Last night, I was in the room for the New York City premiere of Brotherhood: A Cinematic Musical, and I walked out sure of one thing: this is a five-star film. It’s an independent movie musical made for the times we’re living in. At its core, it asks a question that feels more urgent every year: what does it actually mean to love and understand your neighbor? As an independent filmmaker, I usually watch movies with one eye on the screen and one eye on the seams. With Brotherhood, I stopped looking for the seams pretty quickly.

The year 2026 has become a defining one for indie horror. First, audiences were reeled-in to Gen Z’s own interpretation of the consequences of wish-making in Obsession. Then, we saw a popular internet phenomenon come to life in Backrooms. And now, straight from this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Too Many Cooks creator Casper Kelly officially unleashes his feature-length directorial debut: Buddy, which can be considered to be the most bizarre film of the year, and that it is actually a compliment. What makes it actually work is its overall sense of imagination to take the rising concept of “mascot horror” and inject in real world-building from scratch with a dose of meta-commentary on the dark realities of what happened on the sets of various 80s and 90s children’s TV shows.