The Headliner

Contraband

When did Mark Wahlberg turn into Charles Bronson? He’s so much better as part of an ensemble than as an everyman. This movie has a hat trick of character actors know for playing “scummy”: Lukas Haas, Ben Foster, and Giovanni Ribisi. Wahlberg better watch his back as Channing Tatum perfects his own “dumb guy with a heart of gold” routine. 

New and Notable

Parks Bonifay Documentary

The true story of a waterskiing baby that grew up into a wakeboarding adult. Just watch the beginning of the trailer for the waterskiing baby footage, trust me. 

Penumbra
Argentine horror flick about how scary it is to find a new apartment.

Pariah

Critically acclaimed coming-of-age film from director Dee Rees about a young woman in Brooklyn exploring her sexual identity as a butch lesbian teenager, with a breakout performance from star Adepero Oduye and a subtle dramatic turn from In Living Color‘s Kim Wayans as her mom. 

Young Goethe in Love

I’m guessing this German biopic of Goethe has a 1700s downer ending. 

Yeh Dooriyan

A romance about a beautiful divorced choreographer who falls for a younger man. Actress Deepshikha, who crossed over from the Punjabi film industry into Bollywood, wrote and directed herself in this film, which was pretty brutally panned by critics. 

Fightville

Documentary about mixed martial arts fighters in Louisiana, starring “Crazy” Tim Credeur, Gil “The Thrill” Guillory, and Dustin “The Diamond Poirier.”

Cowboys & Indians

This looks like a Mr. Show sketch, but it’s real.

Marley

A documentary about Bob Marley from Kevin Macdonald, the director of The Last King of Scotland, Touching the Void, and documentaries about Howard Hawks, Errol Morris, and Mick Jagger. 

Tomboy

French drama about a little girl who decides to be a boy when her family moves to a new town. 

Wyatt Earp’s Revenge

This is a straight-to-DVD prequel to Wyatt Earp whose producers somehow roped Val Kilmer into revisiting the Tombstone era to frame a story about the young Wyatt Earp. Young Earp is played by Canadian actor Shawn Roberts, best known to me as Dean Walton, the guy who raped Paige Michalchuk on Degrassi: The Next Generation. You burn in hell, Dean Walton!

“In Theaters” VOD Pick

The Moth Diaries

From Mary Harron, the director of American Psycho and I Shot Andy Warhol, comes this entry into the Supernatural Boarding School Horror genre (see also: Suspiria, Never Let Me Go), which is also a vampire movie about teenage girls. Starring Ben from Felicity (Scott Speedman)! Homoerotic gothic horror chills for a rainy day. 

Weird Indie of the Week

The Wicker Tree

What’s weirder than a prequel to Wyatt Earp? How about a sequel to 1973’s The Wicker Man from the director of the original as the second part of an intended trilogy? Featuring a cameo from Christopher Lee, more pagan symbolism than you can shake an athame at, and a subplot about a Texan Christian couple coming to the creepy Summerisle. This looks like a midnight movie if ever there was one. 

Early VOD Premiere of the Week

Booker’s Place: A Mississippi Story

An examination of race relations in Greenwood, Mississippi, based around the fallout from a 1965 NBC news piece on waiter Booker Wright, where he openly spoke about his feelings on racism and was subsequently murdered.

Masochist’s Choice

Nazis at the Center of the Earth

All I needed to hear was the title, but then I read “starring Dominique Swain” and it moved immediately to the top of my list. Cult figure Swain has been in a million bad trashy movies and two amazing trashy movies (Lolita and Face/Off). Nazis at the Center of the Earth is in the same genre as Nazi-horror film Dead Snow and Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. Nazi-sploitation. Aren’t Nazis scary enough?