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Enacted during Prohibition—and the Harlem Renaissance—the New York City Cabaret Law made it so any public establishment that served food and/or drink needed a license to allow musical entertainment and dancing. Like so many similar laws (see pushes for voter ID), proponents championed the initiative as a means of “keeping the peace.” Critics conversely saw how the extra cost and sheer absurdity of its enforcement targeted businesses that were owned and frequented by marginalized groups. And since that law stayed on the books for almost a full century from 1926 to 2017, you can imagine the atmosphere of celebration born from its rescission. It was surely enough to earn a cinematic tribute, and writer/director Christina Kallas complies with Paris is in Harlem.

More than a fictionalized account of that moment, however, Kallas’ film looks to piggyback on the scene that was affected most: jazz clubs. She channels the...

Stars: Bryan Manley Davis, Anne-Marie Mueschke, Chris Viemeister, Lauren Sowa, Kris Manners | Written and Directed by Kurtis Spieler

The Devil’s Well and living in New England, it seems. The found footage subgenre shows no signs of giving up the ghost – but, on this evidence, it’s showing plenty of signs of stagnation.

Karla Marks (Anne-Marie Mueschke), a paranormal activity enthusiast, went missing during a trip to visit the fabled “Devil’s Well”, a supposed gateway to Hell hidden in a creepy abandoned building. The first half of the film is mostly comprised of talking heads interviews with local police officers, lawyers and the main suspect himself: Bryan (Bryan Manley Davis), Karla’s husband, who was with her when she vanished. There’s a lot of dry and frankly dull speculation about what might have happened. The script is flavourless.

Then, like Cannibal Holocaust, which also left its found footage stuff for the second half,...

Google the words “rainbow experiment chemistry” and the internet will provide a wealth of seemingly kid-friendly directives for how to use science to “make a rainbow,” an idea that seems fun enough until another link pops up: a safety alert from the American Chemical Society about an experiment gone very, very wrong.

It’s that sort of tension — between the possibility of academic discovery and out-and-out terror — that frames up Christina Kallas’ Slamdance drama, “The Rainbow Experiment,” which follows what happens after one of those eponymous experiments leads to unexpected consequences, one that indict and unravel whole scores of people and institutions.

Read More:Slamdance 2018 Announces Special Screenings, Including New Films From Lisa France and Dana Nachman

Per the film’s official synopsis, “Things spiral out of control in a high school in Manhattan when a terrible accident involving a science experiment injures a kid for life. A who-dun-it with a...