PFS SpringFest 2025 presents Mile End Kicks, These Are My Friends!, and Hokum

There was one big difference, though: in the scene in the movie, there are only four people outside the theater. At opening night at Springfest, the place was absolutely packed—possibly the busiest I’ve ever seen it.

This is the ninth edition of Philadelphia Film Society’s SpringFest, which, for the second year in a row, is being held entirely at the two screens at PFS East. This year’s SpringFest opened on Friday, April 17 and runs through Thursday, April 23, featuring multiple showings of some films. Here are my reviews of the three movies that played on opening night.

In 2022, the Canadian director Chandler Levack made her feature debut with I Like Movies, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. It was about a 17-year-old movie obsessive who takes a job at a video store, and what looked at first like a Clerks homage turned into something very different and more surprising.

Mile End Kicks

Now, Levack has returned with Mile End Kicks, another very personal film that premiered on Friday night at PFS SpringFest. It’s even better than her first film, and the best thing about it is how it evokes the time and place of the music scene in Montreal in 2011.

Mile End Kicks is about a young rock journalist (Euphoria veteran Barbie Ferreira) who moves from Toronto to Montreal to immerse herself in that city’s music scene, while also attempting to write a book about Alanis Morrisette’s “Jagged Little Pill” album.

During that process, she gets involved in a love triangle with two members of a band—the pompous frontman and the sensitive guitarist—while struggling to stay above water financially. Mile End is a neighborhood in Montreal, and Mile End Kicks is the name of a shoe store that figures in the plot.

Interestingly, on the very same day Mile End Kicks played at Springfest, another film directed by Levack, Roommates, debuted on Netflix. Roommates is a college comedy that isn’t as good as Mile End Kicks, but it’s deeply fascinating—it’s a Happy Madison comedy starring Sadie Sandler (yes, that Sandler) fusing that sensibility with a much darker, class-conscious satire.

Mile End Kicks opens in theaters locally on April 24.

These Are My Friends!

Also debuting on the first night of Springfest was These Are My Friends!, a locally shot, low-budget indie feature directed by Drexel alum Bartuska and written by Bartuska and Will DiNola. It’s a “one crazy night” movie, in the tradition of American Graffiti, Dazed and Confused, and Can’t Hardly Wait, and set almost entirely at a house party.

The characters are mostly in their 20s and at various stages of figuring out life. Not everyone gets a full arc or anything, but a couple of them are quite compelling. I kind of liked the plot of the one girl who doesn’t make it to the party at all.

When Bartuska isn’t making films, he works as a high school teacher in New Jersey. In a recent interview, he said he shot the house-party scenes in a rowhouse at 20th and Carpenter. It certainly feels like a Philly film, even if 90 percent of it is set indoors.

I watched These Are My Friends! a few days before it played at SpringFest. So I enjoyed walking through the lobby and recognizing several of the actors, most of whom were dressed much nicer for the premiere than they had been for the party in the movie. There’s no word on a release date.

Hokum

The other late-night showing on Friday night was Hokum, the latest horror film from Damian McCarthy, the Irish director of Oddity, from two years ago.

Adam Scott stars as Ohm Bauman, a famous novelist who’s depressed and lonely. Early on, he heads to a hotel in Ireland, with plans that include scattering his late parents’ ashes. Soon, though, he gets caught up in a mystery that involves a missing hotel employee, a strange man who lives in the woods, and possibly a witch.

Hokum has three big things in common with The Shining: its protagonist is a troubled writer, it’s set in a creepy, remote hotel that’s closed for the winter season, and there’s one particular room in the hotel that’s even more haunted than the others. But other aspects of the film are more unique.

There are a few things here that would normally give me pause. It’s so reliant on jump scares that they eventually stop being surprising, while, like every other recent horror movie, it establishes that the true horror is the protagonist’s trauma.

All that said, I liked Hokum quite a lot. The hotel is an amazing location, complete with an elaborate system of pulleys, elevators, and dumbwaiters, and it’s spatially consistent, unlike the hotel in The Shining. And I really enjoyed Scott in surly mode, something he hasn’t gotten to do nearly enough since Step Brothers.

Hokum hits theaters on May 1.