Cinematographer Dean Francis’ warm photography, stained with sunny hues of marigold, belies the aching feeling inside of Casey as he traverses a highway flanked by fields of grain toward a truck stop. The white cowboy hat topping his boyish face and muscular frame attracts a bearded trucker; their bathroom encounter is the first of Casey’s

After opening with a spooky dolly shot into some woods, this movie, also written and directed by Robert Machoian, shows us our title character, who is shaving OFF his beard. He leaves behind a sculpted swath of lip hair that he tells his wife is his “hunter’s mustache.” In a mess of expository dialogue between

“Night Ride” – Eirik Tveiten’s film is the kind of simple, well crafted, self-contained comedy that few shorts filmmakers conceive these days. Ebba (Sigrid Kandal Husjord) accidentally starts up a tram and puts it in motion after the driver stubbornly refuses to drive so he can take a long break. As she quickly learns what

Red is a mess. She lives in the garage behind her mother’s house and goes inside every day for meals. She’s never snipped the apron strings. She is a serial job-loser. Something always seems to go wrong. She’s “quirky,” but it’s quirkiness with an edge. When she drinks too much, she goes bananas. In fact,

Mother reassures her Daughter in Vietnamese. This early conversation seems to go on for longer than it should, but the silences that punctuate Dinh’s speech only deepen the unsettling mood established by a wide-angle master shot, which highlights the sheer size and emptiness of Father’s garage. Natural light, some film grain, and an unusual focus

“Forspoken” works from such an obvious “Alice in Wonderland” template that it even drops in literal references to the classic fairy tale. This time, Alice is Frey (Ella Balinska of the recent Netflix “Resident Evil” reboot), a New Yorker who has been getting into trouble in the Big Apple when she’s inexplicably transported to the

It’s a charming premise that then turns into a suspense movie as Jaakko decides not to wait for help but go off on his own to see Sirpa. Unfortunately, he meets strangers both helpful and unkind, some of whom take advantage of his blindness to rob and kidnap him. However serious things get, overall, his

Her story would seem like a can’t-miss subject for a crowd-pleasing film, and “True Spirit”—starring Teagan Croft of DC’s “Titans,” directed by Sarah Spillane and co-written by her and Cathy Randall—does not miss. The screenplay’s structure tends to impede dramatic momentum by regularly cutting back to key moments in Watson’s childhood just when the present-tense action is building

The contrived way they reconnect a decade after their divorce starts things off on a wobbly note. Bennett’s Patricia is an American in England for some vague work trip. When her meeting never materializes, she heads to a boutique hotel inside a converted countryside estate. Complaining about how ugly her room is and comforting herself

The day she gave it to me, I realized how beautiful it was to own this piece because I had a feeling in it there was a whole part of her life, of her experiences. I remember seeing her go off to a wedding in this caftan. And then it’s like if I were wearing