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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.

Some films about political violence feel like arguments preserved under glass. SOLO feels closer to a cigarette burn left in the upholstery after everyone has stormed out of the room. Jean-Pierre Mocky’s 1970 crime thriller comes from the aftershock of May 1968 rather than from its romance. It isn’t interested in turning a revolt into poster art or nostalgia. Instead, it watches anger curdle into murder, privilege respond with self-protection, and one man wander into the middle of it all with just enough conscience to ruin his own life. The result is messy, bitter, funny at times, and more alive than many films trying to make similar points.

Movie stars know how to survive a room, even when the room has already decided what they’re worth. They smile at people they don’t trust, accept praise that sounds like a warning, and pretend every invitation is harmless until the exit disappears behind them. EAGLES OF THE REPUBLIC understands that kind of performance, and its best moments come from watching an actor realize that the most dangerous role of his career isn’t being played in front of a camera.

Westerns don’t always need vast mythology to work. Sometimes all they need is a bad guy, a hidden treasure, a brutal winter, and a person smart enough to know that survival isn’t the same thing as bravery. THE ISOLATE THIEF understands that appeal, even when it doesn’t always push its own setup as far as it could. John Suits’ Civil War-era Western has the bones of a lean, outpost thriller, and when the film trusts that simplicity, it finds something special.

Romance usually depends on the lie that the person beside you can eventually be known, understood, forgiven, and loved through anything. THE DRAMA takes that promise, sets it one week before a wedding, and starts pressing until the whole thing looks less like devotion and more like an elaborate dare. Kristoffer Borgli has made a relationship movie that doesn’t treat love as an answer. It treats love as the place where the worst questions get asked.

Some documentaries ask the audience to feel like they’re a part of the case; BABY DOE asks something far more uncomfortable. It asks whether a person’s worst moment can ever be understood without excusing it, and whether a legal system built around guilt and punishment has the patience to sit with fear, denial, religion, shame, and memory when those things refuse to line up. That distinction is so important in this context because Jessica Earnshaw isn’t making a film designed to feed the usual true crime appetite. She’s making one that studies what happens after a headline has already decided who someone is.