Brett Wright

Following Matt Farley and Charles Roxburgh’s incredible streak of smaller scale, stark black and white films — which includes three of their finest works, Heard She Got Married (2021), Metal Detector Maniac (2021), and Magic Spot (2022) — Evil Puddle (2025) finds the writing/directing duo behind Motern Media making a micro-budget ensemble disaster epic as only they could.

Any aspiring young filmmaker who wants to move past “aspiring” best pay attention to Michael Glover Smith. The Chicago filmmaker works tirelessly to keep making films, screen them in front of audiences, all while encouraging other artists to do the same. He toured across the United States with his 2022 feature film Relative, delivering Q&As and engaging with audiences whenever possible, and cracked the Box Office Top 25 in the process.

When most artists fall 25 songs short of an album goal it can only be considered a catastrophic failure. When The Big Heist falls 25 songs short, they still have a 75-song, three-album cycle called MO75, a concept record about partying in the woods. The Big Heist is a Motern Media supergroup of sorts, a band that Motern founder Matt Farley formed with his three most frequent collaborators: Tom Scalzo (guitars, vocals), Chris “Pete” Peterson (bass), and Doug “Froggy” Brennan (drums).