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STEAL THIS STORY, PLEASE! understands that journalism, at its best, is not a set of hot takes—it’s a muscle memory for asking difficult questions when the room would prefer silence. The film follows Amy Goodman across three decades of reporting and the daily grind, framing the Democracy Now! anchor not as a sainted outlier but as a working reporter who refuses to internalize the limits imposed by corporate consolidation, political intimidation, or apathy. Directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessin shape that vision into a narrative: a story about the persistence required to keep a public square open when the gatekeepers continually change the locks.

DECIBEL locks a musician and a music mogul in an isolated studio and asks a question the music business keeps dodging: what happens to soul when the system optimizes it? The premise is pointed—a promising musician, Scout, is invited to a high-tech recording sanctuary run by Donna, a brilliant, exacting figure who believes the future of music is less about blood and breath and more about training data and control (typical billionaire…). That setup isn’t just timely; it’s personal. Every scene feels like a negotiation between two incompatible definitions of creativity: one that accepts messiness, and one that treats mess as a bug to eliminate.

AFTER DARK is a compact morality play about what we owe a stranger when our instincts disagree. In ten minutes, it sets up a classic 'what would you do' scenario: a man on his way home meets a young woman who needs help getting to the station. He decides to walk with her. From there, the film becomes a tug-of-war between two impulses—compassion and self-protection—played out on quiet streets where every footstep sounds like a decision.

THE MASK is the rare studio comedy that fully understands its star as both actor and special effect. Jim Carrey’s face, posture, and body language were already a cultural event in 1994; this film turns that energy into its own premise. Stanley Ipkiss is a pushover with a kind heart and a habit of apologizing for occupying space. The mask he finds doesn’t create a different person; it detonates the person he’s been holding back, then paints him green and lets him sprint across the screen. That simple idea—your repressed self, set free—is what gives the movie its lasting power. The jokes go big, the gags go bigger, and yet the concept remains clear enough to anchor all the chaos.

The candy-colored surface of BUT I’M A CHEERLEADER hides more than you know. Jamie Babbit builds a world of bubblegum pastels and gender norms not to soften the story, but to sharpen it. Beneath the powder-blue lawns and Pepto-pink dorm rooms is a clear, pointed satire of “conversion therapy” and the cultural pressure to sand queer teens down into an acceptable shape.

There’s a quiet fire beneath BOYFIGHTER. Even as it keeps close to the bruised world of underground combat, it never lets violence define the characters’ worth. Julia Weisberg Cortés approaches the story not as a spectacle of fists and fights, but as a compassionate examination of how love, regret, and masculinity can become entangled into something that hurts even when it tries to protect. That unique perspective gives BOYFIGHTER a soul deeper than the genre typically offers.

THE RISING GIRLS OF K-POP: CONFIDENTIAL wants you to believe it’s cracking open a massive pop culture mystery. What it actually does is spend most of its runtime complaining about one of the most normal, unmysterious things in modern music: backing tracks.

PEACOCK is a dark, unsettling mirror held up to the modern performance of identity. It’s not simply a satire about role-playing; it’s a slow-motion implosion of a man who’s built his entire existence around being whoever others want him to be. Austrian filmmaker Bernhard Wenger’s feature captures the distorted comedy of self-erasure, a modern parable for the age of curated authenticity and algorithmic intimacy. The result is a smart, sharp piece of filmmaking that oscillates between humor and despair — a performance study wrapped in social commentary.

LITTLE AMÉLIE OR THE CHARACTER OF RAIN is a reminder that animation isn’t just a storytelling tool — it’s emotion with color. It’s what happens when you let art speak of memory, especially those first memories that never fully leave us. This is a film about a little girl learning how enormous life is, one moment at a time, and it uses animation to bring that realization to life in a way live-action never could.

PUT YOUR SOUL ON YOUR HAND AND WALK arrives with a story already aching inside it — a young woman whose life mattered, whose art demanded attention, and whose humanity insists on being remembered. That insistence is the backbone of Sepideh Farsi’s documentary. This film does not dramatize war so much as live inside it, through phone screens and connections that refuse to break even when everything else around them does.

he thing that makes 31 CANDLES engaging is this: it understands how much harder it is to change when you’re old enough to know better. Jonah Feingold plays Leo, a guy who skipped having a Bar Mitzvah at 13 and never quite shook the feeling that he left something unfinished. Now grown and stuck in the adult version of neutral — successful enough, charming enough, avoiding anything that might expose what he hasn’t figured out — he decides to finally accept the tradition he dodged, not as a punchline, but as a reckoning. The movie builds from a relatable place: when you’re tired of calling procrastination a personality trait, you have to do something uncomfortable.

In fifteen minutes, TRAPPED builds genuine tension, explores layered social commentary, and leaves you thinking long after the credits. Directed, written, and produced by brothers Sam and David Cutler-Kreutz, the short turns an ordinary high school janitor’s shift into a nightmare of escalating peril. But beneath the suspense lies something more penetrating—a critique of power, privilege, and how the smallest choices reveal who society protects and who it doesn’t.

PISTACHIO WARS peels back California’s agricultural facade and reveals something far more unsettling beneath the orchards. Directed and written by Yasha Levine and Rowan Wernham, the investigative documentary follows the trail of corporate greed that turns the state’s natural resources into a luxury commodity. What begins as a straightforward inquiry into a small water deal evolves into a sweeping, damning examination of power, branding, and the privatization of something as essential as life itself.