Following the success of Top Gun: Maverick, the world's dads began to wonder if maybe they might next be gifted a similarly belated sequel to that other high octane Tom Cruise vehicle, Days of Thunder. Ironically, Maverick's director Joseph Kosinski has probably scuppered any chance of that happening, as his racing drama F1 is exactly the movie you imagine a Days of Thunder follow-up would be.
(MILLVILLE, NJ) -- The Levoy Theatre hosts the CUT International Short Film Festival September 19-20, 2025. The festival's motto is 'Short Films for Quick Minds'. Its aim is to become the premier festival in New Jersey for short form films.
Director Gerard Johnstone scored a hit with his 2023 AI thriller M3GAN, so now we have the obligatory upgrade. And like most software updates, this one doesn't improve on what we already had, rather it adds unwanted features and comes with its share of glitches. It strays so far away from the simplicity of the first movie that if the series is to continue it's going to require a full system restore to an earlier saved point.
(NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ) -- The 44th Bi-Annual New Jersey Film Festival take place between September 5 - October 10, 2025. The Festival will continue to be a hybrid with films available online as well as doing select in-person screenings at Rutgers University. Twenty films will have their New Jersey or Area Premiere (Middlesex County) during the festival. In addition to the screenings, the festival will also be offering three filmmaking workshops and continues its run of audio-visual concerts with a performance by Cold Weather Company.
Following Justin Anderson's Swimming Home, Rebecca Lenkiewicz's Hot Milk is the second adaptation of a Deborah Levy novel to arrive in 2025. Both movies share a Mediterranean setting, and both feature uptight English-speakers being seduced by an enigmatic and bohemian European woman. They're both frustratingly obtuse. Neither film really nails down what it wants to say, but Hot Milk is the more engaging of the two, thanks largely to an attention-grabbing performance from Fiona Shaw.
Following the conclusion of the original run of Planet of the Apes movies in the '70s, European cinemagoers were surprised to find a new batch of Planet of the Apes movies arriving in their local picture palaces. These new movies weren't actually movies at all, but two episodes of the Planet of the Apes TV show stitched together to fill a feature length running time. 28 Years Later, director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland's belated (or five years early?) third instalment of their not-zombie franchise, might be mistaken for two episodes of The Walking Dead glued together and released into cinemas.
British director Michael Pearce made an impressive debut with this 2017 Channel Islands-set thriller Beast, helping to make a star of Jesse Buckley in the process. After an underwhelming sci-fi sojourn with 2021's Encounter, Pearce now returns to thriller territory with Echo Valley. If you've seen Max Ophuls' 1949 thriller The Reckless Moment or its 2001 Tilda Swinton-starring remake The Deep End, the premise of Echo Valley will prove familiar. Well, the first half at least. In its second half Echo Valley deviates off course, and it's at that point that it runs into trouble.
Many short films are made as pitches for a potential feature film, and as such they tease an interesting concept while lacking the time to actually explore it in any detail. Working with co-writer Rumi Kakuta, director Yûta Shimotsu makes his feature debut, Best Wishes to All, by expanding his earlier short of the same name. While the feature length version develops the theme of the short, it never fully digs into what exactly it is it's trying to address. Viewers may be left frustrated by a rushed final act, but for fans of extreme Japanese horror, Shimotsu's debut is a must-see.
Like the boxing movie, you might think the prison drama should have grown stale by now, and yet it continues to surprise. Inside, the feature debut of Cannes-winning writer/director Charles Williams, might have the least original title for a prison movie imaginable, but it uses its familiar setting in distinctive ways that almost reinvent the sub-genre.
When it comes to coming-of-age comedies, the best ones of recent years have been centred on teenage girls (Lady Bird, The Edge of Seventeen, Eighth Grade et al) rather than their male counterparts. Comedies about teenage boys tend to portray them as one-dimensional horndogs whose only goal is to get laid before they graduate, whereas the female protagonists of such movies have far more complex concerns. It's a relief then to find that Lemonade Blessing is that rare teen comedy that offers us a well-rounded young male protagonist, one who isn't even all that bothered about losing his virginity.