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By 1929, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy had already developed the comic partnership that would define the rest of their lives and careers. Stan’s naive confusion, Ollie’s wounded dignity, and their shared ability to turn a minor problem into a spectacular disaster were all firmly in place. LAUREL & HARDY: THE SILENT YEARS gathers nine shorts made as Hollywood was shifting toward sound, capturing the duo at the end of one era without suggesting they needed to change much for the next.

I really had no clue what to expect here. I didn’t know anything about the film going in; all I had seen were the poster and some stills. Revenge stories usually know where they’re headed long before the characters do. IS GOD IS takes a familiar route and drags it through family histories, mythic rage, dark humor, and a whole lot of fire until the path feels less like justice and more like inheritance. Aleshea Harris adapts her own stage play into a film that’s often bold, frequently strange, and carried by two lead performances that understand anger as something more complicated than an action-movie fuel source.

SUGAR COOKIES doesn’t feel like the Troma most viewers think they know. No mutant janitor swinging through radioactive chaos, no splatter-comedy, no self-aware barrage of slime, shouting, and bad taste. This is earlier, stranger (oddly enough), and more patient, the kind of low-budget 1970s erotic thriller that seems to have wandered out of New York’s underground film scene with lipstick on the glass and a knife hidden somewhere nearby.

STARBRIGHT is the kind of movie that makes you wish wanting something badly were enough to make it work. Francesco Lucente’s fantasy adventure has sincerity pouring out of nearly every frame, from its grieving farm girl to its fallen star to its big speeches about hope, faith, and the possibility that light can survive in a broken world. It wants to be sweeping. It wants to be old-fashioned. It wants to make you feel again. That’s admirable, and there are moments where that ambition peeks through. The problem is that the movie keeps mistaking scale for depth and length for emotional weight.

Reviewing a Troma movie by normal standards feels a little like complaining that a haunted house has too many jump scares. At a certain point, the mess is part of it all, and you have to understand that. RISE OF THE SUPER TROMETTES arrives with slime on its shoes, a dirty joke in its pocket, and absolutely no interest in behaving for anyone outside the converted. That doesn’t make it good. The truth is, it’s bad by most measures, yet it also makes it hard to dismiss as nothing.

The funniest thing about MICKI & MAUDE may be how hard it works to make a terrible idea feel lighter than it is. Director Blake Edwards takes a story about deception, marriage, pregnancy, and bigamy, then pushes it through the idea of a classic parody, trusting Dudley Moore’s charm to keep the whole thing from collapsing under the weight of its own premise.

Some fantasy films survive because of the story. Some survive because of nostalgia. THE 7TH VOYAGE OF SINBAD survives because its monsters feel like they were made by someone who believed every movement mattered. The seams show, the performances are all over the place, the dialogue can land with all the little to no delicacy, and the story is barely interested in pretending to be complicated. None of that erases the strange, lasting pleasure of watching Ray Harryhausen’s creations move through Nathan Juran’s 1958 adventure, as ancient myths come to life.

Radio used to feel like stepping into a different world, not the safe, algorithm-approved kind of discovery where a platform decides what you might tolerate next, but the version where a song could arrive without warning, from someone you’d never expect, through a signal that barely had permission to exist. 40 WATTS FROM NOWHERE understands that, and its best moments don’t just explain why a pirate radio station mattered; it explained how radio feels physical, messy, cramped, reckless, and alive.

By the time someone says they’re “just trying to be authentic,” the trap has usually already closed. That’s the darker joke running underneath THE REBRAND, Kaye Adelaide’s comedy about image repair, queer codependency, influencer rot, and the particular horror of being too polite to leave a room you know is unsafe. The film doesn’t treat online branding like a distant social illness or a punchline about people who post too much. It understands something more uncomfortable. The persona doesn’t always stop when the camera turns off. Sometimes the camera is the only thing keeping the persona from becoming even worse.

A forgery only works if everyone agrees to look away from the lie. THE CHRISTOPHERS takes that idea and applies it to art, family, grief, reputation, inheritance, and the stories people tell about genius after it stops being useful to them. Steven Soderbergh’s art-world dark comedy isn’t the slick heist film its premise could have become. It’s quieter, meaner, and more interested in the emotional fraud people commit long before anyone touches a canvas.

THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW did something that no film in history was ever able to do and continues to do so today. It handed the ending to the audience and let them rewrite the experience time and time again at home and in public viewings 50 years later and going. STRANGE JOURNEY: THE STORY OF ROCKY HORROR understands that the real story isn’t only how a London fringe theater anomaly became a film, or how that film failed before becoming a midnight-screening sensation. The real story is how people who felt out of place found a room where being out of place was finally the point.

SON OF THE SOIL storms in with fists in the air, gunfire, grief, dust, blood, and the kind of revenge-movie momentum that rarely leaves room for anyone to sit with their pain before the next body drops. Chee Keong Cheung’s Lagos-set action thriller is rough and blunt, with a deep familiarity, but it has enough physical force and visual personality to stand apart from a routine vengeance story. This is a film that often works better as an impact piece than as drama, and there’s value in knowing the difference.

OH! WHAT A LOVELY WAR recognizes that national disaster doesn’t always present itself with darkness; sometimes it shows up with songs, banners, uniforms, and people eager to believe that history has placed them on the side of glory. Richard Attenborough’s 1969 directorial debut turns World War I into a pageant where civic pride, vanity, recruitment theater, and battlefield arithmetic sit uncomfortably close together. The movie smiles with its teeth, and the longer it plays, the harder it becomes to separate entertainment from indictment.

NEW YEAR’S ABSOLUTION starts with the kind of tradition that sounds harmless until everyone remembers they invited people with secrets, grudges, guns, and poor impulse control. The idea is simple enough to work. A group of friends gathers for their annual New Year’s Eve celebration and exchanges anonymous resolutions. It expects the night to follow the same chaotic but familiar pattern it always has. Then one slip of paper changes everything.

By 1974, Vincent Price didn’t need to play a horror icon; he already was one. That’s the strange, slightly sad feeling running through MADHOUSE, a film that looks at Price’s screen history, borrows from it, rearranges those pieces into a fictional legacy, and then asks what happens when a performer becomes trapped inside the monster that made him famous. The movie isn’t always as clever as it deserves to be, but the idea is strong enough to keep it moving forward.

Bad real estate deals are already scary enough before radioactive insects get involved. EMPIRE OF THE ANTS takes that on headfirst in a wonderfully ridiculous way, turning a swampy land scam into a giant siege where capitalism, toxic waste, and 1970s creature-feature logic all crawl into the same pile. Bert I. Gordon’s final giant-monster film is clunky, silly, and sometimes awkward in ways that are impossible to ignore, yet there’s something undoubtedly entertaining about watching it keep pushing forward with a straight face.

DON’T PLAY WITH FIRE doesn’t drive into chaos toward panic as much as it starts inside it and keeps tightening the room. Tsui Hark’s 1980 provocation, also known as DANGEROUS ENCOUNTERS OF THE FIRST KIND, has the impact of a film made by someone who looked around at a city full of pressure points and decided there was no way to make something civil from it. It’s abrasive, unstable, monstrous, and thrilling in the way a warning can be thrilling when it’s too late to get out of the way.

Some of my favorite documentaries are the ones that leave you with something to think about after. CORONER TO THE STARS understands an uncomfortable truth and builds an absorbing documentary around a man whose job was to pull myth back down to the body. Dr. Thomas Noguchi didn’t create Hollywood’s obsession with death, scandal, mystery, or reputation, but he became one of the few people expected to answer for all of it when the most recognizable names in Los Angeles passed on.

Hollywood loves selling the dream, even when everyone knows the dream comes with a sharp edge. ABOVE THE LINE takes that bitterness and builds a holiday heist around it, imagining a group of wounded industry hopefuls pushed far enough by rejection, humiliation, and one powerful producer that burglary starts to look like career therapy. That’s a funny starting point, and for a while, the film gets decent mileage from the gap between glamorous Hollywood mythology and the sad reality of people trying to survive on its fringes.

You would think, by default, a film that takes place primarily on a yacht should make the world feel larger. In WAVES OF LUST, it does the opposite. The sea stretches out in every direction, the sun bakes the deck, and director Ruggero Deodato slowly turns all that open space into a floating trap where money, sex, resentment, and power begin to breathe the same stale air.

Before Georges Franju gave horror cinema one of its most unsettling experiences with EYES WITHOUT A FACE, he made a film about confinement that didn’t need masks, scalpels, or exaggeration to feel disturbing. LA TÊTE CONTRE LES MURS is built from locked doors, family authority, medical certainty, and the terrifying ease with which a person can be removed from ordinary life once the right signatures are in place.

You would think, by default, a film that takes place primarily on a yacht should make the world feel larger. In WAVES OF LUST, it does the opposite. The sea stretches out in every direction, the sun bakes the deck, and director Ruggero Deodato slowly turns all that open space into a floating trap where money, sex, resentment, and power begin to breathe the same stale air.

Louisa Connolly-Burnham writes, directs, and stars in a thriller that doesn’t treat its concept like a stunt. It’s a film about sex addiction, professional boundaries, shame, control, and power, but the most unsettling part isn’t the subject alone. It’s how calm everything looks right before it starts to crack. Connolly-Burnham plays Kate, an intimacy coordinator whose job requires her to protect actors during vulnerable scenes. She clarifies limits, watches the room, and makes sure everyone on set understands where the boundaries are. In those moments, Kate seems exactly like the person you’d want in that position. She’s composed, attentive, warm, and direct. Her presence lowers the temperature on set. She knows how to make complicated work feel safe.

A murder in a movie theater should be one of the easiest horror setups in cinematic history. The dark room, the distracted crowd, the screams coming from the screen, the real danger hiding inside the fake one. MATINEE, also known as MIDNIGHT MATINEE, begins with exactly the kind of promise that has you on the edge of your seat. Richard Martin’s Canadian horror-mystery opens with a grisly killing during a horror film festival, then jumps ahead two years as the same small-town theater prepares to reopen for another round of genre programming. The past hasn’t healed. The killer hasn’t been caught. The seats are filling up again.

Most family Christmases are already horror stories; if you put people in the same room long enough, there will always be a breaking point. HOW TO KILL YOUR FAMILY ON CHRISTMAS knows that. Robbie Dias’ low-budget holiday horror comedy doesn’t rush straight to the bloodshed. It starts with awkward family behavior, uncomfortable conversations, old resentments, forced cheer, and the kind of gathering where tension and anxiety are around every corner.