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Family can turn a perfectly ordinary relationship into a committee decision before the couple involved has even figured everything out themselves. FOOD FOR THE SOUL understands that particular kind of frustration very well, finding comedy in relatives who genuinely believe they're helping while steadily making everything more complicated.

The smartest decision BODY OF WORK makes is refusing to treat Eric Anfinson's injury as the whole story. It obviously changed everything, and Cassidy Rast and Odin Wadleigh never minimize what happened to him. Still, their documentary is ultimately much more interested in the person who emerged afterward than the moment that forced his life onto a different path.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned since starting to review films is not to judge a movie by its cover, at least no more than I’d judge a book by its cover. I mean no disrespect to this cover designer, but the film on the cover feels substantially less like the film I watched. There’s a point in THE BEHEMOTH when all the restraint gives way, and the movie shows what it really came to do. Blood starts flowing, the effects get increasingly vile, and a relatively quiet cult-horror story suddenly develops the kind of personality that had only been showing itself in flashes. Getting there is considerably less consistent.

What do you get when you have a corpse asking a lonely punk kid for help killing God? It's the kind of premise that either loses you or earns enough goodwill to get away with almost anything. MY ONLY FRIEND'S A CORPSE fortunately belongs in the second category (for me, this won’t work for everyone); the film embraces its absurdity so completely that its limited resources eventually become far less important than whatever writer-director Jack Bayless decides to throw at the screen next.

Gal Dove has already won. That's what makes SEXY BEAST such an effective crime movie before most of the crime even begins. He isn't chasing money, power, respect, or one enormous score that will finally allow him to retire. He already retired, moved to Spain, married a woman he genuinely loves, and spends his days baking beneath the sun beside a swimming pool. The criminal life isn't something he's dreaming about escaping. He escaped it. Then Don Logan shows up.

The first thing that sticks with you about I LOVE BOOSTERS isn't the shoplifting, the politics, or even Boots Riley's willingness to make capitalism look completely ridiculous. It's how aggressively alive the movie looks. Colors are everywhere, clothing practically demands its own screen credit, physical gags are tucked into backgrounds, sets seem governed by different laws of physics, and the movie has enough visual personality to embarrass plenty of movies costing far more.

A title like BRIT NOIR COLLECTION IV suggests darkness, but these three films are much less interested in shadowy alleyways than they are in respectable rooms where somebody is lying. Each comes from the mid-1950s, and all three find different ways to turn seemingly ordinary British life into something uneasy. A writer gets too curious, a supposedly dead husband comes home, and a condemned murderer claims he knows the identity of a spy. None of the films need to push hard to make their worlds feel suspicious because distrust is already built in.

I laughed exactly once during SCARY MOVIE. That creates an awkward situation when reviewing a comedy, because at some point I have to wonder whether the movie is just that unfunny or I’m either too mature or too immature (can that be a thing?) for this particular brand of nonsense now. Maybe it’s all three. Twenty-six years after the original SCARY MOVIE helped turn over-the-top parody into a box-office monster, the Wayans returned to the franchise alongside Anna Faris and Regina Hall, and there’s something so appealing about seeing so many familiar faces together again. That goodwill lasted longer than most of the jokes did for me, which becomes a problem when jokes are practically the only reason this thing exists.

Movies about making movies and television usually gravitate toward the people everybody recognizes. Directors bark instructions, actors struggle with performances, producers panic about money, and writers stare miserably at blank pages. THE SCOUT spends its time with somebody whose work is necessary but usually finished long before any of those people arrive. Sofia drives around New York photographing apartments, businesses, streets, and whatever else might eventually become somebody else's fictional world, and Paula González-Nasser finds something quietly fascinating in how much real life has to be invaded to manufacture one.

There’s an advantage to putting a horror movie inside a real haunted attraction: the production doesn’t have to spend much time convincing us that the place has personality. HELLBILLY HOLLOW was filmed at the actual Alabama attraction that gives the movie its name, and that setting is easily one of its best assets. The barns, backwoods paths, carnival contraptions, and deliberately grimy spaces already feel like places where something awful could happen. Director Kevin Wayne understands that and gets plenty out of simply turning the attraction’s machinery against the people wandering through it.

Martial arts movies have never automatically been my thing, which makes the ones that completely abandon common sense a lot easier to appreciate. NINJA WARS apparently reached the same conclusion. Kosei Saito's 1982 fantasy takes ninjas, feudal politics, romance, prophecy, sorcery, grotesque villains, bodily transformation, copious blood, and a young Hiroyuki Sanada, throws everything into the same pot, and never worries too much about whether any sane person would have combined these ingredients.

The strangest thing about CRUEL TALES OF THE BOHACHI isn’t how much blood, nudity, cruelty, or general depravity Eureka Entertainment has managed to squeeze into two discs. It’s how little fifty-plus years have done to make either of these movies feel tame. BOHACHI BUSHIDO: CODE OF THE FORGOTTEN EIGHT and its spiritual successor, BOHACHI BUSHIDO: THE VILLAIN, come from a period of Japanese genre filmmaking when apparently somebody could ask, “Is this too much?” and the answer was repeatedly, enthusiastically, “Not even close.”

Andrea Artusi cheats on his wife and almost immediately discovers that adultery itself bothers him considerably less than the possibility that she might be capable of doing the same thing. That hypocrisy gives THE MAGNIFICENT CUCKOLD its funniest material, but Antonio Pietrangeli isn't satisfied with simply watching a guilty husband get a taste of his own medicine. Andrea's affair doesn't destroy his marriage. His imagination nearly does that for him.

Kaze's greatest talent isn't keeping a wife and nine mistresses. It's somehow managing to act genuinely confused that any of them might eventually become angry about the arrangement. Eiji Funakoshi plays that bewilderment so well in TEN WOMEN IN BLACK that some of the movie's funniest moments come from watching a man encounter the completely predictable consequences of his own behavior and react as though everyone else has suddenly become unreasonable.

You can almost feel the temperature rising before anybody has done anything particularly dangerous. THE HOT SPOT looks sweaty, dusty, and uncomfortable from practically the moment Harry Madox enters town, and Dennis Hopper understands that the heat shouldn't simply be part of the setting. It needs to affect everything.

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.

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.

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.