‘The Quincy Avery Effect’ documentary premieres on Hulu
Quincy Avery, one of the NFL’s most sought-after quarterback coaches, and the man behind the rise of some of football’s biggest names, from Jalen Hurts to Justin Fields, CJ Stroud, and Jordan Love, is the subject of the documentary The Quincy Avery Effect. Directed by Bryant Robinson it premieres on Hulu on April 23rd.
The film chronicles journey from homelessness to transforming the NFL quarterback landscape. Quincy Avery, now one of the league’s most successful coaches, overcame 1,000 nights without a home to guide some of football’s brightest stars. His story is a testament to the power of faith, resilience, and believing in untapped potential.
The film highlights the remarkable rise of Black quarterbacks in the NFL, breaking through decades of barriers. For too long, Black athletes were told they couldn’t excel in the sport’s most coveted position. Through Quincy’s mentorship, athletes like Jalen Hurts, Justin Fields, CJ Stroud, and Jordan Love have shattered those limits and paved the way for future generations.
“Watching this documentary, you’ll see the real power of belief—not just in football, but in life. I’m proud of the work we’ve done together, but it’s the athletes themselves who’ve shown the world what’s possible when you have someone who sees your potential,” says Quincy Avery. “It’s been a journey of resilience, faith, and unlocking greatness, and I’m humbled to be part of their stories.”
Director Bryant Robinson says, “The Quincy Avery Effect is a journey into the heart of greatness, following Quincy Avery, a Quarterback trainer who pushes athletes to unlock their highest potential. This film is about more than just football—it’s about the relentless pursuit of excellence. Through Quincy’s mentorship, we see the challenges, sacrifices, and belief required to reach the highest level, as seen in the remarkable journey of Jalen Hurts, once written off by sports critics, to his 2025 Super Bowl victory. It’s a powerful story of growth, resilience, and transformation. We at Religion of Sports are proud to share these sensitive, lesser-known stories, showing the raw work and dedication that fuel extraordinary achievement, and the life-changing impact of a mentor who believes in you even when the world doesn’t.”
Watch the officiall trailer for The Quincy Avery Effect.
Clive Christopher continues the quest with the documentary ‘Aliens Uncovered: Observe & Report 2’
The investigative documentary Aliens Uncovered: Observe & Report 2, continues the quest for extraterrestrial truth with a new chapter of eye-opening discoveries.
Directed by Clive Christopher, the film will be released on May 20, 2025 by Breaking Glass Pictures.
Part of the expansive Aliens Uncovered investigative journey, this film marks #18 in a 20-part series exploring unexplained aerial phenomena and government secrecy.
According to the synopsis: A dedicated UFO investigative team embarks on a groundbreaking journey to uncover the truth behind a series of enigmatic sightings in the foothills of Phoenix. With a reputation for thorough investigations, the team leverages cutting-edge technology to piece together compelling evidence. Their findings challenge preconceived notions about extraterrestrial visitation, suggesting that some incidents may have earthly explanations, while others hint at secrets yet to be unveiled. As they prepare to share their findings, the team grapples with the implications of their discoveries, forcing them to confront the question: Are we truly alone, or has the truth been obscured for too long? With a mix of excitement and trepidation, they set the stage for a transformative moment in Arizona’s history of UFO research, inviting the public to reconsider what lies beyond the stars.
Watch the official trailer for Aliens Uncovered: Observe & Report 2.
Ciaran Lyons’ psychological thriller ‘Tummy Monster’ opens in UK cinema
Tummy Monster, the psychological thriller and debut feature from Scottish-Irish filmmaker Ciaran Lyons is making its way to cinemas throughout the UK this Spring kicking off at Glasgow Film Theatre on 1st of May. Screenings will be accompanied by Q&As with the filmmaker; with special Q&A appearance from lead actor Lorn MacDonald (Bridgerton, Beats) at select screenings.
This darkly comic, surreal tragedy chronicles 24 hours of escalating chaos as an encounter between a sadistic international popstar and a narcissistic Scottish tattoo artist descends into all out psychological warfare.
Tummy Monster world premiered at Glasgow Film Festival 2024, and went on to play international festivals including Austin, Leiden, and Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival.
The Tummy Monster tour will screen at venues including: Glasgow Film Theatre, Sheffield Showroom, Manchester Home, Montrose Playhouse, Dumfries Robert Burns Film Theatre, Edinburgh’s Cameo, Eden Court Inverness, Fort William Highland Cinema, Stornoway An Lantair, Birmingham’s Mockingbird Cinema, Leigh Film Factory, and Bo’ness Hippodrome. More destinations to be announced shortly.
Watch the official trailer for Tummy Monster.
‘All There is’ Starring Jason Priestley and Mena Suvari set as closing night film of Worldfest Houston International Film Festival
All There is, a dramatic examination of parent-child relationships, will be the Closing Night Film at the 58th Annual Worldfest Houston International Film Festival, taking place April 25 to May 4, 2025.
Earlier this month the film made its World Premiere at the 2025 Beverly Hills Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award for Best Feature Film.
All There is centers on a troubled teenager whose world is upended when a tragedy involving her best friend is blamed on her movie-star father’s controversial new sci-fi film. The ensemble picture stars Laurel Marsden, Jason Priestley, Mena Suvari, Elsie Fisher, Shiv Pai, Jack Wright, and Nick E. Tarabay.
The film is directed by Kit Williamson (“Eastsiders”), produced by Sam Okun (“Prisoner’s Daughter”, “She Drives Me Crazy”), co-written and produced by Amir Ohebsion (“The Apology”), and co-written and executive produced by Arash Homampour. Sam Okun Productions’ Christian Jean, Lachlan Towle, and Constantinos Yiallourides are co-producers.
The film will also be screened at the Sunscreen Film Festival in St. Petersburg, Florida on Friday, May 25.
‘Mr. Polaroid’ documentary on inventor Edwin Land debuts on PBS
Long before the iPhone, there was the Polaroid camera, the product, and the company’s unique culture, would launch not only instant photography mania but also become the model for today’s Silicon Valley tech culture.
It all began with the Polaroid Model 95, first offered for sale in the fall of 1948. Its revolutionary power to allow the photographer to see the picture then and there would change the country, then the world. Mr. Polaroid tells the little-known story of the man behind the camera, a Harvard dropout named Edwin Land.
Directed and written by Gene Tempest, Mr. Polaroid premieres Monday, May 19, 2025, 9:00-10:00 p.m. ET check local listings) on American Experience on PBS, PBS.org and the PBS App.
The invention Edwin Land believed would change the world was sparked by a near-accident on a dark Connecticut road. At the age of 14, he vowed to invent a solution for headlight glare, which killed thousands of motorists a year, and was convinced that the solution lay in a physics phenomenon known as polarization. By 1937, at age 28, he had already founded his own company, Polaroid. In the early years, Polaroid made sunglasses, camera lenses, glare-free windshields and headlights. But the tech he designed for carmakers never caught on. As his first great vision fizzled, Land found his way to a new field: photography. He had long believed that photography was perhaps humanity’s greatest invention. The problem, he thought, was that people were just too far removed from its magic.
At that time, photography was no simple act. It involved chemicals, darkrooms, specialists or special equipment, and above all, time: it usually took a week for a customer to see a photo after it was snapped. Land wanted to create a device that would collapse time and put the darkroom inside the camera. Helping Land make this dream a reality was an unusual group of pioneering female scientists and researchers, including Eudoxia Muller, who would make the first successful Polaroid instant photograph in 1943, and Meroë Morse, who for almost 30 years ran the Film Research Division. Land’s inclusive vision would break industry norms and expand opportunities for women in cutting-edge technological innovation.
After years of trials, in 1947, Land demonstrated a working scientific prototype of his Polaroid camera to the press; by the 1948 Christmas season, the first Polaroid went up for sale in Boston. It was an instant sensation, and Polaroid’s new kind of photography was on its way to profoundly changing how people documented their lives. Everyone loved the immediacy, and the ability to take photographs that didn’t pass through the hands of middlemen afforded a new type of freedom. “You could take a Polaroid without the pressure of anyone external judging or controlling,” says photographer Rhiannon Adam. “It came with a sort of freedom to document your life as you were living it.”
Through the 1960s and 70s, Polaroid seemed to be riding ever higher, the Apple of its day. “Steve Jobs would tell you that Land was his idol in many, many ways because he created this technology company that made products people didn’t even know they wanted,” Land biographer Ron Fierstein says. With the Polaroid Swinger, introduced in 1965, the company captured the spirit and imagination of the era’s youth culture, and the camera — and its catchy jingle — became wildly popular.
But success masked risky financial gambles, a costly lawsuit against archrival Kodak, and an increasingly obsessive belief on Land’s part that technology could cure rifts in contemporary society. When workers discovered that the company was selling cameras to South Africa, where the apartheid government used them to photograph Black citizens for tracking purposes, they organized a protest, and the resulting publicity was devastating. As politics, social change, and the darker side of instant photography became enmeshed with innovation, Land would stumble.
The history of Land and Polaroid’s fall is as precipitous and revealing as that of his rise. Yet the magic of the Polaroid continues to hold sway.
On Swift Horses starring Daisy Edgar-Jones, Jacob Elordi opens In San Francisco Bay Area theaters
On Swift Horses, the romantic drama film starring Daisy Edgar-Jones, Jacob Elordi, Will Poulter, Diego Calva, and Sasha Calle will open in San Francisco Bay Area theaters on April 25, 2025.
Directed by Daniel Minahan, the film is based on Shannon Pufahl’s 2019 novel .
According to the synopsis: Muriel (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and her husband Lee (Will Poulter) are beginning a bright new life in California when he returns from the Korean War. But their newfound stability is upended by the arrival of Lee’s charismatic brother, Julius (Jacob Elordi), a wayward gambler with a secret past. A dangerous love triangle quickly forms. When Julius takes off in search of the young card cheat he’s fallen for, Muriel’s longing for something more propels her into a secret life of her own, gambling on racehorses and exploring a love she never dreamed possible. Based on the book On Swift Horses by Shannon Pufahl .
San Francisco Bay Area Theaters
AMC Metreon16, San Francisco
Sequoia Cinema, Mill Valley
Rialto Cinemas Sebastopol, Sebastopol
AMC Bay Street 16, Emeryville
Rialto Cinemas Elmwood, Berkeley
Century 25 Union City, Cinemark Century Union Landing 25 and XD
AMC Mercado 20, Santa Clara
Cinemark Century Redwood Downtown 20 and XD, Redwood City
Cinemark Century at Tanforan and XD, San Bruno
Regal Stockton City Center, Stockton
AMC Manteca 16, Manteca
Regal Edwards Fairfield, Fairfield
Davis Varsity Theatre, Davis
Andrew Keegan, William McNamara, and Nikki Leigh star in ‘Healing Towers,’ Shuja Paul’s horror film
The only cure is waking up…
Andrew Keegan, William McNamara, and Nikki Leigh star in the horror film Healing Towers directed by Shuja Paul. It will be released On Digital and On Demand on April 22, 2025.
According to the synopsis: A detective’s search for his missing daughter uncovers a horrifying link to a twisted psychiatrist’s dream therapy treatment, where deranged patients are forced to enact their darkest fantasies on innocent victims.
Watch the trailer for Healing Towers.
A cab driver gets caught up in ‘Self Driver’ Michael Pierro’s debut thriller film
Writer-director Michael Pierro’s debut thriller feature Self Driver will be released on VOD, digital on May 8 by Cinephobia Releasing.
Self Driver follows a down-on-his-luck cab driver, who, facing mounting expenses and the unrelenting pressure of modern living, is lured on to a mysterious new app that promises fast, easy money. As his first night on the job unfolds, he is pulled ever deeper into the dark underbelly of society, embarking on a journey that will test his moral code and shake his understanding of what it means to have freewill. The question becomes not how much money he can make, but what he’ll be compelled to do to make it. If you’ve got nothing to lose, how far would you go?
Self Driver stars Nathanael Chadwick (The Last Porno Show), Reece Presley (In a Violent Nature), and Lauren Welchner (Faulein Cherie). The film is produced by Kire Paputts and Michael Pierro.
“I’m beyond excited to be working with Cinephobia Releasing to bring Self Driver to American audiences, said Pierro. “The film was a passion project, built with a guerilla spirit from the ground up. It’s a true joy to be working with a bunch of people who share the same love for independent cinema that brought the team behind Self Driver together in the first place. This film would not exist without people like that and I can’t wait to see where they take it!”
The film world premiered at the Fantaspoa – International Fantastic Film Festival, winning Best Film in the Low Budget, Great Films section and went on to play Fantasia Festival where it won the New Flesh Award for Best First Feature, Grimmfest, taking home the award for Best Actor and receiving a Special Mention of the Jury for Best Director, Macabro Festival Internacional de Cine de Horror, MidWest WeirdFest, and Panic Fest.
Watch the trailer for Self Driver.
Filmmaker Sarah Kambe Holland’s ‘Egghead & Twinkie’ queer coming-out comedy film set VOD Release Date
Egghead & Twinkie is the autobiographical debut feature film of 27 year old mixed-Asian writer-director Sarah Kambe Holland. The romantic queer coming-out comedy is set amidst a road trip through the southern U.S. and stars Sabrina Jie-A-Fa, Louis Tomeo, Asahi Hirano, and Ayden Lee.
The film premiered in 2023, and played at multiple festivals including London’s BFI Flare Festival, TIFF Next Wave, Seattle Int’l Film Fest, Outfest LA, Frameline, Reeling Chicago, and Out on Film, and the Austin Film Festival.
Following a Special Screening featuring a Q&A with filmmakers and cast on April 24 at Laemmle Glendale theater in Los Angeles, it will be available on Demand April 29 in the U.S. & Canada.
According to the synopsis: Freshly out of the closet, misunderstood by her adopted parents, and heading to college in the fall, teenage animator Twinkie teeters on the cusp of adulthood waiting out the summer with her best friend Egghead and secretly DMing her Insta-famous DJ crush BD. But when BD proposes meeting in person for the first time at their show some 500 miles away from Twinkie’s Florida home, there’s only one thing for her to do…enlist Egghead to steal her parents’ car and hit the open road. Bursting at the seams with exuberant flourishes of rotoscoped anime and clever visual montage, director Sarah Kambe Holland’s debut feature is a breath of fresh air into the queer coming-of-age film – enlivening themes of racial and sexual identity, young love, and ride-or-die friendship with flair to spare in its distinctly Gen Z sensibility.
Said writer/director Holland, “Twinkie is the protagonist that I needed when I was growing up as a queer mixed-Asian kid in Texas, and I want the audience to see the world through her eyes.”
Added Holland about the coming-out inspiration for the film, “I first came up with the concept for Egghead & Twinkie when I was fresh out of the closet at nineteen years old. It’s a terrifying moment when you have to sit across from your parents and the important people in your life and tell them who you are, especially at such a young age. But at the same time, there can be so much joy and awkward humor in finding yourself and sharing that with the world. This film is my earnest attempt to find the comedy in the coming out process without trivializing the struggles that queer people endure to be themselves.”