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Alex Cox apparently looked at Nikolai Gogol’s 1842 novel DEAD SOULS, a story about a man purchasing the names of dead Russian serfs who still existed on government tax records, and decided the natural place to relocate it was the American West. The stranger part is how quickly that decision starts to make sense.

There’s something strangely appropriate about watching a group of men who built an empire around refusing to act their age finally admit that age has caught up with them. JACKASS: BEST AND LAST still has testicles getting crushed, bodily fluids going places they shouldn’t, and grown adults agreeing to situations that should immediately make any reasonable person leave the room, but underneath all of it sits an unavoidable realization. These guys can’t keep doing this forever.

Some short films spend their entire running time proving how clever they are. RETRIEVING ROADIE spends roughly eight minutes introducing a lonely salesperson and a dog, sends them through an increasingly ridiculous trip home, and somehow lands somewhere much warmer than its simple setup initially suggests.

The most interesting thing about KIM NOVAK'S VERTIGO is that its title initially sounds like a documentary about Alfred Hitchcock's VERTIGO, but the possessive matters. This isn't really another examination of Hitchcock's movie. It's Kim Novak looking back at the version of herself that Hollywood created, the woman underneath that image, and the decades she spent trying to understand the difference between the two.

CONVOY probably shouldn't exist in anything close to the form it does. A hit novelty country song about CB radios and truckers somehow became a major studio production directed by Sam Peckinpah, the man behind THE WILD BUNCH and STRAW DOGS. What could have been little more than a quick attempt to cash in on a late-1970s craze became a strange mix of working-class rebellion, broad comedy, road-movie spectacle, and several hundred thousand pounds of machinery rolling across the American Southwest.

Some movies need twenty minutes before you understand what they’re trying to do. THE HAUNTED COP SHOP needs about that long before you realize understanding probably isn’t the point.

I can’t think of a recent movie that’s come with more warnings before I pressed play. I was told people walked out during a festival screening. I was told people got sick. The publicity materials even promote SLICE as having been banned in Canada for being too graphic. By the time I finally watched it, there was almost no way the movie could match the picture already built in my head. To its credit, SLICE certainly tries, and in more than a few moments it succeeds.

Some movies become important because they were first, and others because they changed what everyone expected afterward. HORROR OF DRACULA belongs firmly in that second category. By 1958, Dracula was already one of horror’s most recognizable figures, with Bela Lugosi’s performance casting an enormous shadow over the character. Hammer Films didn’t try to recreate that version. Instead, director Terence Fisher, Christopher Lee, and Peter Cushing pushed the material into something faster, bloodier, more physical, and noticeably more dangerous. Even now, it’s easy to understand why that approach landed so hard.

The most intriguing thing about people is that you never can really know what to expect when you ask a stranger a question. Ask someone about work, money, happiness, marriage, or what they want from life, then give them enough space to answer, and eventually they might end up telling you far more than they intended. Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme understand that, throughout LE JOLI MAI, they turn conversations with Parisians in May of 1962 into a portrait that grows more expressive the further it moves from anything resembling a history lesson.

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From the start, GALICIA! feels familiar in some ways. Anna Maguire and Kyle Greenberg arrive in Spain with a camera, visit friends working at a winery, drink, wander around, and record the moments that normally end up forgotten somewhere in the ether. That’s so important here, because the film needs us to settle into the idea that we’re simply watching people document a trip, before it starts asking what those images would mean if nobody were left to return home to.

Some mothers pressure their children to get married and have kids. Jacqueline Grayson has enough money, determination, and complete disregard for boundaries to turn that pressure into something far more dangerous. THE RESTORATION AT GRAYSON MANOR takes an already poisonous mother-son relationship, gives one of them experimental prosthetic hands controlled by his subconscious, and waits to see how much worse an awful family can become.

Families can become awfully honest once an inheritance is involved. THE INUGAMI FAMILY begins with an enormous fortune, a dead patriarch, and a will practically designed to make everyone in the room hate everyone else, then spends the next 146 minutes demonstrating just how ugly that combination can become. What starts as a fairly traditional murder mystery slowly opens into something stranger, darker, and far more visually adventurous than expected.

There’s a moment fairly early in SEX AND THE EMPEROR when it becomes clear that trying to predict what kind of movie you’re watching is a losing game. One minute it’s behaving like a period drama about palace politics, the next it’s a broad sex comedy. Before long it’s willing to wander into cruelty that’s genuinely difficult to laugh off. That instability can be exhausting, but it’s also the reason Sherman Wong’s 1994 Category III oddity remains much more interesting than its title might suggest.

There are only so many ways to reinvent a vampire before the creature stops feeling like a vampire at all. VAMPIRE CARNIVAL finds a surprisingly simple way around that problem: its creatures aren't particularly interested in your blood. They're interested in the misery you're carrying around with you, and for Gemma, a grieving young woman already struggling to move forward, that makes her exactly the sort of person they want walking through the gates.