‘Lazareth’
Rent or buy it on most major platforms.
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 “Tiny Beautiful Things” and “The Wilds”) obediently follow Lee’s 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’s 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.
Written and directed by the Australian-born Alec Tibaldi, “Lazareth” 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’s obsession with cleanliness — both physical and moral — has an intensity that borders on the religious. It is her chosen path to survival, and she imposes it on her nieces. Yet Lee’s drive ends up provoking as many problems as it supposedly solves: No woman is an island for long.
‘First Time Caller’
Stream it on Tubi.
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’s the home studio of a talk-radio edgelord — his slogan: “You’re thinking it, he’s saying it.” The sneering, smug Brent (Goldfarb) hawks his sponsors’ dodgy products with cynical irony and mocks his listeners’ 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.
Adapted by Mac Rogers from his podcast “The Earth Moves,” 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 — and somehow even scarier than the perspective of impending global doom.
‘New Life’
Rent or buy it on most major platforms.
“New Life” is fairly standard in terms of what’s going on with Jessica — which seasoned sci-fi and horror fans will figure out quickly — 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’t 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.
‘Project Dorothy’
Stream it on The Roku Channel and Fandango at Home.
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’t have to worry about any of that with George Henry Horton’s hybrid of thriller, horror and sci-fi: “Project Dorothy” is only interested in fun cheap thrills. The location itself does half the work here — a fascinatingly vast abandoned space, once the site of a mysterious factory and its attendant offices. That’s 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.
Dorothy (voiced by the scream queen Danielle Harris, who starred in four installments of the “Halloween” 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. “Project Dorothy” 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.
‘Revolution X’
Rent or buy it on most major platforms.
I have to admit to restarting Matthew Philip Cannon’s movie after a few minutes because I had a hard time following its multiverse implications: As if time travel and alternate realities were not complicated enough on their own, “Revolution X” blends both of those tropes. Hanging on is worth the effort, however — if anything, this low-budget British offering can be criticized for being too ambitious rather than not enough.
The story starts in a future where Tee (Tee Morris) is a big-deal artist overseeing a charitable foundation. Shortly thereafter, we travel back decades, to 1983, and watch a young Tee (Alfie Wilson) witness his mother (Rosie Jane) being shot. How this tragedy affects his future is at the heart of “Revolution X,” which juggles timelines. In one, Tee is the success we initially met; in another, his art career does not take off and he is a struggling painter on an isolated farm. Even when the film gets a little too convoluted for its own good, it holds our interest, if only to figure out where it will end up. I, for one, am surprised more movies haven’t used to idea of manipulating time travel for speculative ends.
