New Jersey Stage logo
New Jersey Stage Menu



FILM FEATURES

ART | COMEDY | DANCE | FILM | MUSIC | THEATRE | COMMUNITY

Showing film results: From 1 to 10


Annie, wake up screens at the 2026 United States Super 8 Film + Digital Video Festival on Sunday, February 22!

by Penelope de la Cruz
published 2026-02-18

Annie, wake up is an experimental film by Laura Ivins, an experimental filmmaker based in Southern Indiana. Ivins has been working on this film for over a decade, beginning to collect footage in 2012. The project developed slowly over time and does not follow a traditional narrative. Instead, the film grew out of years of careful reflection and revisiting the material, and that thoughtful process is a big part of how it feels. The work carries a strong sense of time passing and allows meaning to form gradually rather than being forced.




 

Mixtape for Stom Sogo screens at the 2026 United States Super 8 Film + Digital Video Festival on Sunday, February 22!

by Penelope de la Cruz
published 2026-02-17

Mixtape for Stom Sogo doesn’t feel like a documentary trying to explain its subject. It feels more like someone sitting with unresolved thoughts and letting them unfold. Directed by Adrian Goycoolea, the film is framed around a response to the last email he received from his friend Stom Sogo before he died. This is not a biography or a structured story. It’s a conversation with someone who isn’t there anymore, full of hesitation, memories, and questions that don’t get answered.



Winners of the Spring 2026 New Jersey Film Festival Competition Announced!

by Al Nigrin
published 2026-02-16

The Competition component of the Spring 2026 New Jersey Film Festival has just concluded! Overall, we had a good festival this year.  We had a few screenings that were very well attended and a bunch with lower turnouts but that happens every festival for a variety of reasons.  The in-person show attendance was about the same as our Festival last year, but the online viewership is what has kept us afloat financially since COVID broke in 2020. All the Official Selection works of the Spring 2026 New Jersey Film Festival were selected by a panel of judges including media professionals, journalists, students, and academics. These judges selected the 33 finalists which were publicly screened at our Festival. The finalists were selected from over 600 works submitted by filmmakers from around the world. In addition, the judges chose the Prize Winners in conjunction with the Festival Director. Here below are the winners of the Festival. 



New Release Review - "Send Help"

by Eric Hillis, TheMovieWaffler.com
published 2026-02-15

With Send Help, screenwriters Damian Shannon and Mark Swift have taken the basic setup of Lina Wertmuller's Swept Away (and its awful Madonna-starring, Guy Ritchie directed remake) and given it a gender swap. Here it's a lowly female employee who finds herself stranded on a desert island with her male boss. Much of Send Help explores the same class and sexual tensions as Wertmuller's film, but with Sam Raimi in the director's chair we know things are going to get a little crazy at some point. And, boy, do they!



By popular demand Freeing Juanita returns to the 2026 New Jersey Film Festival on Friday, February 20!

by Yuri Kim
published 2026-02-15

Freeing Juanita, directed by Sebastián Lasaosa Rogers, is not the kind of documentary you watch and walk away from unchanged. It stays with you long after the credits roll. At its heart, this is a film about one woman, wrongfully imprisoned. But as you watch it unfold, you realize it’s also about so much more: a broken immigration system, the erasure of Indigenous voices, and the extraordinary strength of family and community.