News

Stars: Tony Todd, David Gridley, Vince Hill-Bedford, Steffani Brass, Eric Etebari, William Lee Scott, Tyler Clark, John Beasley | Written by Jonah Kuehner | Directed by Benjamin Louis

Stoker Hills gets down to business early, starting with a lecture on film by Professor Smith. That gets the film’s celebrity cameo out of the way in the film’s first five minutes. It also uses those scenes to introduce the three of his students who will be the film’s leads, aspiring filmmakers Ryan, Jake (Vince Hill-Bedford; American Fighter) and Erica.

While shooting their class project, a zombie hooker film entitled Streetwalkers, which was also Stoker Hills’ original title, a car drives by and stops just long enough to drag Erica in before racing off with Ryan and Jake in pursuit with their camera still running.

They don’t return but the camera is found and two of the town’s cops...

An epic, magnificently shot chronicle of a tiny Chinese hamlet enduring one of its final yearly cycles of harvest and hardship, Liu Feifang’s delicate but mighty debut documentary feature “The Fading Village” is loosely organized around the last member of the newer generation to still live in the Shanxi Province village of Heishuigetuo. Goat farmer Hou Junli is 35, but whatever hope his relative youth might hold out for a rejuvenation of his hometown has already passed: While Junli tends to his dwindling flock under the hectoring instruction of his mother and the silent, saturnine eye of his aging father, his wife and son live in the city. And the boy dislikes the village because there are no malls and you can’t get a Wi-Fi signal: This is no country for young men.

Stories about “the dark side of China’s economic miracle” are in such plentiful supply as...