Premiering locally this weekend at Winston-Salem’s Out at the Movies film festival, Durham filmmaker Andie Morgenlander’s Whistle Down Wind is a lovely coming-of-age queer romance that follows a pair of best friends through childhood to adulthood as they begin to go separate ways, but maintain a close connection that goes deeper than either of them truly realize.

Rinko Kikuchi is so good in Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!, that it may be easy to overlook how messy the film around her is. Kikuchi (who was an Oscar nominee for her role in Babel) stars as Haru, an amateur dancer devastated by the sudden passing of her husband and dance parter, Luis (Alejandro Edda). With her life consumed by mourning, her friends encourage her to get back out on the dance floor and reclaim her joy.

As someone who has never seen a Resident Evil movie or played any of the video games on which they are based, I am coming to Zach Cregger’s new film with something of a blank slate. I don't know if this is a good “Resident Evil" movie or a good representation of the video game, and frankly I don't care. What I do know is that it is a damn good movie, and that Zach Cregger has cemented himself as one of the foremost horror filmmakers working today.

Practical Magic, the 1998 film starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman, seems a strange candidate for a legacy sequel. It wasn’t a particularly big hit at the time, although the strength of the chemistry between its stars propelled it to find an audience on cable and home video in the ensuing decades. It’s also not particularly good. A hackneyed, tonally uneven film about magic, sisterhood, and overcoming generational trauma, Practical Magic seems caught between the lighthearted comedy the studio wanted, and the more serious film director Griffin Dunne reportedly wanted to make.

When was the last time you were genuinely surprised by a movie? I don’t mean in a twist ending sort of way, I mean truly having no idea where a film is going to go next, when a film has gone totally off the map and we are in completely uncharted territory.

I'm a sucker for a good serial killer procedural. The 90s and early 2000s were rife with them, both good and bad, and having grown up in that era there's something oddly comforting about that genre and their often lurid pleasures. James Ashcroft's The Whisper Man fits very comfortably in that realm, but like so many of its 90s counterparts, it's also terrible.

When The Mandalorian debuted on Disney+ in 2019, Grogu, the pint-sized Force-sensitive critter popularly known as “Baby Yoda” became a runaway hit with audiences. Teamed up with the titular bounty hunter played by Pedro Pascal, Grogu’s adventures have now spanned multiple television shows (The Book of Boba Fett essentially served as The Mandalorian season 2.5) and now a theatrical feature, marking the first Star Wars film since 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker.

Watching Ridley Scott’s The Dog Stars, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day.  On the surface, the two films may appear to share little in common, but a closer look reveals more similarities than initially meet the eye. Both are science fiction films directed by venerable filmmakers who are no strangers to helming major blockbusters. Both are late period works that feel like elder statesmen looking for hope in a world they no longer recognize.

Siobhan McCarthy’s debut feature, She’s the He, is a trans-themed coming-of-age comedy that walks such a fine line of tastelessness that it could only have been successfully executed by a trans filmmaker.

Jane Schoenbrun’s films have spent a lot of time examining the impact of horror in media and pop culture, both as an influence on and an escape from a world that is somehow full of even more incomprehensible horrors. Whether its through the internet (We’re All Going to the World’s Fair), television (I Saw the TV Glow), or now the movies (Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma), Schoenbrun’s connection of fandom to identity and how it both shapes and offers insight into who we are has felt like a kind of balm for those who have found a kindred spirit in their idiosyncratic texts.

Jurassic Park so fully cornered the market on dinosaurs that you’d be hard pressed to name another successful dinosaur movie since 1993 that isn’t a part of the JP franchise. Spielberg’s film cast such a long shadow that even now his vision of t-rexes and velociraptors remains the default depiction of dinosaurs in popular culture, despite decades of scientific study that suggests they probably looked quite different.

There are few more foundational texts in western literature than Homer’s “The Odyssey.” An epic poem of ancient origin, Homer’s tale is a foundational text that is almost inescapable in its ubiquity. It is, quite simply, one of the greatest stories ever told. A staple of high school English classes, it’s hard to imagine many people in the west who don’t have at least a passing familiarity of the epic of Odysseus and his decade-long journey home from the Trojan war.

In the 1990s, LGBT films were, for the most part, still very much the territory of independents and specialty studios. While films about gay men were often tragic, films about lesbians tended to be more lighthearted affairs, which made Lisa Cholodenko’s directorial debut, High Art, something of an anomaly for its time.

Disclosure Day, the new film by the legendary Steven Spielberg, has drawn many rightful comparisons to the work of M. Night Shyamalan over the last few weeks. It’s certainly an apt comparison; it’s a deeply hopeful film about people working together in a time of global crisis. While the obvious parallel here is Signs, Shyamalan’s wildly popular alien invasion thriller, to me Disclosure Day feels more akin to The Happening.

Two years ago, I lost my maternal grandmother. I was sitting by her side in the nursing home when she passed. I’d recently moved into her home to take care of it in her absence, and I discovered a closeness to her during that time occupying space that had once belonged to her. My family moved a lot when I was younger, and her home was the closest thing to a childhood home I could go back to. Living amongst her things, old photographs of a full life lived long before my arrival, it felt like living in a haunted house; haunted by memories that belonged to someone else. There was something almost sacred about it - the chance to peer into a past that both was and was not mine.

Memories of Christian camps may spark something akin to PTSD for many people who grew up queer and possibly closeted, especially for those of us in the south for whom these events were often ubiquitous and unavoidable. Whether they were simply youth group excursions, or worse, conversion therapy, the thought of these camps can often be a source of trauma and isolation if you weren’t among those who fit into their straight, white hegemony.

In a time of unprecedented attacks on the transgender community from the halls of power worldwide, there’s something oddly comforting about the flourishing of underground queer art. Political pressure has certainly caused corporate owned studios to be shy about even the modicum of progress made when it comes to trans people in film out of fear of being perceived as “woke.” Thankfully, that hasn’t stopped trans people from telling our own stories. Queer art has always thrived underground, in the margins, especially in times of persecution and turmoil. Now, trans filmmakers like Louise Weard (Castration Movie), Alice Maio Mackay (The Serpent’s Skin), Vera Drew (The People’s Joker), Henry Hanson (Puppy Girl), and many others are out here making films on their own terms, and it’s incredibly inspiring to see queer and trans art flourishing in times like these.

After the very public firing of Melissa Barrera for speaking out against Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, Jenna Ortega’s departure from the series in solidarity, and the resignation of director Christopher Landon, the Scream franchise found itself in a lurch. Barrera and Ortega’s story had been the focus of Scream 5 and 6 and had represented something of a passing of the torch. Spyglass Entertainment’s craven dismissal of Barrera for her Palestinian solidarity essentially torched the franchise, forcing them to completely rework the already in development Scream 7.

It’s impossible to deny that YouTuber Curry Barker’s theatrical debut, Obsession, is a genuine phenomenon. Barker is part of an up-and-coming set of filmmakers who cut their teeth on YouTube and have transitioned to big screen filmmaking that includes Kane Parsons (Backrooms), the Philipou brothers (Bring Her Back), and Mark Fischbach (Iron Lung). Both Obsession and Backrooms have surged in the recent box office, toppling Disney’s latest Star Wars film, The Mandalorian and Grogu, with Obsession increasing its box office returns in its second and third weekends of release – a rare and notable feat.  

Watching Sophy Romvari’s barn-burning debut feature, Blue Heron, can be a disorienting experience. It often feels like we’re watching someone else’s memories unfold, missing key context that could make it all click. But then somewhere along the way it all falls into place – that’s the whole point.