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Airi knows exactly what to do when a ghost refuses to leave. That confidence is what makes NEVER AFTER DARK, because writer-director Dave Boyle doesn’t introduce his lead as someone stumbling into the supernatural for the first time. She arrives with tools, rules, a practiced ritual, and the calm of someone who has done this often enough that fear has become part of the job.

LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS does a lot of things right, but one of the most impressive things it does is convince you that all of this belongs together. A lonely florist, a singing man-eating plant, a sadistic dentist, a love story, and a parade of musical numbers shouldn’t fit inside the same 94 minutes. Yet Frank Oz keeps the movie moving with the confidence of someone who knows hesitation would be fatal.

The skeleton suit is almost a trick. KRIMINAL puts one of the most immediately recognizable costumes of 1960s European comic-book cinema front and center, only to discover that its real weapon is Glenn Saxson walking into a room with complete confidence and convincing everyone that he belongs there. The costume matters, but the man wearing it turns out to be much more interesting.

1978 puts celebration and cruelty in the same room. While Argentina is consumed by the 1978 World Cup final, a group of men connected to the country’s military dictatorship goes about the far uglier business of kidnapping and interrogating a group of young people, creating a contrast that gives the movie some of its most disturbing moments.

There’s something wonderfully strange about describing a movie as a “psychoglitter thriller,” but THE BELLADONNA earns every part of it. Writer-director Javid Rezai surrounds grief, jealousy, and psychological instability with sequins, corsets, bright makeup, and the theatricality of a burlesque club. Instead of those two sides fighting each other, the glitter makes the darkness underneath much easier to see.

Before anyone says much of anything, COME THE NIGHTFALL has already made one of its strongest decisions. Tom Michaels shot his 23-minute horror short on 16mm, and that choice immediately gives the film a texture that would be difficult to reproduce digitally. The grain, heavier shadows, and slightly worn image quality aren't simply there to announce that Michaels likes older horror movies. They help establish the uneasiness of a story where almost everyone seems a little different from the person they're presenting to the world.

There’s something almost ridiculous about assigning enormous meaning to a nickel. It’s the kind of coin many people wouldn't bother bending down to pick up, worth so little that finding one normally wouldn't register beyond the next few seconds. NICKELS takes that insignificant object and asks what happens when grief gives it a meaning that money never could.

When I started screening BEGOTTEN, I had no clue what I was getting myself into. I stopped trying to decide if what I was watching was really a “movie” or an exploration. There’s no traditional dialogue, no real narrative structure, and not even the expected character development some experimental films have, and the images are so distorted that figuring out what is happening becomes a challenge in itself. E. Elias Merhige drops the viewer into something resembling a nightmare that the viewers shouldn’t even be allowed to see, and whether that sounds fascinating or unbearable will probably depend on what you’re willing to accept.

Some movies are polished enough that you can almost forget somebody had to fight to get them made. UP IN HARLEM is the opposite. Paul E. Eliacin's independent drama wears nearly every limitation on its sleeve. Still, it carries the unmistakable feeling of someone with something specific to say and the determination to say it.

There’s something appropriately messy about a punk documentary that occasionally feels like somebody emptied decades of flyers, photographs, VHS tapes, club stories, and half-forgotten memories onto a table and decided to sort through all of it with us. OIL CAPITAL UNDERGROUND: THE GENESIS & EVOLUTION OF PUNK ROCK IN TULSA LATE 70S TO MID-90S may not always know when enough is enough, but there’s real value in how unwilling it is to let Tulsa’s underground music history quietly disappear.

The quickest way to make a nearly 70-year-old science-fiction movie feel its age is to ask it to predict the future. FORBIDDEN PLANET somehow survives that challenge because its version of tomorrow is so committed to being strange that realism almost stops mattering. The control panels, uniforms, enormous machinery, painted landscapes, electronic noises, and wonderfully bulky Robby the Robot don't resemble our world in 2026. However, together they create a future that still feels like someplace else.

The irony about SAWTOOTH MOUNTAIN is that Bigfoot barely needs to be there for everything to go horribly wrong. Writer/director Matt Kincses starts our story with people who desperately want Sasquatch to be real, adds someone willing to fake that for money, and then watches an increasingly stupid series of decisions turn a tourist attraction into something far more dangerous.

GO feels like someone preserved a particular corner of 1999 before anyone realized it was worth saving. The clothes, grocery-store jobs, pagers, raves, casual drug use, soundtrack, and general lack of concern about making a responsible decision all belong to a specific moment, yet Doug Liman's movie has survived considerably better than plenty of films that were supposed to represent their generation more seriously.

GHOST IN THE CELL can go from a vicious murder to an absurd joke quickly enough to make you wonder whether Joko Anwar is daring the movie to fall apart. Then he'll throw in a prison fight, political satire, another grotesque body, and something supernatural before giving the characters room to be funny again. Keeping all of that under control seems almost impossible, which makes it strangely entertaining to watch Anwar keep testing how much one movie can hold.

It would be easy for a documentary about Twiggy to spend its runtime admiring photographs. There are enough famous images, magazine covers, hairstyles, clothes, and heavily copied poses to build an entire movie around how a teenager came to represent a particular moment in the 1960s. Sadie Frost’s TWIGGY is much more interested in the woman who somehow remained herself while everyone else was busy turning her into that image.

There’s an odd time-capsule quality to BATTLE CABIN. Lionsgate is bringing it to U.S. digital platforms in 2026, but Aaron Falvey shot the film in New Zealand years earlier, and it was first released in some places as NORTHSPUR. That history matters because the movie often feels less like a new survival thriller and more like an older independent production finally finding a larger doorway into the American market.

APRIL X is at its best when the future is just happening around its characters instead of telling us all about it. Michel K. Parandi builds a near-future society out of scattered details, technology, economic instability, criminal activity, and an underlying sense that civilization has reorganized itself into something slightly removed from the present. That makes the setting considerably more interesting than a parade of gadgets or giant effects could have been.

FUNNY MONEY: THE DANE COOK STORY is really about more than just the millions of dollars that disappeared. It explores how Dane Cook could let someone that close to him get away with that kind of theft in the first place, and director Brett Harvey understands that the family relationship is far more interesting than watching numbers disappear from a bank account.

Within a few minutes of watching THE BORROWERS, I kept thinking about THE LITTLES, the animated series I remember from years ago. Tiny people hiding inside the walls, ordinary household objects becoming useful tools and furniture, and an entire secret society existing just beyond the awareness of normal-sized humans all felt immediately familiar. The comparison makes complete sense, though not quite in the way I initially assumed.

Kim Basinger and Jeff Bridges spend much of NADINE arguing like two people who know exactly which buttons to push because they’ve been pressing them for years. That relationship is far more entertaining than the murder, land scheme, or criminals chasing them, and Robert Benton seems to understand that almost immediately. The crime plot gives Nadine and Vernon somewhere to run, but their broken marriage is what gives the movie a reason to keep following them.

Westerns have never been the easiest sell for me, so putting four of them into one six-hour box set sounds more like an assignment than an invitation. EASTERN TRAILS: THE WESTERN AT DEFA, however, comes with an angle strange enough to make the familiar landscapes worth another look immediately. These aren't American westerns or even the Italian variations that reshaped the genre during the same period. They're East German productions made by the state-operated DEFA studio, looking across the Atlantic at the mythology of America's frontier and deciding that the people traditionally pushed to the edges of those stories should be standing in the middle instead.

DEMON HUNTER: TIME 2 KILL has absolutely no interest in recognizing the limitations of its budget. Zoe Kavanagh throws demons, time travel, corporate Satanists, a 1980s summer-camp slasher, sword fights, practical gore and a motorcycle-riding heroine into the same 97 minutes, then keeps adding ideas long after most independent productions would've started cutting them. That ambition gives the movie an undeniable scrappy charm, but it also creates a constant battle between what Kavanagh imagines and what the production can convincingly put on screen.

The title BAD COUNSELORS makes a promise the movie never fully intends to keep. Put two irresponsible fraternity guys into a summer camp comedy, and there are plenty of directions things could go, most of them considerably raunchier than what director Chris Dowling eventually delivers. Instead, the bad counselors end up at a Christian youth camp, where their attempt to cheat their way through community service gradually becomes a fairly sincere story about responsibility, relationships, and faith.

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.