WHEN CALLS THE HEART: BROOKFIELD streams on Great American Family and Pure Flix. The Season 3 opener, “Gratitude,” picks up the morning after the cattle raids, as Brookfield faces the aftermath of danger and uncertainty. The residents wake to destruction; farmers assess damaged property and neighbors check on one another. The first episode of Season 3 of WHEN CALLS THE HEART: BROOKFIELD delivers high production value with authentic sets and beautiful costumes that highlight the small-town charm fans love. Expansive shots of the surrounding landscapes draw viewers into every corner of the community, while the actors heighten the drama with heartfelt performances

The first episode of Season 3 of WHEN CALLS THE HEART: BROOKFIELD contains a strong Biblical and Christian worldview with an emphasis on community, helping others and protecting your neighbor. Characters discuss starting a local church and interview a prospective preacher who speaks on trusting God’s timing and presents a Bible. While the episode delivers wholesome entertainment, there is action violence and peril. An unmarried couple discusses kissing, shares a kiss and embrace. Otherwise, Season 3 of WHEN CALLS THE HEART: BROOKFIELD opens championing Christian values, inspiring viewers with hope, courage and uplifting entertainment.

(BB, CC, V, S, M):

Dominant Worldview and Other Worldview Content/Elements:

A strong Biblical and Christian worldview with an emphasis on community, helping others and protecting your neighbor. Characters discuss starting a local church and interview a prospective preacher who speaks on trusting God’s timing and presents a Bible. A woman selflessly cares for orphans. Pro-law enforcement element as Mounties protect and serve their community;

Foul Language:

No foul language but some unkind language with the use of words like idiot, scamps, scoundrels and snake in the grass;

Violence:

Instances of action violence, a man kidnaps, binds and threatens a woman, characters follow a trail of blood to capture an outlaw, characters brandish guns and shoot at each other. A man has a bloody arm from being clipped by a bullet, a man burns his hand lighting fireworks, a character hits another on the head with a shovel, a man tackles a man to the ground and punches him in the face;

Sex:

An unmarried couple discuss kissing, share a kiss and embrace;

Nudity:

No nudity;

Alcohol Use:

No alcohol use;

Smoking and/or Drug Use and Abuse:

No smoking or drug use,

Miscellaneous Immorality:

Characters discuss bribery and speak on not trusting banks to hold their money.

WHEN CALLS THE HEART: BROOKFIELD streams on Great American Family and Pure Flix. The Season 3 opener, “Gratitude,” picks up the morning after the cattle raids, as Brookfield faces the aftermath of danger and uncertainty. The residents wake to destruction; farmers assess damaged property and neighbors check on one another.

The first episode of Season 3 of WHEN CALLS THE HEART: BROOKFIELD delivers high production value with authentic sets and beautiful costumes that highlight the small-town charm fans love. Expansive shots of the surrounding landscapes draw viewers into every corner of the community, while the actors heighten the drama with heartfelt performances.

The episode opens with the town restoring safety after rustlers brought chaos to Brookfield. Local Mounties, Russell, and Donovan are on the case to track the mastermind. Meanwhile, Tess lands in danger when wounded outlaw, Jerry Huntsman, captures her, confesses his involvement in crimes and threatens her life.

Hannah balances her fashion design projects with her commitment to help Wyatt with work responsibilities. Hannah plans to open a permanent bakery, planting roots in the recovering community. Sam and Maggie explore a possible romance after sharing a kiss the night before. Nora discovers a troubling secret about her former boss that may carry serious legal consequences.

The first episode of Season 3 of WHEN CALLS THE HEART: BROOKFIELD has a strong Biblical and Christian worldview with an emphasis on community, helping others and protecting your neighbor. Characters discuss starting a local church and interview a prospective preacher who speaks on trusting God’s timing and presents a Bible.

While the episode delivers wholesome entertainment, there is light action violence and some peril. An unmarried couple discusses kissing and shares a kiss. Otherwise, Season 3 of WHEN CALLS THE HEART: BROOKFIELD opens championing Christian values, inspiring viewers with hope, courage and uplifting entertainment.

By RACHEL MEGHAN

Starring Rushabh Patel, Stephanie Gomes Hogan and Bobby Liga
Written by Mike Corey
Directed by Alexandra Speith
MPX

Ah, the life of a writer. To be holed away in some motel far away from all your responsibilities, writing what is sure to be your magnum opus. It really would be a shame if the remote motel you were staying in was haunted, your agent was berating you at all hours of the day, and your characters were coming to life. That is precisely what happens in I KNOW EXACTLY HOW YOU DIE, a new indie horror film directed by Alexandra Speith and written by Mike Corey. 

The movie stars Rushabh Patel as Rian Burman, a hack horror writer who checks into a seedy motel to finish his new novel about a woman who is relentlessly stalked by her mailman. Recovering from a break-up, Rian spirals into self-destruction while he fields calls from his disappointed agent. Soon, he discovers that the motel brings his writing to life. And his protagonist, Katie (Stephanie Gomes Hogan), is the girl in the room next door. What follows is a nightmarish dive into the macabre, where gore is abundant, and writer’s block is deadly.

The house of horrors in the movie is more than what meets the eye. It’s motel hell. Every room contains a different creepy man trying to take from the women in the story what they want with no regard for their humanity. When Rian isn’t double-fisting shots or calling his agent a bitch, he’s drunk, phoning his ex in a vaguely threatening tone. He stalks women to their rooms, sleeps with his protagonist, and generally doesn’t care about the feelings of any of the women around him. All the while, he paints himself as the hero of the story.

Katie, on the other hand, is an addiction counselor who is repeatedly stalked and taken advantage of by the men she encounters. Hogan brings a gritty realism to the movie, making it a human story under a veneer of fun, indie horror schlock. There are great performances all around. Bobby Liga, Hogan’s real-life husband, is a chilling and convincing villain, and their chemistry can be felt even in the most brutal scenes. Rawya El Chab as motel owner Naja gives a grounding performance. She’s an impeccable straight man and wise person in contrast with the insanity around her. All of the actors do a great job with the material, never overdoing it and letting the story’s message speak for itself.

Overall, I KNOW EXACTLY HOW YOU DIE is about men who think they deserve the attention of women, no matter the cost. It doesn’t matter if you see yourself as the hero or the villain; it’s about centering the women who are in pain and actually listening to them. It has a brutal and cathartic end, full of gruesome imagery, that allows the female protagonist to finally take ownership of her destiny – all while presenting a chilling satire on the ethics of autofiction and the rise of the meta in the literary space.

I KNOW EXACTLY HOW YOU DIE debuts on DVD, Digital HD, including Prime Video, and Fandango at Home, on April 7.

Pretty Lethal, 2026.

Directed by Vicky Jewson.
Starring Lana Condor, Iris Apatow, Millicent Simmonds, Maddie Ziegler, Avantika, Uma Thurman, Michael Culkin, Adam Boncz, Balázs Megyeri, Gary Cothenet, Krisztián Csákvári, Shahaub Roudbari, Miklós Béres, Gábor Nagypál, Julian Krenn, Tamás Szabó Sipos, Péter Végh, and Klára Spilák.

SYNOPSIS:

It follows a group of ballerinas as they try to escape from a remote inn after their bus breaks down on the way to a dance competition.

Forget that director Vicky Jewson and screenwriter Kate Freund’s ballerinas-vs-mobsters disposable streaming flick Pretty Lethal is failing at twirling by on the slimmest of narratives (it is a miracle that the running time even reaches 88 minutes); they can’t even settle on a consistent tone during the fight scenes. Within seconds, the film often goes from a grounded sense of danger in that these men cruelly mean business and can toss these nimble but agile women around like rag dolls, to something farcical that defies logic and physics with the dancing coming into play, often times with blades or other sharp objects going through similar rhythms.

There isn’t one of the usual reveals that we are watching characters with a secret past or hidden talents for violence, it’s just a movie that can’t decide if ballerina based attacks are no match for Hungarian mobsters (a silly concept I’m all for) or if this is a situation of real threat, especially considering one of the leaders of this establishment shoots their instructor point blank in the face 20 minutes into the proceedings.

That there isn’t a semblance of a plot beyond a dysfunctional dance troupe inadvertently finds themselves in trouble when their tour bus breaks down and receive help from shady individuals bringing them to their hangout spot who, as you already know from reading this, turn out to be mobsters, and must start working together if they’re going to survive, doesn’t help these jarring distractions in hand-to-hand battles that, if nothing else, contain the occasional bit of impressive manoeuvrability and physicality along with a clever stroke of violence (even that is frustratingly limited).

This might sound nitpicky to an outsider who hasn’t seen a single scene play out, but rest assured, the action doesn’t even make sense in terms of the characters. Played by an ensemble including Lana Condor, Maddie Ziegler, Avantika, Iris Apatow, and the only semi-interesting one of the bunch, A Quiet Place‘s deaf-mute revelation Millicent Simmonds, who is then disappointingly not given much of anything interesting to do (she heads to the bathroom before the mobsters get violent, for unclear reasons, where she meets a young man her age along the way and instantly becomes smitten as they goof around unaware of what’s happening around them), the ballerinas are personified as mean girls ditzy (none of these jokes land), cutesy, or rejecting the artform, yet can suddenly turn dancing into a superpower whether they are working together or not.

When it’s their turn to start taking punches and other blows back, it is excessively brutal for whatever this movie is going for, and it consistently feels as if these filmmakers have no idea what they want to do with the action they have conceptualized. Protagonists take a beating back all the time; that’s not the gripe here. It is done in a manner that muddies what type of action movie this is supposed to be. If, at one point, this was something darker and more of an attempt at a thriller before going through rewrites that ungracefully smoothed aspects over into action that takes too long to get nutty enough to work, that would explain a lot. Nothing can explain how flimsy and bare-bones the narrative is.

Regarding the villains, adjacent to the mobsters is Uma Thurman’s former dancer, Devora Kasimer, bad accent and all, who sees an opportunity to leverage the monsters’ screw-up to get out of a dicey situation of her own. Again, little of this matters or even makes sense, with Devora’s motives not coming into play until the final 15 minutes. At the very least, Pretty Lethal builds to an amusing and somewhat skillfully choreographed all-out brawl between the now-united ballerinas and the mobsters, set to a classical piece of music; it’s the type of sequence that functions more successfully as absurd, with more fitting flourishes of vulnerability and a sense of character through action. The rest is stuck somewhere in the middle, not ridiculous enough or too serious for its own good.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★

Robert Kojder

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=embed/playlist