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SPAWN lives in the peculiar sweet spot where a bold comic-book world collided with late-’90s studio filmmaking. You can feel the era in every choice: aggressive CG, a hard-edged soundtrack, and a go-for-broke villain performance that threatens to hijack the movie. Yet beneath the glaze and scorched-earth aesthetic, there’s a sharp hook—a tragic antihero whose pain is as compelling as his power. That core keeps the film from toppling under its own extravagance and makes a modern revisit surprisingly enjoyable, even while the seams show.

COUNTED OUT makes a simple, potent claim: in a world arranged by code, statistics, and algorithms, math is a language of power—and literacy in that language affects who gets hired, who gets heard, and who gets a real say. Vicki Abeles builds that claim into a focused documentary that treats mathematics not as a test to pass but as a civic tool. The result is engaging, unusually clear, and sincere about the shame and anxiety that many people still carry from their school days.

AKASHI is a story that wears its duality on its sleeve—bridging continents, generations, and emotional timelines. Director Mayumi Yoshida transforms her award-winning short into a deeply personal feature, one that explores grief, romance, and the weight of secrets handed down through family. From the outset, this isn’t framed as just a homecoming drama but as a reckoning with identity. Kana (played by Yoshida herself), a struggling artist who’s been living in Vancouver, returns to Tokyo for her grandmother’s funeral. In that journey back, the film opens layers of memory and buried truths that ripple through the lives of those left behind.

THE ART OF ADVENTURE tracks an irresistible premise with a simple confidence: two curious young Canadians—painter Robert Bateman and biologist Bristol Foster—set off in 1957 in a suped up Land Rover nicknamed “Grizzly Torque,” roaming across Africa, India, Southeast Asia, and Australia with a sketchbook, a 16mm camera, and more nerve than budget. Director Alison Reid doesn’t just recount where they went; she shows how a road trip crystallized into a lifelong mission, translating awe into action. The result is a buoyant, clear-eyed documentary that feels like a road movie first and a career retrospective second. That order matters—the film offers a lived experience, then threads it to legacy.

UNDELETABLE is the rare short that understands how comedy and pain are often the same sound at different volumes. It traps a grieving daughter and lets every misstep, every backspace that isn’t possible, every awkward correction, reveal a life cracking in real time. In seven minutes, the film pulls off an emotional high-wire act: it’s funny because you recognize the panic of leaving a message you can’t edit. It’s devastating because the stakes are as high as they could be. That double exposure—humor laid directly over heartbreak—is the film’s engine.

SYNTHESIZE ME proves that fifteen minutes can be expansive when emotion and metaphor are intertwined. Dutch-Indonesian filmmaker Bear Damen crafts a deeply personal story framed within the world of a grieving family. Set in a town near Mexico City in the late 80s, the film channels the instability of its setting into a potent metaphor for human relationships. At its heart is Violeta, a teenager played with energy and quiet sorrow by Ivana Plantier, who uses her late mother’s neglected synthesizers as a lifeline to memory.

There’s something timeless about the idea of a high school newspaper—enthusiastic teenagers chasing stories that feel monumental within their own microcosm. DIRTY BOOKS takes that premise and infuses it with both humor and a commentary on how journalism and ethics collide, even at the most novice level. This 16-minute short film demonstrates that with the right execution, small stories can have just as much impact as sprawling feature films.

A DIWALI DILEMMA begins in the fluorescently-lit cubicles of a workplace that doesn’t celebrate diversity so much as commodify it. Mala, an overworked employee, is compelled by her toxic boss to organize a Diwali party as a superficial gesture of inclusion. Already running on fumes, she numbs herself with too many drinks and collapses. What follows is a night of reckoning, guided by three mentors from her past, who force her to confront how far she has drifted from the dreams she once had of becoming.

Few cult studios embodied the DIY ethos of the VHS era quite like Full Moon Features. Nowhere is that clearer than in THE DOLLMAN TOYBOX: DOLLMAN X DEMONIC TOYS COLLECTION, a five-disc, eight-film set from 101 Films’ Black Label line. For the first time, the complete run of crossover madness — from Tim Thomerson’s tiny space cop to Baby Oopsie’s foul-mouthed reign of terror — has been gathered in one package. The result is less about perfection and more about persistence: a living archive of what happens when imagination refuses to die, even under the tightest budgets.

PEARLS wastes no time in plunging the viewer into a story that feels equal parts absurd, unsettling, and disturbingly relatable. With only fifteen minutes to make its mark, Alastair Train’s short film approaches the horrors of fertility struggles through a lens of body horror, distorted imagery, and the kind of creeping discomfort that stays long after the credits fade. It’s not a film that politely asks for attention—it forces it, much like the invasive presence of the oysters at its core.

This documentary manages to take something as familiar as baseball and remind us how much weight it can carry beyond the confines of a field. DIAMOND DIPLOMACY is one of those rare films that doesn’t just tell the story of a sport, but instead reshapes how we understand its place in the world. In under ninety minutes, it captures more than 150 years of history between the United States and Japan, demonstrating how the game became a vessel for unity, resilience, and repair.

MONSTERS WITHIN wears its heart on its sleeve. It’s a character-driven drama with thriller elements about a veteran, Luke Wolf, who returns home and discovers that the hardest battles aren’t fought overseas, but inside the mind and within the relationships he’s neglected. The film’s core is the bond between Luke and his sister, Elle—played by writer-director-star Devin Montgomery and his real-life sister, Daniella Montgomery—which lends the story an authenticity that is palpable in the quiet moments. That choice grounds the film’s broader themes and keeps the focus where it belongs: on care, responsibility, and the complex path from avoidance to accountability.

MAIGRET opens with a promise: a character defined by patience and empathy dropped into a present-day Paris that rarely slows down. That recalibrating is the series’ thesis. Rather than treating modernization as a gimmick, it utilizes the contemporary setting to test what actually makes Jules Maigret distinctive—the way he listens, the space he creates for people to reveal themselves, and the stubborn insistence that justice must fit the human contours of a case, not just the letter of the law. The result is a character-driven crime drama that prioritizes quiet moments and builds its momentum through observation rather than shock.

DOGTOOTH remains one of the most startling debuts in modern cinema, the film that first presented Yorgos Lanthimos as a director unafraid of discomfort, ambiguity, and provocation. Now restored and released in 4K by Kino Lorber with director-supervised grading and remastered audio, it arrives with sharper edges than ever. Though released in 2009, its disturbing questions about control and manufactured truth still feel contemporary.

SHE LOVED BLOSSOMS MORE arrives as one of the most unusual films that I’ve seen lately, and that’s saying something. This feature resists easy categorization and pushes firmly into the terrain of the Greek “weirdwave.” Directed by Yannis Veslemes, the film fuses grief, science fiction, surreal horror, and an undercurrent of bleak comedy into a deliberately confounding story of three brothers attempting to undo the permanent. What begins as a strange family drama quickly morphs into something far less stable — a feverish meditation on memory and mourning where logic crumbles as easily as the flowers that line its title.