\n<\/p>\n
Rent or buy it on most major platforms<\/a>.<\/p>\n After civilization was wiped out by a virus, Lee (Ashley Judd) managed to raise her two young nieces on an isolated Pacific Northwest property called Lazareth. Now looking to be in their early 20s, Imogen (Katie Douglas) and Maeve (the rising star Sarah Pidgeon, of \u201cTiny Beautiful Things\u201d and \u201cThe Wilds\u201d) obediently follow Lee\u2019s strict discipline. The women live in self-reliant isolation and endure thorough scrubbings when Lee returns from one of her occasional hunting-and-gathering forays to what\u2019s left of the city. As is so often the case with this type of scenario, a handsome stranger, Owen (Asher Angel), turns up out of the blue and upsets the fragile balance.<\/p>\n Written and directed by the Australian-born Alec Tibaldi, \u201cLazareth\u201d<\/a> does not bank on originality but on building a creepy mood. The film looks at how one person decides to survive a crisis, and how her decisions have an impact on those close to her. Lee\u2019s obsession with cleanliness \u2014 both physical and moral \u2014 has an intensity that borders on the religious. It is her chosen path to survival, and she imposes it on her nieces. Yet Lee\u2019s drive ends up provoking as many problems as it supposedly solves: No woman is an island for long.<\/p>\n Stream it on Tubi<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The directors J.D. Brynn and Abe Goldfarb have done an exemplary job making a dynamic film out of one character in one small room. In this particular case, it\u2019s the home studio of a talk-radio edgelord \u2014 his slogan: \u201cYou\u2019re thinking it, he\u2019s saying it.\u201d The sneering, smug Brent (Goldfarb) hawks his sponsors\u2019 dodgy products with cynical irony and mocks his listeners\u2019 conspiracy theories and paranoid ramblings while distractedly watching cam-girl feeds. But one day a caller catches his attention: Shorty (voiced by Brian Silliman) predicts that out of nowhere, a freak tsunami is about to hit Seattle. And it does.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Adapted by Mac Rogers from his podcast \u201cThe Earth Moves,\u201d<\/a> this dark-humored movie is a neat concept neatly executed. As Shorty keeps calling with more predictions of catastrophic events (that all come true), Brent gets increasingly terrified: Are we hurtling toward the end of the world? The final twist is as simple and as effective as the rest of the movie \u2014 and somehow even scarier than the perspective of impending global doom.<\/p>\n Rent or buy it on most major platforms<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Jessica (Hayley Erin) is on the run when we first meet her, but from whom or what? John Rosman\u2019s film alternates between the young woman\u2019s northward journey and the efforts of Elsa (Sonya Walger, best known as the hell-raising astronaut Molly Cobb on the series \u201cFor All Mankind\u201d) to track her down.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cNew Life\u201d is fairly standard in terms of what\u2019s going on with Jessica \u2014 which seasoned sci-fi and horror fans will figure out quickly \u2014 but the story springs a couple of emotionally charged developments that prevent it from being a basic tale of an emerging epidemic. One of them concerns Jessica and involves the existential horror of being unable to get close to anybody. The other is revealed early on: Elsa has recently been diagnosed with A.L.S. and is just starting to feel the debilitating effects of that illness. She can\u2019t quite wrap her head around what will happen to her in the long term; in the short one, she is frustrated when hampered in her attempts to catch up with Jessica. The film is genuinely poignant when it exposes the way people cycle through vulnerability, powerlessness, fear and frustration when their own body betrays them.<\/p>\n Stream it on The Roku Channel<\/a> and Fandango at Home<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Even when they do so with a lighter tone, movies dealing with artificial intelligence tend to tackle heady issues: ethics, grief, the fate of humanity, how tough it is to replace a dead loved one with an A.I. clone. You don\u2019t have to worry about any of that with George Henry Horton\u2019s hybrid of thriller, horror and sci-fi: \u201cProject Dorothy\u201d is only interested in fun cheap thrills. The location itself does half the work here \u2014 a fascinatingly vast abandoned space, once the site of a mysterious factory and its attendant offices. That\u2019s where Blake (Adam Budron) and James (Tim DeZarn) end up after a robbery gone wrong, hiding from the police. It takes them a little while to realize that they are tracked by a mysterious entity they have accidentally awakened from an enforced slumber.<\/p>\n Dorothy (voiced by the scream queen Danielle Harris, who starred in four installments of the \u201cHalloween\u201d franchise) is a supercomputer with dreams of world-dominating power and a way with forklifts. Harris gives a very entertaining disembodied performance as an old-school electronic presence ordering trucks to find and kill a couple of hapless guys. \u201cProject Dorothy\u201d will not win awards, but at a time when everybody seems to think they have something deep to say about A.I., its retro goofiness has the charm of classic B flicks.<\/p>\n\u2018First Time Caller\u2019<\/h2>\n
\u2018New Life\u2019<\/h2>\n
\u2018Project Dorothy\u2019<\/h2>\n
\u2018Revolution X\u2019<\/h2>\n