The 24th Garden State Film Festival (GSFF) takes place March 26-29, 2026 across Asbury Park, Monmouth County & Cranford, Union County, NJ featuring over 200 films from around the world, events, filmmaker parties, live podcasts, industry panels and networking opportunities.
Self Portrait, directed by Samuel DeFrank, is a refreshing, albeit short, entry into the horror genre that tells the story of an aspiring model who is given the chance to be photographed by a famous artist at his cabin, not knowing the true, sinister nature of this photoshoot.
The Shoshani Riddle is a true international movie. Opening his investigation in France, director Michael Grynszpan traveled the globe from Israel to Uruguay, tracking the life of the mysterious Mr. Shoshani. Overdubbing a dramatized animation of Shoshani walking the streets of 1950s France, the film introduces its mysterious star. Shoshani was a great scholar and nomad throughout the mid 20th century. It was reported he spoke over 30 languages and had a perfect memory of the Torah, Talmud, Tanakh, and more. Earning the nickname “The Jewish Socrates,” Shoshani was a figure devoted to inquiry yet steeped in mystery. On his grave it is written, “His birth and his life are sealed in enigma.” While most audiences might be unfamiliar with Shoshani, his students include Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, who authored the mysterious epitaph of Shoshani’s tombstone.
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.
I love horror. I’ve loved it since I was twelve and my friends from Boy Scouts showed me Friday the 13th for the first time. With almost a decade of experiencing the genre, I have learned that there are things more terrifying than jump scares and gore, for example, the fear of the unknown. Sure, the monster or crazed killer might be scary, but when you can’t see who- or what- is killing people, the viewer’s mind is left to fill in the blanks, projecting their own fears onto the antagonist and making it seem much scarier. Everything is more frightening when you’re in the dark, and Samuel Freeman’s Don’t Look in the Dark uses this aspect of horror to its fullest effect.
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.
Though it's adapted from a novel from the '90s (Donald Westlake's 'The Ax', previously filmed as The Axe by Costa-Gavras in 2006), Park Chan-Wook's No Other Choice speaks to very modern fears around job stability in the age of AI. Like Bong Joon-ho's Parasite, it's centred on desperate measures taken by a protagonist to acquire a job, but there is no class satire here. AI doesn't care about our socio-economic backgrounds. It's coming for us all.
