Waynesville‘s Hometown News Site

TEMPEST is a series designed to transcend borders. At first glance, it’s another entry in the sprawling world of espionage dramas. Yet, under the surface, it delivers more—an exploration of trust, loyalty, and fractured identities played out against a conspiracy that stretches from Seoul to Washington.

Set against the rise of Apple and the near-mythic figure of Steve Jobs, EVERYTHING TO ME unfolds as a clever, heartfelt look at ambition, failure, and the moments in between that actually shape who we become. Kayci Lacob, making her feature directorial debut, crafts a story that is both nostalgic and incisive, weaving Silicon Valley’s glossy allure with the awkward realities of growing up.

Short films thrive when they condense ambitious ideas into concise storytelling, and AS i BELIEVE THE WORLD TO BE does just that. Written and directed by Spooky Madison, the project was born from creative constraint: competitors were given a theme and a prop and had only a month to turn the concept into a finished film. The result is a thriller that blurs the line between reality and imagination, a compact story in which a writer tests the limits of chaos one mind can conjure before the world pushes back.

James Sweeney’s TWINLESS takes a premise ripe for intrigue — two men bonding in a bereavement support group for twins — and spins it into a darkly funny, emotionally layered story that defies expectations. Written, directed by, and co-starring Sweeney, this Sundance audience award-winner refuses to stay in a single lane. It’s hilarious and biting one moment, deeply moving the next, and even a little shocking when its secrets unravel. The result is one of the year’s most distinctive indie films, anchored by two phenomenal performances.

Chad Hartigan’s THE THREESOME begins as the kind of presumptuous premise you might expect from a raunchy sex comedy: two long-time friends finally hook up and bring in a stranger into the mix for a spontaneous night together. However, rather than relying solely on cheap laughs, the film uses that impulsive encounter as the starting point for something more complex. At its core, it’s a romantic comedy with genuine weight — one willing to ask what happens when a fantasy meets reality, and when adults are forced to grow up in the aftermath.

PSYCHIC MURDER may only run ten minutes, but it crams in a surprising amount of tension, satire, and complexity into those frames. Directed and co-written by Brandon Block, the film tells the story of Billy (Will Bernish), a struggling young stand-up comic born with a three-fingered hand. Early on, Billy can’t quite find his voice on stage. His jokes lack confidence, and his physical differences are something he avoids fully embracing. The breakthrough comes when he begins folding his own disability into his material, using humor as a way to claim ownership over his body and his story. It’s a moment that feels both triumphant and slightly uneasy, as the film wisely doesn’t present self-deprecating humor as an uncomplicated solution.

Director and co-writer Brandon Christensen has long demonstrated an interest in using horror to explore more than just jump scares. The film’s setting—a quiet 1980s suburb where Halloween is still a community event—immediately feels familiar, yet the story avoids playing like a mere nostalgia cliche. Instead, it builds suspense by centering on Deena (Jessica Clement), a college student reluctantly taking a last-minute babysitting job while back home for the weekend. It’s a premise that sounds classic on paper. Still, Christensen and his brother Ryan give it a fresh twist by intersecting Deena’s ordeal with the investigation of Sheriff Rod (Ryan Robbins), who receives a chilling package suggesting a previous murder may only be the beginning.

Sometimes the most unexpected journeys carry the deepest emotional weight. DARUMA takes that familiar notion and reshapes it into a story that’s genuinely heartfelt in its humanity. At its core, this indie drama doesn’t hinge on disability as a narrative gimmick; instead, it highlights fully realized characters who happen to live with disabilities, allowing their complexities to take center stage. While the film started a little slowly, I wasn’t entirely sure where it was going, but it picked up in the second and third acts to offer a complete story that will get you in your feels!

THE INNKEEPERS is the type of ghost story that lingers long after the credits roll, not because it overwhelms you with cheap jolts, but because it patiently wraps you in unease until the silence itself feels threatening. Ti West’s 2011 indie gem has always thrived on atmosphere, and with Dark Sky Selects bringing it back in a fully restored 4K UHD steelcase release, its reputation as one of the most effective modern slow-burn horrors feels more solid than ever.

Country music’s origins are often romanticized, but THE MUSIC WE CALL COUNTRY does something better: it traces the genre’s roots with detail and genuine affection for the people that shaped its sound. At just under an hour, Greg Gross’ documentary is concise yet not rushed, offering an exploration of the 1927 Bristol Sessions and the first wave of country superstars, including Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family.

Family dinners are rarely as peaceful as the movies make them out to be. SUNDAY SAUCE leans into that chaos, delivering a bold, biting, and unexpectedly moving portrait of identity and inheritance—all packed into a brisk 14 minutes. Writer-director Matt Campanella’s short, fresh off its selection at the Oscar-qualifying HollyShorts Film Festival, proves that he has a knack for finding the emotional fault lines hidden beneath familiar rituals.

Some stories yell for your attention; others leave a lasting impression through moments told. ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS belongs to the latter. At only twenty-one minutes, Franz Böhm crafts an experience so immediate and emotionally raw that its brevity feels deceptive. This is not a war story told from afar, but an intimate portrait of survival shaped by those who lived its horror.

LARGO captures the enormity of global crises through the eyes of those most affected, offering an unfiltered look at the refugee experience from a child’s perspective without slipping into sentimentality. At just 19 minutes, the short is an emotional powerhouse, striking a balance between grief and hope.

PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR: AN AMERICAN POET is a compact but potent short film that dramatizes one of America’s most overlooked voices at a time when those words were desperately needed. Written and directed by Kane Stratton, the 10-minute drama reconstructs a moment from 1903 Dayton, Ohio, in which Dunbar, one of the first influential Black poets in American literature, stands against the incomplete promises of the Emancipation Proclamation forty years after it was signed. With a small cast and contained setting, the film succeeds in amplifying the timeless urgency of Dunbar’s call for compassion and sympathy.

BEYOND TRAINSPOTTING – THE WORLD OF IRVINE WELSH promises to take viewers further than the title that defined a generation, but what it ultimately delivers is a lively, sometimes messy documentary that never quite decides what it wants to be. Directed by Ray Burdis and Ian Jefferies, it assembles an impressive lineup of contributors—from rock icons like Iggy Pop and Bobby Gillespie to longtime collaborators like Danny Boyle and Ewan McGregor—yet the strongest presence throughout is Irvine Welsh himself. His voice, his wit, and his honesty remain the film’s greatest strengths, even when the documentary around him struggles.

Hollywood history is full of improbable success stories, but few properties seem more unlikely in retrospect than the ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.’ Four anthropomorphic turtles trained in martial arts by a rat in the sewers of New York hardly screams mainstream appeal, and yet the franchise became a worldwide cultural juggernaut. Writer-director Vin Nucatola seizes on this irony with his 2019 short ITALIAN TURTLES, a nine-minute comedy that imagines the pitch meeting where it all might have begun. Equal parts parody and affectionate nod, the film thrives on deadpan humor and exaggerated performances that lean into the absurdity of trying to explain something so bizarre in a corporate setting.

The premise of FRENCH LESSONS sounds deceptively simple: two men meet in Los Angeles for a conversation before leaving for Cannes. Yet in its eight-minute runtime, the short becomes an exploration of the endless tug-of-war between commerce and creativity. Directors Kyle Garrett Greenberg and Anna Maguire position the film at the intersection of satire and genuineness, offering a brisk but layered reflection on how ego, ambition, and industry can make even a simple meeting feel like a battle of wills.

The pairing of BLUE (1968) and FADE IN (1973) in Imprint Films’ limited edition hardbox is one of those archival moves that could only come from a label willing to champion overlooked oddities. At first glance, these films might not seem to warrant such lavish treatment: one is a Western that has long carried a reputation for being miscast and misguided, and the other is a troubled romance that was buried by the studio system. But together—along with Daniel Kremer’s 2024 documentary CRUEL, USUAL, NECESSARY: THE PASSION OF SILVIO NARIZZANO—they create a narrative about ambition, compromise, and the kind of filmmakers whose legacies slip between the cracks of cinema history.

SOMNIUM doesn’t waste time presenting itself as a straightforward horror story. Instead, Racheal Cain’s debut feature embraces the unstable terrain of dreams and ambition, using both as fuel for a haunting exploration of identity, exploitation, and the desperate pursuit of success. It’s a film that feels pulled straight from the subconscious, where every room hides another reflection of fear and every door opens onto an opportunity that could just as easily devour you.

Some films whisper from the edge of consciousness, asking viewers not to understand them but to inhabit them. SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS, the new feature from Stephen and Timothy Quay, belongs entirely to that realm. After a two-decade hiatus from feature-length storytelling, the brothers have returned with a piece that is less a conventional narrative than a moving installation. This artwork navigates a space between cinema, sculpture, and the realm of dreams. It is as much a test of patience as it is a demonstration of creativity and imagination; it exists in the space between admiration and frustration.

THE FANTASTIC GOLEM AFFAIRS wastes no time announcing its intentions: this is not a world bound by rules. Within the first minutes, a rooftop game between friends ends with one of them plummeting to his death — only his body doesn’t break in the way ours would. Instead, he smashes into porcelain shards, as if he were never human at all. It’s a shocking image, absurd and unsettling, that sets the tone for what follows: a surreal odyssey where death, bureaucracy, and friendship intersect in a Spain that feels both familiar and utterly alien. This film isn’t what you think it will be, and then when you think you understand what it is, it resets expectations and becomes something else entirely.

STRANGER EYES is one of those films that gets under your skin before you even realize how deeply it has sunk in. Marketed as a surveillance thriller, it begins as a story of a couple unraveling in the wake of their daughter’s disappearance, only to transform into something far more — a meditation on observation, grief, and the ways people fracture under relentless scrutiny. While its icy craftsmanship is in the tradition of cerebral European and Asian thrillers, Yeo Siew Hua’s direction never settles for homage. Instead, it carves out its unnerving exploration, sometimes alienating in its patience, but never less than fascinating.

High school movies never truly go out of style; they simply reflect the anxieties and experiences of each generation. ALMOST POPULAR joins that lineage with a familiar setup—a pair of misfit best friends chasing the approval of the cool kids—but it spins that story with a blend of modern social media, heartfelt friendship, and a clear love for the teen comedies of the ’90s and 2000s. Director Nayip Anthony Garcia makes his feature debut with something that manages to be both broad and unique, balancing humiliation with a sincere message about self-worth.

In the late 1990s, Hollywood was eager to mine television nostalgia, repackaging classic titles with blockbuster budgets. LOST IN SPACE arrived in 1998 as part of that wave, promising an epic rebirth of the campy 1960s series into a sleek, effects-driven spectacle. With a cast including Gary Oldman, William Hurt, Matt LeBlanc, and Heather Graham, it looked poised to be both a crowd-pleaser and a new franchise starter. Yet, despite moments of genuine entertainment and now with an Arrow Video 4K restoration that reminds us of its visual ambition, the film never quite found its footing. Instead, it became a curious artifact: half-genuine family space adventure, half-awkward reminder of the perils of big-budget remakes.

In 2003, Platinum Dunes, the studio newly founded by Michael Bay, took a gamble: remaking Tobe Hooper’s 1974 horror landmark THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. At the time, the decision sparked anger among purists who believed the original should remain untouched. What followed was a grisly, unapologetic reimagining from director Marcus Nispel and screenwriter Scott Kosar. It would not only become a massive box office success but also ignite a wave of horror remakes throughout the 2000s (for better or worse). Two decades later, the film remains as divisive as it was at release — but it’s hard to deny the impact it left.