Family Movie. Directed by Kevin Bacon
Family Movie is a gleefully scrappy B-movie slasher that fully leans into its “family affair” premise. With Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick joined by their kids, Sosie Bacon and Travis Bacon, the film plays like a love letter to the genre filtered through a homegrown, self-aware lens. It’s part slasher homage, part meta-comedy, and part celebration of what happens when a family actually makes something together. The result is messy, but playful, and far more charming than it has any right to be. A slasher, sure, but one with enough warmth and humor to make it feel oddly universal.
Seekers of Infinite Love. Directed by Victoria Strouse
Victoria Strouse’s Seekers of Infinite Love comes loaded with a killer cast featuring Hannah Einbinder, Justin Theroux, and John Reynolds, and a premise that should be a slam dunk: siblings banding together to pull their sister out of a suicide cult. On paper, it’s the kind of dark, absurd setup that practically writes itself. So where does it fall apart? Put simply, the film tries way too hard to be funny. Instead of trusting its cast to find the humor within the situation by letting the inherent absurdity do the heavy lifting. It leans aggressively into secondhand-embarrassment comedy. Every scene feels overstuffed, like it’s straining for laughs rather than letting them land. Rather than allowing the tension and humor to build organically as these siblings navigate a genuinely dire situation, the film forces its comedy at every turn. Characters constantly talk over each other, creating noise instead of momentum, and the result is less chaotic energy and more exhausting clutter. Nothing really gets accomplished except amplifying how frustratingly inept everyone seems. It’s a case where restraint would have gone a long way. There’s a sharper, funnier film buried in here somewhere, but Seekers of Infinite Love never stops long enough to find it.
The Sun Never Sets. Directed by Joe Swanberg
There’s a lot I admire about Joe Swanberg’s The Sun Never Sets. I’m drawn to stories about messy, uneven relationships where wants and needs don’t quite line up and the film leans fully into that tension as its couple tries to navigate the disconnect. The performances are a major strength across the board, with Dakota Fanning, Jake Johnson, and Cory Michael Smith all doing excellent work. And yet, for whatever reason, it never fully clicked for me. On a technical level, it’s solid, and the story itself is compelling. But there’s an intangible disconnect that kept me at arm’s length. Sometimes that just happens where everything works, it just doesn’t work for you. In the end, The Sun Never Sets is well-crafted and thoughtfully performed, but it’s simply not my cup of tea.
The Shitheads. Directed by Macon Blair
Macon Blair’s The Shitheads is a throwback in the best and worst ways as it is a road trip stoner comedy that feels ripped straight out of the early 2000s. It runs on pure chaos logic where if something can go wrong, it absolutely will for this pair of wannabe good Samaritans tasked with escorting a delinquent kid to a juvenile rehab center. Unsurprisingly, they’re spectacularly bad at making even the most basic decisions. The film leans hard into its outrageous, often gross-out sensibility, and for the most part, it works. A lot of that comes down to the cast featuring Dave Franco, O’Shea Jackson Jr., and Mason Thames who keep things lively even when the film starts to spin its wheels. Because it does lose some momentum in the middle, getting a little too comfortable with its own bit. Still, even when it drags, there’s an undeniable scrappy charm to it. Messy, crude, and frequently hilarious, The Shitheads is the kind of crowd-pleaser that knows exactly what it is.
Capturing Bigfoot. Directed by Marqu Evans
Capturing Bigfoot digs into the infamous 1967 footage shot by Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin deep in the California wilderness, and it makes a strong case for why that grainy clip still has a grip on people decades later. Through interviews with those closest to the footage, from its creation to the mythology that followed, along with newly surfaced material, the film stays consistently engaging. Structurally, it’s fairly standard as documentaries go, but the subject matter does a lot of the heavy lifting. There’s an inherent fascination baked into this story, and the film knows how to tap into it without overcomplicating things. Whether it truly settles the Bigfoot debate “once and for all” is up for discussion, but Capturing Bigfoot makes for a compelling, well-assembled deep dive into one of the most enduring pieces of cryptid lore.
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