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Back in the day, there was a time when TV didn't need to convince you that every comedy was redefining the format. Sometimes funny people were enough, and PERFECT STRANGERS understood the assignment. Eight seasons and 150 episodes later, the moving pieces behind the show become incredibly easy to recognize. Bronson Pinchot and Mark Linn-Baker remain funny enough together that recognizing why doesn't necessarily stop it from working.

Director Colette Ghunim knew the basic facts about where her parents came from, but TRACES OF HOME asks deeper, more complicated questions. How well can you really know your parents when the most painful parts of their lives were rarely discussed? Ghunim grew up in suburban Illinois with a Palestinian father and Mexican mother who worked to give their children a stable American childhood. Yet, something remained absent from the family story.

MUTANT GENESIS has that type of premise that feels like it should come with a checklist. Artificial intelligence turns against humanity, machines take control of the planet, survivors form a resistance, cities collapse, heavily armed robots hunt the remaining humans, and our heroes prepare for one final attempt to fight back. Qilin Li’s science-fiction action movie spends so much time reminding us of better movies that it never develops much of a personality of its own.

There’s undoubtedly a difference between discovering a forgotten gem and discovering a movie that’s fascinating because it somehow survived at all. RED FLAG DOWN falls much closer to the second category. Christopher P. Smith’s 1992 shot-on-video production, which is somehow not even on IMDb (thank you, Letterboxd!), spent decades buried in the deepest corner of genre filmmaking, and its reappearance on Blu-ray is probably more remarkable than anything actually happening during its sixty-minute runtime. Heck, it doesn’t even have a Letterboxd review yet!

Putting more than nine hours of early Ken Burns documentaries into one box makes something obvious. The style people now associate so strongly with his name didn’t just appear with THE CIVIL WAR. You can watch it becoming structured across KEN BURNS’ AMERICA COLLECTION. Photographs become active parts of the storytelling, letters and firsthand accounts provide emotional detail, narration gives history its shape without turning into a lecture, and monumental moments in time are approached through individual people. The techniques grew more sophisticated as Burns’ career progressed, but the underlying ideas were already there.

There’s a revelation buried inside about making a Christmas ornament out of a piece of wire. It’s simple, delicate, and worth almost nothing on its own, yet in CHRISTMAS ANGELS it becomes a small act of defiance against circumstances that offer very little room for joy. That thought carries most of this thirteen-minute short, which understands that protecting a child doesn’t always mean keeping reality hidden entirely behind lies. Sometimes it means reshaping that reality just enough to make it survivable.

There’s a moment somewhere in FATAL FLYING GUILLOTINE when trying to keep track of everybody’s reasoning becomes considerably less important than accepting that another fight is probably about thirty seconds away. That’s the movie’s survival strategy. Plot threads start to pile up, characters are introduced with varying degrees of importance, loyalties become difficult to follow, and Raymond Lui keeps solving the problem the same way!

There’s something almost ridiculous about watching adults insist they’re fighting for children while repeatedly failing to listen to the children standing right in front of them. That becomes one of the most revealing parts of BUCKS COUNTY, USA, a five-part docuseries about a purple county in Pennsylvania where arguments over schools grow into something much larger, uglier, and increasingly personal.

We don’t need to experience the eruption of Mount Etna to understand the danger hanging over Adele and Sofia. director/co-writer Irene Dionisio puts an active volcano beneath two women carrying years of resentment, guilt, affection, disappointment, and unfinished conversations, then has the restraint to let most of that “pressure” remain beneath the surface. IDDA builds the story around everything these childhood friends haven't said to each other, and the mountain becomes less a looming threat than a reminder that silence doesn’t mean that nothing is happening beneath the surface.

Eating people isn't even the biggest problem this family has. That's the most wonderfully ridiculous intro I think I’ve written, and that’s just the starting point Megan Mostyn-Brown establishes in THE NEED, a horror debut about a rare genetic disorder requiring those affected to consume human flesh to survive. The concept sounds like something about blood, shock value, and increasingly disgusting meals. Mostyn-Brown certainly doesn't shy away from any of those things, but the surprise is how quickly cannibalism becomes almost the norm. Bodies are a problem to clean up. Meat has to be sourced. Murder creates logistical headaches. The real damage, though, comes from parents, children, money, resentment, loneliness, and people who are trying desperately to decide whether their families are protecting them or ruining their lives.

There’s nothing glamorous about inheriting a giant range of forest, especially when you have no idea what you’re supposed to do with it. For Frieda, it initially looks less like a gift and more like another problem keeping her from the life she’s been working toward. MEMORIES OF A FOREST takes that situation and uses it to look at family obligation, money, and how easily one generation’s sacrifices can become the next generation’s responsibility.

KNIFE: THE ATTEMPTED MURDER OF SALMAN RUSHDIE is one of those documentaries where you know going in that parts of it are going to be difficult to watch. I wasn't prepared for how much of that would come from seeing what happened afterward rather than simply revisiting the attack itself. Rushdie survived being stabbed repeatedly onstage in 2022, but survival was only the beginning of what he and his wife, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, had to endure.

If LION FIST had shown up on a video store shelf in the 90s, nobody would have questioned it. The tournament, the training, the rock music, the colorful fighters, and even the ridiculously straightforward motivation all belong to a particular era of martial arts movies. Director Taim M. Adams isn't trying to reinvent any of that, and the movie is probably more enjoyable once you realize he has absolutely no interest in doing so.

For almost a decade, there’s been one image that’s followed Colin Kaepernick everywhere. Kneeling on an NFL sideline during the national anthem. THE PERILOUS FIGHT gives him enough room to tell the much larger story surrounding that moment. Kaepernick goes back to his childhood, his relationship with race and identity, his obsessive love of sports, his rise through college football, the Super Bowl years, his growing political awareness, his activism, and the life he’s continued building since leaving the NFL.

There’s a kind of exhaustion that comes from watching people making themselves miserable in the pursuit of companionship, especially when everyone involved seems convinced there must be a better person just one swipe away. FLOATING CAROUSEL understands what exhaustion really is and, instead of trying to make modern dating look appealing, turns it into something increasingly ridiculous, uncomfortable, and eventually just unhinged. It’s funny because so much of what happens feels exaggerated right up until you realize that very little of it seems impossible.