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.
A world-ending disaster usually brings along chaos, cities crashing into rubble, and a camera shouting over the noise. WE BURY THE DEAD works in the opposite direction. The catastrophe has already happened. It’s quiet now. Ash settles, bodies lie where they fell, and the survivors are left to clean up the pieces without answers or time to process. The film is built around a simple idea: when the dead refuse to stay buried, grief doesn’t disappear; it intensifies. Zak Hilditch approaches the premise with restraint, focusing less on gore and more on the fallout of a world that suddenly made no sense.
This documentary approaches Julian Assange like the eye of a storm, not a martyr standing on a hill. THE SIX BILLION DOLLAR MAN treats him as a symbol caught between governments, surveillance systems, fractured narratives, and the terrifying frame of a world where information itself is weaponized. Eugene Jarecki’s award-winning return to the political documentary form is the kind of film that’s less interested in what Assange did, moment to moment, than in what his existence reveals about how power operates today. It’s confident, concentrated, and structured with the tension of a political thriller, even as it tackles territory that’s been explored before. What’s new is the scale and the access.
DELINQUENT SCHOOLGIRLS is the kind of film that doesn’t ask whether its premise is appropriate, logical, or even remotely defensible. It simply launches into chaos with commitment, reflecting a period of exploitation filmmaking built on shock value, budgets, and whatever concept could draw attention on a marquee. Watching it today is less about the story—which barely exists—and more about experiencing a very specific corner of 1970s grindhouse cinema, one where boundaries were pushed mostly because no one involved believed any existed. This new addition to the PSYCHO TRONICA line embraces exactly that, packaging a notorious title with a much-needed restoration that leaves every rough edge intact.
TIMESTAMP is constructed without narration, interviews, or commentary, yet there is not a moment when the film feels silent. On the surface, it documents school life in Ukraine during the ongoing Russian invasion. That premise alone would suggest something direct and investigative, a chronicle of crisis through the eyes of children and teachers. Instead, the film achieves something more: it captures the persistence of the ordinary while the extraordinary becomes constant. Every scene appears calm, but danger is never more than a siren away. The documentary’s design makes normalcy feel like an act of resistance.
KILL THE JOCKEY feels like a film built of fragments of a nightmare that somehow reflect the logic of someone who no longer trusts reality. Luis Ortega structures the movie around a simple known truth: Remo was once good. He was a renowned jockey, admired, reckless, and so consumed by bad habits that talent couldn’t save him from becoming a liability. Everything that follows comes from that truth cracking open. The film begins in the world of debt, violence, and desperation, and by its final stretch, it becomes something symbolic rather than literal.
FLATHEAD grounds itself in the return of a man to a place that shaped him long before he understood what shaping meant. Cass Cumerford’s late-life journey back to Bundaberg isn’t framed as a grand pilgrimage or a dramatic reckoning. Instead, it plays out as a conversation with the past spoken in pauses, glances, and stories pieced together from strangers who seem to know him without really knowing him. The film meets Cass without nostalgia for the “old” Australia or skepticism about the new one. It wanders with him, the way memory does: less in a straight line, more in unfinished thoughts and gentle contradictions.
DOGMA is, without question, my favorite Kevin Smith film. I can’t help but be biased, but I feel like the film is nearly perfect in almost every way. The release limbo that the film has been in has caused a ton of chaos in the collector community. The 25th-anniversary 4K UHD release is more than a format upgrade; it’s a reintroduction to a movie that predicted a cultural collision between spirituality and organized extremism long before it defined mainstream discourse. Comedy rarely stays relevant for twenty-five years. This one did because its target isn’t belief—it’s the machinery built around belief and the complacency that follows.
TOWNSEND approaches therapy from an unusual angle, turning the concept inward and making the therapist the one searching for answers. The show follows Dr. Patrick Townsend, a celebrity psychologist whose life has publicly fallen apart. Instead of rebuilding his credibility through a redemption arc, the pilot puts him in a space where he’s questioning everything he used to present as expert guidance. It carries a dry, irreverent sense of humor that acknowledges how strange it can be when a person trained to guide others must confront his own lack of clarity.
THE HANDMAID’S TALE always carried a specific goal, but experiencing all six seasons together intensifies how its atmosphere of dread became its greatest tool and, later, its toughest limitation. The vision defined the early seasons; they weren’t content with simply imagining a collapsed America but actively interrogated how a society with democratic roots could break itself into something monstrous. This isn't just a setting—it’s an autopsy report. The first season, especially, remains one of the strongest debuts in modern television, propelled by the raw immediacy of Elisabeth Moss’ performance. She built June Osborne not as a symbol of rebellion from the outset, but as someone dragged toward resistance through repeated psychological and physical shattering. (The irony is how familiar many aspects of the series look to the real world we’re living in.)
A bachelor party comedy usually starts with the same expectation: chaos, hangovers, bad decisions, and some attempt at clarity before the credits roll. STRIPPER BOYZ takes that blueprint and flips the premise, creating a surprisingly sincere experience without sacrificing the absurdity of watching two lifelong friends attempt to become male revue performers. Stephen brings his best friend Joe to Las Vegas for a bachelor weekend, and instead of hiring entertainment, the two decide they'll be the entertainment. Their mission is framed like a joke, but the film doesn’t treat it as a punchline. The goal is confidence, body positivity, and pushing past the kind of self-doubt that often hides behind humor. The result is a hybrid film that plays like both a narrative buddy comedy and a documentary about pushing beyond your comfort zone.
Most crime stories often live or die by how quickly the filmmaker can establish danger, desire, and motivation. SLOPPY SUNDAY is less concerned with building a sprawling criminal ecosystem than it is with capturing the exact moment a young woman decides she no longer wants to belong to someone else’s version of survival. The film follows Sweetheart, a young sex worker who quits working under her abusive pimp and tries to find a way out of town before she’s dragged back into the same world. The idea is simple, the execution is tight, and the short’s energy comes from watching a character who looks like she could be overpowered at any moment make decisions that flip that assumption on its head.
WITHDRAWAL doesn’t open with the kind of framing that tries to soften addiction into something cinematic. It drops us into the middle of a relationship that had long since become unsustainable, long before either character was ready to admit it. Two young lovers — a singer-songwriter with talent she can’t access and a boyfriend who mistakes loyalty for martyrdom — decide to kick heroin in the most chaotic way possible: alone, together, in a night full of pain they don’t have the tools to process. It’s a terrible plan, but the film understands why it feels like the only option they believe they have left.
WADD: THE LIFE & TIMES OF JOHN C. HOLMES is not a documentary that sits quietly with an expected biography-style dive. It's blunt, direct, and in many ways deliberately unsettling, not because it tries to shock the audience, but because the subject’s life was already a spectacle of extremes. The film isn’t interested in softening Holmes’s story or turning him into a sanitized figure. Instead, it presents a portrait that forces viewers to consider how a reputation becomes a myth, how a person becomes a commodity, and how an era without boundaries creates figures who are never equipped to handle the consequences of their own fame. As a documentary, it functions both as a biography and a time capsule, revealing an industry that was being invented moment by moment, often faster than anyone could comprehend.
HOW TO START A CULT IN 5-EASY STEPS begins with a defeated college graduate examining the world for any sign that adulthood is supposed to feel better than survival. Instead of entering a career, he’s staring down a wall of debt that isn’t an abstract — it’s a direct reminder that he worked this hard and still ended up in the exact position he feared. That frustration becomes the spark for a strange plan: if confidence, charisma, and a pulpit lead to security, then why not build a pulpit of his own?
218 understands that childhood isn’t shaped by what adults say; it’s shaped by everything they refuse to explain. The film makes that idea feel contained to one apartment number, where an eight-year-old boy wakes up to the same unanswered questions every morning. His mother leaves without context. Two officers sit in the living room. The silence is supposed to keep him safe, yet nothing about the situation feels safe to him. The adults may control the problem, but the audience is positioned within the reality of a child abandoned by information.