Hillside Cacti (2025)

The film seems like an extreme interpretation of the conspiracy theorists that exist in real life. And then, there’s the twist.

April, a professional dancer, reluctantly trains a group of girls at a dance school for the dance competition.

In this short film, writer/director Nikita Hattangady focuses on Jai, a starving artist rooted in the latter category. Though unhoused, he works hard.

'Motherless Brooklyn' is a 1950s whodunit made by its star, Edward Norton. Like most detective films in this setting, the cast is mostly white males (with a few notable exceptions).

These confines won’t really encourage you to read the film as a metaphor for the nerve-inducing experience we’ve all been through over the last year, however — and in the interest of maintaining your dignity, you probably shouldn’t. While the sociopolitical commentary may have worked for the similarly-themed Buried (2010), in which we find Ryan Reynolds on his own buried alive in the Middle East, but this futuristic take on the premise is best left as a piece of distracting entertainment. Nevertheless, the atmosphere is no less suffocating, literally and dramatically.

In Stowaway, director Joe Penna narrates the story of a starship crew (Anna Kendrick as Zoe Levenson; Toni Collette as Marina Barnett; and Daniel Dae Kim as David Kim) struggling with serious technical problems on a two-year mission to Mars. During the trip, they discover aboard the presence of Michael (Shamier Anderson), a stowaway who jeopardizes everyone’s life on board.