(MANASQUAN, NJ) -- Algonquin Arts Theatre hosts World's Best Short Films presented by Asbury Shorts on Saturday, March 7, 2026 at 8:00pm. Curated by Doug LeClaire, the event brings a fast-paced "Short Film Concert" screening featuring award-winning comedy, drama, and animation.
Back in 2016, New Jersey Stage spoke with filmmaker Kevin McLaughlin about a film called Riot, which was starting to have screenings at film festivals. The film told the story of the Newark riots of 1967 and how the city spent 50 years trying to overcome that violent period of time.
As movie settings go, the backdrop of Atropia is one of the more arresting you'll find. Actress Hailey Benton Gates' feature debut as writer/director is set in Fort Irwin, a sprawling US military training compound in the California desert where young men and women are acclimatised to whichever corner of the world they're set to be deployed. Within Fort Irwin is a 600,000 acre area known as "The Box," which is used to recreate foreign lands, filled with actors performing as natives and insurgents.
Whether it's True Grit, Leon: The Professional, Man on Fire or the recent Dust Bunny, movies love to pair off gruff tough guys with precocious young girls. It was only a matter of time before Jason Statham found himself in such a scenario, which is exactly what we get from director Ric Roman Waugh's Shelter.
Here is the New Jersey Film Festival Spring 2026 Filmmaker Q+A with Director Yuwei Zhang and Festival Director Al Nigrin:
As movie settings go, the backdrop of Atropia is one of the more arresting you'll find. Actress Hailey Benton Gates' feature debut as writer/director is set in Fort Irwin, a sprawling US military training compound in the California desert where young men and women are acclimatised to whichever corner of the world they're set to be deployed. Within Fort Irwin is a 600,000 acre area known as "The Box," which is used to recreate foreign lands, filled with actors performing as natives and insurgents.
Whether it's True Grit, Leon: The Professional, Man on Fire or the recent Dust Bunny, movies love to pair off gruff tough guys with precocious young girls. It was only a matter of time before Jason Statham found himself in such a scenario, which is exactly what we get from director Ric Roman Waugh's Shelter.
Over the past decade, producer/director Timur Bekmambetov's name has become synonymous with the "screenlife" sub-genre. For those who are unaware, screenlife movies play out their narratives on the screens of laptops, tablets, phones and similar devices. Watching someone's desktop for 90 minutes may not sound too exciting but the format has proved surprisingly successful in thrillers like Unfriended, Searching and Profile. Much like the American horror movies of the 1970s took the genre out of its traditional Gothic setting of European castles and transferred it to the US suburbs, screenlife thrillers have a relatable immediacy, their thrills playing out on the sort of screens we stare at every day.
It's ironic that a terminal diagnosis can often result in the recipient getting a new lease of life. Knowing exactly how limited your time is can make you determined to embrace life and go out smiling. Conversely, the loved ones of such people often sink into depression, unable to adopt the positive outlook of the friend, lover or family member they're set to lose, forced to put on a brave face while dying a little themselves.
Remember that time when Batman and Superman stopped fighting because they realised they had both been raised by women named Martha? Chloé Zhao's Hamnet, adapted from the 2020 novel by Maggie O'Farrell, is centred on an equally silly contrivance. Just as Zack Snyder noted the aforementioned tenuous link between Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent, O'Farrell twigged that William Shakespeare had a short-lived son named Hamnet and also wrote a play titled 'Hamlet'. Could the two be linked? Err, no. 'Hamlet' was based on the Danish legend of Amleth and doesn't feature so much as a single dead son. But in O'Farrell's eyes Willy the Shake wrote the tragedy as a coping mechanism for the grief he felt over the loss of his boy, which is odd given how the bard penned a couple of comedies in the immediate aftermath of his kid's death.
