
(NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ) -- The 45th Bi-Annual New Jersey Film Festival will take place between January 22-February 21, 2027. The Festival will continue in hybrid form as it has done in recent years, meaning it will be presented it online as well as with select in-person screenings at Rutgers University. Thirty-nine films will have their New Jersey or Area Premiere (Middlesex County) screenings as part of the New Jersey Film Festival and the United States Super 8 Film and Video Festival.

(MONTCLAIR, NJ) -- On Saturday, November 21, 2026, The Clairidge hosts a film showcase featuring three indie films - Wedding Night, Lady in the Mirror, and End of the Line: Brotherhood. Dive into three epic tales, one screen, and endless vibes at The Official Film Showcase. Showtime is 1:30pm.

(NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ) -- The 45th Bi-Annual New Jersey Film Festival will take place between January 22-February 21, 2027. The Festival will continue in hybrid form as it has done in recent years, meaning it will be presented it online as well as with select in-person screenings at Rutgers University. Thirty-nine films will have their New Jersey or Area Premiere (Middlesex County) screenings as part of the New Jersey Film Festival and the United States Super 8 Film and Video Festival.

(MONTCLAIR, NJ) -- On Saturday, November 21, 2026, The Clairidge hosts a film showcase featuring three indie films - Wedding Night, Lady in the Mirror, and End of the Line: Brotherhood. Dive into three epic tales, one screen, and endless vibes at The Official Film Showcase. Showtime is 1:30pm.







The shadow of 1999's The Blair Witch Project has loomed over every found footage horror movie to come our way in the subsequent century. With his directorial debut, Hunting Matthew Nichols, actor Markian Tarasiuk doesn't shy away from acknowledging that pivotal movie's influence. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez's micro-budget blockbuster is explicitly referenced as possibly motivating the plot of Hunting Matthew Nichols. Access to the stunning but foreboding forests of Vancouver Island was likely another motivating factor for Tarasiuk.

Had Jack Begert's Junk premiered at Sundance in 1995 rather than 2024 it likely would have made a bigger splash. It's very much a throwback to that post-Pulp Fiction era of American indie cinema, when all it took for a movie to receive plaudits was a non-linear plot structure and overlapping timelines. But in the 2020s such techniques have become old hat, 2004's Crash proving the final nail in the ensemble drama coffin.

Political thrillers aren't usually headlined by 70-year-old British actresses, but that's exactly what we get in director Kasia Adamik's Winter of the Crow, treating viewers to the sight of Lesley Manville outrunning secret police, getting involved in car chases and strangling a villain with a clothesline. In Phantom Thread, Manville's character warned Daniel Day Lewis that she could easily take him in a fight, and on the evidence of Winter of the Crow, we believe her.

It's no surprise that filmmakers have taken a generally dim view of online influencers in their screen portrayals of that modern phenomena. After all, such figures are taking eyes away from cinema and TV screens and directing them towards phones instead. Many a horror movie has featured an influencer among its roster of characters, and they're usually either a villain or a victim who is so unlikeable we're practically encouraged to celebrate their demise.

English language remakes of Kurosawa's 1963 thriller High and Low are like buses: you wait half a century for one and then three come along at once. Following Steven Soderbergh's mini-series Full Circle and Spike Lee's Highest 2 Lowest, we now get Ben Affleck's take on the setup in Animals. Unlike Soderbergh and Lee however, Affleck fails to credit Kurosawa, but make no mistake, this is just as much a remake of High and Low as Soderbergh and Lee's projects.