A man is caught with his pants down when terrorized by a force outside his bathroom stall. “Someone’s In Here,” directed by Ben Kitnick, is a horror vignette, minimal, well-executed and open for metaphorical interpretation. A man dressed in Khakis, a polo, and a fleece vest, takes care of busines...

An alternate history, or impending future, that imagines a catastrophic meteor strike in Kansas triggering odd disorders for those who breathe in a mysterious green mist. We're given three such stories, one of a Texas man who finds himself with superhuman strength, another, of a Brooklyn photogra...

A very unfunny family history is spun into brilliant comedy from co-directors Samy Burch and Alex Mechanik. They begin with a doozy of a premise and keep pushing. When it all comes together, it feels like a wallop, but it’s largely packaged as a deadpan farce about a group therapy session. Bev is...

Young revelers, Jean and Jacob, vow to stop their crazy lifestyle holding them back in life, but first they must live it up for one more night. An infectious short film about partying in your own world no matter what it looks like from the outside. Waking up hungover by a pool, two friends decide...

Alex’s upscale co-workers think she’s going on a beach vacation. Instead, she descends into New York City in search of the vile. From director William Welles comes this pitch black comedy or tragedy (depending on your squeamishness) about perversity and compulsion. Her motivations aren’t spelled ...

One of the sharpest satirical shorts in awhile, an American portrait of gluttony, tragedy, and cheap entertainment. Guised as a character study, it begins with a large man in a hotel room in Wilmington, North Carolina. Randy Stormberg, host of a TV show called "All You Can Eat" (a fake show in th...

Perhaps most notable for its lead performance by Nora Kirkpatrick, a musician in Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes, & an actress who has had supporting roles on "The Office" and others. She turns in a sad, sweet performance taking on the world's troubles by way of worrying about a crying man ...

College roommates / cinephiles in Vancouver discuss cinema, et al, casually planning to make a piece of their own. But they're at the stage where plans blow away so the thing is to capture 'now.' Turn on the camera, point it at the couch, let it roll till the card is full. Or as 'director,' 'acto...

Five bored high school senior girls are planning a party for their friend Colby, who doesn't seem too excited about it. The credits give these girls names, but the film doesn't. Instead, they are identifiable as the bitchy alpha blonde, the sad sack with an eating disorder, the airhead in pigtail...

Linas Phillips continues his Shawnsey series in a quick pic about the man from Boston with bad hearing trying to get his stand-up routine off the ground. Whatever Phillips does, I'm on board with & there's a couple hilarious moments here, as when he's reviewing footage of his routine and tweaking...

Two teens in a small desert city earn cash standing on the side of the street holding signs for cheap loans. They make a game of it, spinning the signs like they’re doing skateboard tricks. “More tricks, more money, dawg,” says the baller white kid teaching a newbie the ropes of the street in a g...

On the streets of Los Angeles, a group of young hustlers spend a night partying and stealing. It's a visceral collection of scenes with a pulsating natural energy and soft-focus gaze on lost innocence. The film centers around Gabriel, a handsome young man, and a gender-fluid set of friends maneuv...

2014 NoBudge Award winner Jeremy Hersh (Best Screenplay, “Natives”) returns with another story of women in love confronting their maybe-irreconcilable differences. Where that earlier film expanded to embrace ideas about place, culture, and identity, what we get here is a marvel of concentration. ...

Jeremy Hersh's impressive short fresh out of NYU is remarkably mature & whip smart. Coming off a strong '13, featuring festival appearances at SXSW, Frameline, and Outfest, etc, the film is off to a running start online, recently selected to Vimeo Staff Picks & featured on Short of the Week. The ...

A lonely man becomes obsessed with a woman on the internet via her emotionally revealing webcam show about her struggles as an actress. It gets weird when the woman (Jenna D'Angelo) moves into his building, immediately making her presence felt. Except maybe it's not real, maybe he's imagining her...

Technical issues abound as a voiceover artist attempts to record a local news spot about an upcoming storm. “Ursula Promo,” directed by Tyler Rubenfeld, is one, uninterrupted six minute shot of the man (played by Matt Hopkins, impeccable) trying to perfect his weather warning performance for the ...

Charlie Hill has been living in Cuba as a fugitive since 1971 after being accused of killing a police officer and hijacking a plane (he admits to the hijacking but not the killing). Here we have an intimate profile of the man today as he relives the incident while reading a letter to his nine-yea...

"I recently had the pleasure of watching Claire Denis’ “Trouble Every Day” for the first time. I love her movies. I love how you have to work for them in order to figure out what’s going on. Afterwards, I realized I hadn’t read the synopsis on the back of the DVD, so I gave it a look. It went int...

An unknown woman with an unknown trauma grapples with her life as she wanders the streets of Vancouver, B.C. “Mornings You Wake Up,” an experimental film by Case Barden, is a collection of still images that withholds a clear narrative but builds plenty of atmosphere from an evocative soundscape. ...

It’s like baseball, except played in the woods — teams dodge trees in the middle of the field, fans sit on tree stumps. And today is the World Series of Woods Baseball, 1997 — three teams began the season but only two remain: the Hutton Sasquatches vs the Lexington Timberhawks. We begin with a He...

A simple, restrained story of an afternoon with a babysitter, well-acted and carefully crafted. Actress Joslyn Jensen is eminently watchable as Elizabeth, the sitter, as she was in the excellent 2011 film, "Without." Director Christopher Bell presents an uncommon combination of the hyper-real and...

The Itching is a short horror film about two girlfriends whose cozy social life turns ugly when one of them contracts a mysterious illness. Beginning with a tiny itch, she rips a ragged hole in her own leg, a pooling landscape in which some terrible urge is reflected. I won’t reveal any more of t...

An aspiring film director prepares for a play based on her complicated feelings toward her father. “An Athlete Wrestling a Python” is a Australian film by director Stephanie Jane Day, an incisive, darkly comedic character study on Julien. Her present preoccupations with the artistic process and c...

In Johannesburg, South Africa, we follow two young factory workers through an ordinary day on and off the job. “Casual Workers,” directed by Keagan Afonso, is a free roaming portrait, a day in the life. Periods of work are followed by periods of rest and leisure, smoking cigarettes, staring at th...