Las Vegas film critic Josh Bell reviews two new movies:
June is Pride Month, so my first pick this week is the documentary Changing the Game, now streaming on Hulu. This film festival favorite spotlights the struggles of teenage transgender athletes. Director Michael Barnett follows three trans high schoolers as they participate in their chosen sports while fighting for their rights to do so. Trans participation in youth sports has been a highly contentious issue recently, and Barnett brings the focus back to individual human stories. These young people are committed activists, but their main passion is wrestling or running or skiing, and this film captures the full range of their unique personalities. That's Changing the Game, now on Hulu.
On a completely different note is the Irish horror movie Caveat, now streaming on Shudder. An unemployed man gets a seemingly generous job offer to spend a few days keeping watch over his landlord's teenage niece at a remote estate. But situations like that never turn out well in horror movies, and when Isaac (played by Jonathan French) arrives at the isolated house, he's told that he needs to spend his entire time locked in a harness attached to a chain in the basement (for the safety of the mentally unstable young woman, of course). That's just the first of the many unsettling events that befall Isaac in this creepy, atmospheric movie, which doesn't entirely hold together narratively but maintains a consistently eerie mood. That's Caveat, now on Shudder.
