William Jackson Harper
This comedic retrospective mixes archival footage and scripted sketches as it revisits all the dread — and occasional delight — that 2021 had to offer.
On a snowy night in 1963 Pennsylvania, a boarding school student goes missing in the woods. Her friends, a disgraced quarterback, a shunned ex-cop, and the headmaster’s wife, agree to go search for her. As they do, they confront the lies, ghost stories, and demonization that their idyllic school was built on.
Margaret Rockland is as depressed as the ubiquitous Christmas carols are cheerful when she returns to the Washington DC suburb of her childhood for a reunion. The wild bunch she grew up with have settled into respectable family life. Adding insult to injury, her former boyfriend is engaged to the most bourgeois blonde on the East Coast. Margaret reacts by diving into a drinking and drugs marathon. With two remaining fellow souls, she roams the suburban no man’s land and ends up in an incomparable adventure with kidnapping, extortion, misunderstandings and clumsy violence as basic ingredients.
A young couple travels to Sweden to visit their friend’s rural hometown and attend its mid-summer festival. What begins as an idyllic retreat quickly descends into an increasingly violent and bizarre competition at the hands of a pagan cult.
Longtime best friends Bebe and DeeDee are both wrestling with love. Bebe has met someone new and is in the exuberant phase of a budding romance. DeeDee is trying to move on from someone she can’t forget – mostly in destructive ways. As Bebe waits for the perpetually late DeeDee at their favorite coffee shop, she meets Clementine, a distraught young woman with love problems of her own. With Clementine in tow, Bebe and DeeDee soon embark on the kind of outrageous misadventure that only New York City can offer.
Two scientists investigate the root of environmental changes and strange animal behavior at a remote site where a cult committed atrocities. The isolated location, the unraveling of their relationship, and the biome itself begin to lead them down a path of doom where primeval forces threaten to consume them. An adaptation of Laird Barron’s short story “–30–”.
Eleanor Shellstrop, an ordinary woman who, through an extraordinary string of events, enters the afterlife where she comes to realize that she hasn’t been a very good person. With the help of her wise afterlife mentor, she’s determined to shed her old way of living and discover the awesome (or at least the pretty good) person within.
Three friends united by their love of hip-hop work to make their big mark in the music industry. Beginning in the summer of 1990 NYC, Nikki a brilliant recent grad abandons a law school scholarship to pursue her dream of becoming a record exec along with the son of a legendary music producer boyfriend David who’s struggling at the city’s top R&B station. Dee Vee is an aspiring producer on the hunt to find the next big rapper on the come-up.
Ray Livingston is a relationship-blogging hack (“freelance writer, actually”) responsible for Brooklyn’s infamous blog, “Occasionally Dating Black Women.” The well-written, if not controversial, blog has generated some notoriety, but Ray is chafing from an overextended stay in New York, romantic ennui, and a stagnating writing career. After a particularly crappy week, he goes off on a tirade and harasses a gorgeous random passerby, only to discover that it’s Rochelle Marseille, one of New York’s up-and-coming authors. Moving to make amends in an effort to preserve his media clout, Ray is stunned when Rochelle gives him more than he ever thought she would.