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What does it mean to watch a band at full strength when you already know what they’ll become decades later? LET’S SPEND THE NIGHT TOGETHER doesn’t just document the Rolling Stones’ 1981 U.S. tour; it captures a rare moment when scale, stamina, and self-mythology briefly aligned without fully calcifying into legacy management.

What does it mean to help someone you love when the cost of that help is never defined? HONEY BUNCH has that question deeply embedded in its premise, then spends nearly two hours refusing to let the audience resolve it. Rather than positioning itself as a puzzle-box thriller or a pure body-horror production, the film commits to something more emotionally destabilizing: a love story in which devotion is both the pulse and the exposure.

What happens when Broadway’s most enduring myths are frozen in celluloid, then revisited decades later, not as nostalgia pieces but as living documents of performance, desire, and contradiction? That’s the challenge at the heart of BROADWAY ON THE BIG SCREEN, a six-film collection that doesn’t ask you to love every note or every choice, but instead invites you to sit with how wildly different these adaptations are in tone, ambition, and intent.

What happens when a way of life depends on being alone, but survival increasingly demands connection? THE LAST PUESTERO doesn’t try to frame that question as a philosophical exercise. It observes it unfolding in real time through the daily routines, silences, and contradictions embodied by Adonai Jara, a gaucho (a skilled, historically nomadic horseman and cattle herder of the South American pampas (grasslands)) stationed at a remote Patagonian outpost where tradition still holds, but only barely.

What happens when a nation explains its violence through myth instead of responsibility? THE HOLE, 309 DAYS TO THE BLOODIEST TRAGEDY doesn’t ask that question civilly. It drags it into the open, smears it with blood, and dares the audience to look away. Hanung Bramantyo’s film isn’t content to simply unsettle its audience; it wants to indict, and it understands that horror is often the most honest language for doing so.

What does it mean to be American when the definition keeps changing depending on where you stand, how you sound, and who gets to decide? FIL-AM starts with that issue quietly embedded in its bones rather than declared outright, and it trusts the audience to feel the tension long before it names it. Writer-director Ralph Torrefranca frames his short not as a thesis statement about Filipino American identity, but as a lived-in memory shaped by displacement, resentment, and reluctant adaptation.

What makes a neighborhood feel safe, and how quickly does that illusion fall apart once doubt creeps in? The ’Burbs takes that question and stretches it across eight tightly constructed episodes, using comedy not as a release valve but as a delivery system for discomfort. This isn’t a lazy remake, nor is it a nostalgia trap desperate to coast on the past. Instead, it’s a deliberate reworking of an idea that still feels uncomfortably relevant: the belief that danger always comes from somewhere else.

What does a home-invasion thriller owe its audience when it’s built almost entirely on escalation? MISDIRECTION answers that question with a focus on nostalgia while creating its own path forward, if not always with depth. This is a lean, tightly wound genre piece that understands its limitations and chooses momentum over overstatement, even when that choice occasionally exposes thin character shading or narrative shortcuts.

How long can grief sit inside a person before it starts shaping everything around them? THE ARBORIST builds its entire identity around that question, using folk horror not as a gimmick but as a framework for emotional decay. This isn’t a film interested in jump scares or cheap provocation. Instead, it settles into the dirt below you and waits, allowing unease to accumulate, as rot does, slowly and invisibly, until it becomes impossible to ignore.

How do you revisit a work that already reshaped how history is told without diminishing its impact on the world? THE HELL OF AUSCHWITZ: MAUS BY ART SPIEGELMAN approaches this challenge carefully, refusing to position itself as a definitive statement on Maus and instead framing the graphic novel as a living object that continues to provoke, educate, and agitate select people decades after its publication.

What happens when a system designed to shape young minds becomes a hunting ground instead? TEACHER’S PET takes a premise that feels uncomfortably plausible and refuses to treat it as a metaphor or exaggeration. Writer/director Noam Kroll’s psychological thriller frames the academic environment not as a refuge, but as a system built on trust, authority, and access. These very conditions make it vulnerable to exploitation.

What happens to a sense of self when every hour of the day becomes organized around keeping another human alive? REMOVAL OF THE EYE begins from that muted panic, not as a conceptual exercise, but as lived reality, captured in real time by filmmakers Artemis Shaw and Prashanth Kamalakanthan as they document the first year of parenthood without the comfort of distance or hindsight. This isn’t a film about learning lessons or arriving with an understanding of clarity. It’s about survival, and the fragile hope that meaning will emerge once the exhaustion lifts.

What happens when permission becomes emotional leverage? BIGHT, with that question hanging in the air, spells out its consequences, positioning itself not as provocation but as an uncomfortable examination of how easily desire can be weaponized when boundaries are treated as suggestions rather than safeguards.

What does it mean to owe your life to a sacrifice you never asked for? HOME explores that unspoken question and allows it to echo across decades, cultures, and roles without ever demanding an answer. Marijana Janković’s feature debut draws directly from lived experience, but it resists the trappings of autobiography as self-explanation. Instead, the film positions memory as something fragmented and unresolved, shaped as much by absence as by presence.

What happens when doing the right thing for your child means reopening wounds you never fully processed yourself? JIMPA places the core of its story around that uneasy question, placing a mother, her nonbinary teenager, and her aging gay father in the same emotional sphere and refusing to let any of them escape without consequence. Rather than building toward a single answer, director/co-writer Sophie Hyde’s deeply personal film settles into the discomfort of competing truths, asking how love, autonomy, and responsibility coexist when family history refuses to stay quiet.