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Kelsey Grammer has spent much of his career playing men who believe their intelligence should place them in control of every room they enter. LARS SHRIKE WALKS THE NIGHT strips that away while leaving the voice and wounded pride intact. Lars knows his name and believes he has escaped. Those two scraps of certainty aren’t enough to explain the desert surrounding him, the people he encounters, or why reality appears to be changing its rules whenever he begins to understand them. Watching Grammer argue with a universe that won’t acknowledge his importance becomes the movie’s most intriguing joke and its most unsettling idea.

RED SUN has the kind of cast list that almost sounds made up after the fact. Charles Bronson, Toshirō Mifune, Alain Delon, and Ursula Andress in a Western shot in Spain, directed by Terence Young, with a ceremonial Japanese sword pushing the story across the American frontier. That combination gives the film something built in before anyone fires a gun or draws a blade. It’s the sort of production that doesn’t need to be great to be worth seeing. It just needs to let its pieces bounce off each other long enough to make the ride interesting.

The uncomfortable thing about FALLING DOWN is that its starting point doesn’t feel that far from reality. Not the violence, not the cruelty, not the choices William Foster makes once he starts crossing lines, but the exhaustion underneath that first step out of the car. Everyone has had some version of that day. The traffic won’t move. The prices make no sense. The rule you’re asked to follow is stupid. The person in front of you doesn’t care. The system has an answer for everything except relief. Joel Schumacher’s film understands that with alarming clarity, then follows it into the place most people know not to go.

Clara spends so much of WHAT TOMORROW BRINGS pretending she has answers that the smallest moments of uncertainty become the most revealing. She can comfort her younger sister, smooth over an awkward conversation, and act as though another unpaid bill is only a temporary inconvenience. None of that means she knows how to keep a household running while finishing high school and carrying grief she’s never been allowed to process. The movie understands the cruelty of expecting a teenager to become dependable simply because every adult around her has stopped being dependable.

Pickleball is funny before anyone says a word about it. The sound, the court size, the sudden takeover, the way it can turn retirees, former athletes, casual hobbyists, and deeply competitive dads into people fighting for emotional survival over a plastic ball, all make it an easy target. THE DINK knows that, which is both its advantage and its ceiling. Josh Greenbaum’s sports comedy doesn’t reimagine the underdog formula. It understands how far a likable cast, a bruised ego, and a ridiculous game can carry a movie when everyone involved commits to the bit.

Smoke changes the way a place feels before the flames ever arrive. Roads narrow, distance turns unreliable, and every sound starts carrying a warning inside it. CRUEL HANDS understands that part of fear well, using Australia’s 2019 Black Summer bushfires as more than scenery, or disaster-movie spectacle. The fires become a second predator, one that doesn’t care who’s guilty, who’s trapped, or who deserves to make it out.

One of these monsters is almost impossible to find. The other arrives so late that the cowboys have nearly finished their own movie. Rather than weakening Eureka Entertainment’s BEASTS UNLEASHED collection, that shared reluctance to produce the promised creatures becomes part of its appeal. THE BEAST WITH A MILLION EYES and THE BEAST OF HOLLOW MOUNTAIN come from different corners of 1950s genre filmmaking. Both show how imagination, advertising, and limited resources could pull a modest production toward something stranger than expected.

By 1929, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy had already developed the comic partnership that would define the rest of their lives and careers. Stan’s naive confusion, Ollie’s wounded dignity, and their shared ability to turn a minor problem into a spectacular disaster were all firmly in place. LAUREL & HARDY: THE SILENT YEARS gathers nine shorts made as Hollywood was shifting toward sound, capturing the duo at the end of one era without suggesting they needed to change much for the next.

I really had no clue what to expect here. I didn’t know anything about the film going in; all I had seen were the poster and some stills. Revenge stories usually know where they’re headed long before the characters do. IS GOD IS takes a familiar route and drags it through family histories, mythic rage, dark humor, and a whole lot of fire until the path feels less like justice and more like inheritance. Aleshea Harris adapts her own stage play into a film that’s often bold, frequently strange, and carried by two lead performances that understand anger as something more complicated than an action-movie fuel source.

SUGAR COOKIES doesn’t feel like the Troma most viewers think they know. No mutant janitor swinging through radioactive chaos, no splatter-comedy, no self-aware barrage of slime, shouting, and bad taste. This is earlier, stranger (oddly enough), and more patient, the kind of low-budget 1970s erotic thriller that seems to have wandered out of New York’s underground film scene with lipstick on the glass and a knife hidden somewhere nearby.

STARBRIGHT is the kind of movie that makes you wish wanting something badly were enough to make it work. Francesco Lucente’s fantasy adventure has sincerity pouring out of nearly every frame, from its grieving farm girl to its fallen star to its big speeches about hope, faith, and the possibility that light can survive in a broken world. It wants to be sweeping. It wants to be old-fashioned. It wants to make you feel again. That’s admirable, and there are moments where that ambition peeks through. The problem is that the movie keeps mistaking scale for depth and length for emotional weight.

Reviewing a Troma movie by normal standards feels a little like complaining that a haunted house has too many jump scares. At a certain point, the mess is part of it all, and you have to understand that. RISE OF THE SUPER TROMETTES arrives with slime on its shoes, a dirty joke in its pocket, and absolutely no interest in behaving for anyone outside the converted. That doesn’t make it good. The truth is, it’s bad by most measures, yet it also makes it hard to dismiss as nothing.

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.