There is something almost mesmerizing about watching a dancer move alongside a horse. At certain moments in Imprinted, their movements feel so natural together that it is easy to forget how much trust and communication it takes to reach that point. Directed and produced by Martina Casas, the documentary follows choreographer JoAnna Mendl Shaw and her work with dancers and horses through The Equus Projects. What first seems like a film about an unusual form of dance slowly becomes something much more meaningful. Through beautiful movement, unexpected challenges, and quieter moments between the dancers and horses, Imprinted explores how two completely different species can learn to communicate without words.
(NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ) -- State Theatre New Jersey presents The Rocky Horror Picture Show with Barry Bostwick (The Original Brad Majors) on Saturday, October 3, 2026 at 7:30pm. A VIP meet & greet with Barry Bostwick as well as tickets to The Rocky Horror After-Party are available. Regular event tickets start at $34.
Here is the New Jersey Film Festival Fall 2026 Short Film Video Panel with Filmmakers Lukas Berger, Filip Jacobson, Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu, Andrea Otto Longhi, and Festival Director Albert Nigrin.
Here is my interview with Clan of the Painted Lady Director Jennifer Chiu who is a Hakka-Canadian filmmaker who contends with the loss of her ancestral community in Kolkata, India. She journeys across the world to uncover the story of her family’s past and confronts the effects of migration on family, belonging and the uncertainty of preserving culture in the modern world.
Migration is often discussed in terms of the places people leave and the places they eventually call home, but Clan of the Painted Lady, directed by Jennifer Chiu, is more interested in everything that happens in between. The documentary follows Chiu as she reconnects with her Hakka identity and traces her family history stretching across China, India, and Canada. Born in India and raised in Canada, Chiu grew up mostly separated from her father, who spent much of his life in Kolkata, India. What begins as a personal search into her own family eventually becomes a larger exploration of migration, cultural loss, and what it takes to keep a culture alive across generations.
It makes sense that James Wan would latch onto Kane Parsons, recently serving as producer on Parsons' film adaptation of his cult web series Backrooms. Long before horror fans became obsessed with liminal spaces, Wan was exploring just such an idea through his Insidious franchise. The series features its own liminal realm, known as "The Further," a sort of demonic buffer zone between this world and the next. Practically every entry in the series climaxes with someone entering The Further to defeat some form of evil, but it never really took advantage of the eeriness of liminal spaces.
Irish writer/director Kate Dolan's excellent 2022 feature debut You Are Not My Mother marked her as a horror filmmaker to keep an eye on. Blumhouse certainly had their eyes on Dolan, snapping her up to direct a movie in the M3GAN franchise. The result is Soulm8te (the movie itself mocks that clunky title). An unfair victim of the disastrous box office performance of last year's M3GAN 2.0, Dolan's film was pulled from its theatrical slot and dumped onto VOD. Any connections to the M3GAN universe that may have previously existed have been scrubbed, resulting in a standalone killer sexbot thriller.
We've gotten so many shark movies in the last few years that at this point they've all begun to blur into one big mess of chum. The core issue with this crowded sub-genre is that there simply aren't enough variations on the theme. The best of the recent crop, Dangerous Animals, worked because it gave us a human serial killer who was arguably scarier than the sharks. Every other recent shark movie carries on the tradition set by 2003's Open Water, that of characters becoming stranded in a body of water that unfortunately for them, happens to be infested with man-eaters (watch out or they'll chew you up).