-contained, right? You can be part of the experience, but you’re never going to be in the experience. YOU ARE THE FILM turns that distance into a doorway, a warning system, and eventually a rather funny argument over who gets to control life once someone else can see its next scene.

SUGAR COOKIES doesn’t feel like the Troma most viewers think they know. No mutant janitor swinging through radioactive chaos, no splatter-comedy, no self-aware barrage of slime, shouting, and bad taste. This is earlier, stranger (oddly enough), and more patient, the kind of low-budget 1970s erotic thriller that seems to have wandered out of New York’s underground film scene with lipstick on the glass and a knife hidden somewhere nearby.

STARBRIGHT is the kind of movie that makes you wish wanting something badly were enough to make it work. Francesco Lucente’s fantasy adventure has sincerity pouring out of nearly every frame, from its grieving farm girl to its fallen star to its big speeches about hope, faith, and the possibility that light can survive in a broken world. It wants to be sweeping. It wants to be old-fashioned. It wants to make you feel again. That’s admirable, and there are moments where that ambition peeks through. The problem is that the movie keeps mistaking scale for depth and length for emotional weight.

OUR EFFED UP WORLD has the nerve to look at an alien invasion and ask whether the end of everything might arrive at an inconvenient emotional time. That’s funnier than it sounds, sadder than expected, and exactly the kind of contradiction Alice Maio Mackay chases in their productions. The movie has monsters from beyond the stars, goofy genre ethics, bursts of attitude, and a title that mirrors the world we live in, all too well! Underneath all of that, it’s really about grief making the world feel optional.