There is a fundamental difference between adapting a fantasy novel and understanding the mythology that made the novel worth adapting in the first place. The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin understands that difference. Created by Jeremy Boreing and drawn from Stephen R. Lawhead’s Pendragon Cycle, particularly Taliesin and Merlin, the seven-part series undertakes an unusually difficult act of translation. Lawhead’s novels are not simply Arthurian adventures. They are an a

There are films that seek to overwhelm audiences with spectacle, and then there are those rare works that understand the greatest battles are often fought not on sprawling fields, but within the human soul. King of the Iron Will belongs firmly in the latter category—a stirring, Shakespeareanesque medieval drama that proves epic cinema is measured not by the size of its armies, but by the weight of its ideas. From its opening moments, the film draws viewers into a world where

Seeking Persephone Review: A Beautifully Wounded Romance That Understands the Terrifying Courage of Being Loved There is a moment in every truly great romance when the story stops being about whether two people will fall in love. We already know they will. The question becomes whether they will be brave enough to let that love change them. Seeking Persephone understands that distinction beautifully. What begins with all the irresistible trappings of a Regency romance — a m

Lorena Luciano’s deeply unsettling documentary centers the testimony of former nuns confronting alleged abuse by celebrated priest and artist Marko Rupnik, exposing not merely the actions of one powerful man but an institutional culture in which obedience, spirituality and silence can become instruments of control. The most disturbing thing about Nuns vs. the Vatican is not simply the abuse its subjects describe. It is the language through which that abuse was allegedly made

Johannes Vang’s sharply observed short turns a remote border crossing into a comic collision of bureaucracy, cultural identity and belonging, using the stark northern landscape to expose just how arbitrary the lines between people can become. Borders are among the strangest inventions human beings have ever agreed to treat as absolute. On a map, they appear clean and unquestionable: lines dividing one country from another, separating one legal system, language and national i

Michael J. Jacyna transforms the archetype of the wandering samurai into a contemporary meditation on violence, memory and moral obligation, using Los Angeles after dark as both battleground and emotional landscape. The title The Modern Samurai suggests something far more literal than the film Michael J. Jacyna ultimately delivers. There are no feudal castles here, no armies gathering beneath banners and no warrior riding into battle beneath a code visibly written for him.

Paula Lindblom and Kevin McNally turn an almost surreal doctor’s appointment into a surprisingly tender meditation on grief, denial and the strange forms compassion can take. There is something initially funny about the premise of Plaster, though laughing at it feels dangerous. A woman walks into a doctor’s office carrying an urn. She speaks about the vessel as though it contains a living child. Her son is sick, she insists, and she would like the doctor to examine him. For

In barely seven minutes, writer-director Jonny Durgan turns the confined interior of an ambulance into a pressure chamber, with Genevieve O’Reilly delivering a remarkably controlled performance at its center. There are films that require an elaborate premise to generate tension, and then there is G.S.W., a seven-minute short that needs little more than an ambulance, a wounded man and a few fragments of information coming across a radio. Writer-director Jonny Durgan understan

Loneliness is easy to portray as emptiness: an unused chair, a silent telephone, a meal eaten alone. Lonely is interested in something harder — the accumulated weight of all the years that came before the silence. Ty Sheetz’s intimate independent drama centers on Ruth Wilson, an 80-year-old woman who has spent some 40 years largely alone and has reached the point where resignation is no longer enough. She wants companionship. More painfully, she wants another chance with the

There are no monsters lurking in the woods of A Country Dog. There hardly need to be. In Ryan Nielsen’s 22-minute adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s “The Renegade,” menace arrives in far more ordinary clothing: neighbors, expectations, certainty and the quietly terrifying realization that everyone around you appears to understand the rules except you. That distinctly Jacksonian unease gives Nielsen’s short its most compelling foundation. What initially sounds almost quaint — a

Falling in love is easy — at least at the movies. Staying there is considerably more complicated. Billy Clift’s Only Bears understands that distinction, and its greatest charm lies in refusing to treat happily-ever-after as the finish line. Instead, this affectionate queer romantic comedy looks beyond the courtship, beyond the wedding and beyond the cinematic kiss, landing squarely in that much less glamorous territory where two people who unquestionably love one another disc

Joe Cornick’s tactile, beautifully photographed documentary turns the waning days of traditional Welsh steelmaking into a meditation on memory, labor and the communities forged around both. There is an obvious metaphor waiting inside Steel: The Blood of Us: steel is forged through extraordinary heat, and communities, too, are sometimes defined by the pressures they survive. Joe Cornick’s documentary is intelligent enough not to underline that comparison too insistently. Inst

Kimberly-Sue Murray anchors Boris Mojsovski’s gently surreal dramedy, in which an improbable neurological condition becomes an unexpectedly perceptive doorway into the immigrant experience. There is something deceptively clever about the central conceit of Boris Mojsovski’s Foreign Tongue. Kathy Woodrow does not cross a border. She does not relocate to another country, exchange one culture for another or suddenly find herself deprived of the rights and privileges she has alw

Jayme Kaye Gershen’s lyrical 15-minute documentary transforms a decades-old Kendall roller rink into an unexpectedly profound meditation on memory, community, continuity and the increasingly radical act of remaining in place. Cities are very good at remembering themselves selectively. Buildings disappear, businesses are renamed, neighborhoods are remodeled, and entire districts acquire newer, more marketable identities until the people who lived there are left carrying memor

Dustin Muenchow and writer-star Alyssa Sabo turn rollerblading, adolescent heartbreak and a lifetime supply of tacos into an 18-minute barrage of inspired nonsense whose craftsmanship is considerably more sophisticated than its characters. There comes a moment in “Bladez” when attempting to determine whether any of this should be taken seriously becomes beside the point. The answer is both absolutely not and completely yes. Directed and edited by Dustin Muenchow from a scr

Writer-director-star Hamish Sturgeon crafts an unusually restrained meditation on grief, queer identity and the selves we invent to survive, finding its greatest power in everything its characters struggle to say aloud. The title of Hamish Sturgeon’s “Gossamer” refers to something almost weightless: a thread so fine that it can disappear depending on how the light catches it. It is an apt metaphor for a film preoccupied with equally fragile things — memory, identity, perform

Joshua Burge gives a nerve-shredding physical performance in M. Dara Alavi’s viciously effective body-horror short, where an untreated tooth becomes the festering embodiment of everything its protagonist can no longer afford to ignore. There is something uniquely primal about dental pain. It is small enough to dismiss at first, intimate enough that no one else can see it and persistent enough to eventually colonize every waking thought. In M. Dara Alavi’s “Bad Tooth,” that f

There is a particular danger in making a film about Vikings. The imagery has been so thoroughly absorbed by popular culture — fur, iron, blood, mud, axes and men roaring beneath slate-colored skies — that even historically minded filmmakers can find themselves competing with an entire genre of borrowed iconography. “HAMRAMMR,” the independently produced Icelandic historical short from filmmaker Dániel Puskás, succeeds largely because it appears interested in something conside

Hoj Jomehri’s darkly comic short transforms one of Iran’s stranger morality crackdowns into a pointed fable about identity, authoritarianism and the perilous act of remaining visible. It would be easy to treat the premise of Hoj Jomehri’s “The Last Mullet” as little more than an irresistible political absurdity. In 2010, Iran’s Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance officially condemned the mullet as an un-Islamic hairstyle, turning an eccentric fashion choice into another

Melissa Bloom turns regenerative agriculture into something intimate and unexpectedly moving in a handcrafted short about inheritance, stubbornness, and whether damaged ground — and damaged traditions — can be restored. There is something fitting about telling a story of soil through stop-motion. Both require patience. Both depend upon small, almost imperceptible changes accumulating over time. And both are acts of creation performed largely by hand. That connection sits at