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BROWNSVILLE BRED anchors us firmly in the lived-in reality of memory, community, and survival. Elaine Del Valle’s debut feature feels less like a conventional movie and more like an act of reclamation — the reshaping of pain, resilience, and cultural identity into a narrative that refuses to compromise its truth. Adapted from Del Valle’s acclaimed stage play and autobiographical novel, and expanded from her SXSW Audience Award-winning short, the film emerges as a raw yet vibrant testament to the power of storytelling born from personal experience.

CHAIN REACTIONS isn’t a “making-of.” It’s a meditation on why a scrappy 1970s horror film keeps rattling around in our collective headspace, and how it continues to shape artists five decades later. Alexandre O. Philippe treats the subject with the same introspective rigor that has become his signature: isolating a foundational text, assembling an eclectic group of icons, and asking not what happened on set, but what the film did—and still does—to our senses, our anxieties, and our art. The result is a confident, idea-forward documentary that’s equal parts criticism, confession, and cinematic séance.

I had heard about this series for years, but this was my first time diving in, so, of course, I had to binge it all! The return trip to Mike White’s luxury pressure cooker trades cabanas for kombucha, repositioning the show’s signature social X-ray inside a Thai wellness resort that promises transcendence while serving the same old human mess. Season 3 doesn’t try to reinvent the series so much as refine its favorite maneuver: assemble combustible personalities, apply the slightest pressure, and watch entitlement dress itself up as enlightenment. The setting may sell serenity, but the show understands that people who book “transformational experiences” tend to arrive pre-transformed into exactly who they will remain.

Few animated shows have survived as many cancellations, revivals, and resurrections as FUTURAMA. After more than two decades, the series continues to prove that it thrives on unpredictability. Season 13 is a confident continuation of the show’s ability to merge science fiction satire with absurd, although mostly family-friendly comedy. It’s a season that dares to be both silly and smart, sometimes struggling, but still delivering a nostalgic yet fresh experience that feels like exactly what fans signed up for.

When the crime world collides with mentorship, the results can be both explosive and surprisingly tender. LONDON CALLING leans into that contradiction with gusto, offering an action-comedy that’s equal parts shootouts, road movie, and unlikely bonding. Directed by Allan Ungar, who previously collaborated with Josh Duhamel, the film aims to deliver entertainment that recalls the buddy movies of the 1980s and 1990s while carving out a contemporary spin.

Awkwardness has long been comedy’s secret weapon, and DOIN’ IT embraces that awkward edge with enthusiasm. Lilly Singh steps into her first leading role on the big screen, playing Maya, a thirty-year-old software engineer who never quite grew out of the shadow of her strict upbringing. What starts as an absurd setup— a virgin suddenly tasked with teaching high school sex education — gradually morphs into something deeper, a story about shame, self-acceptance, and finding one’s voice. The film doesn’t always strike the perfect balance between raunchy gags and genuine commentary, but it has enough personality and honesty to make the experience worthwhile.

DON Q opens with a man who never stopped narrating his life like a legend. Al Quinto’s days are small—errands, conversations, rituals—but in his head they add up to a coronation. He’s convinced he’s the one who can restore Little Italy to a version of itself that probably never existed, the way he imagines. That gap between the story he tells and the one the neighborhood is living is the film’s heartbeat, and it’s where both drama and humor are created.

POCKET PRINCESS on the surface is miniature: stop-motion, threadbare fabrics, papier-mâché edges, and a dollhouse scale that invites you to lean in. The undercurrent is anything but small. Olivia Loccisano utilizes the tactile limits of the medium—visible seams, deliberate roughness, and handmade textures—as an emotional buffer, allowing the film to confront material that many live-action features refuse to touch. That choice isn’t just aesthetic; it’s a thesis. The deception keeps us from flinching long enough to process what the story is actually saying.

There’s “gritty New York,” and then there’s Night of the Juggler—a movie that wears late-’70s/early-’80s NYC like a bruise. The premise is ruthlessly simple: a teen is abducted by a psycho; her father, a hard-charging ex-cop, tears across the city to find her. What lifts it above the logline is the film’s breathless velocity and its tactile sense of place. This is 24 hours as demolition derby: foot chases, cab chases, subway chases—stitched so tightly you barely have time to blink.

THE BETRAYAL begins with a single decision that sets everything else in motion. A loyal warrior is asked to shoulder a false charge of murder to shield his clan from political fallout. He accepts with the understanding that he’ll go into hiding for a year and then be welcomed back once the storm has passed. But what sounds like a temporary sacrifice quickly mutates into a permanent exile. Promises evaporate, protections vanish, and the clan that asked for loyalty quietly abandons him. From that point on, the film is less about one man’s mistake than about how an entire system uses honor as both carrot and weapon.

The best way to approach these companion pieces is to imagine two visits to the same corner—same storefront, same faces drifting in and out—but on different days of the week. One day is all about listening; the next is about letting the room talk. SMOKE is the quiet one: a neighborhood drama that sneaks up on you through ordinary conversation and the small rituals that give people meaning. BLUE IN THE FACE is the loud cousin: faster, looser, full of diversions and drop-ins that feel like a street party. Put together, they celebrate how a place can organize a life, and how a life can reorganize a place.

Sometimes film history gets shaped by accident, and FRANKENSTEIN’S BLOODY TERROR is proof of that. Though the title suggests another spin on Mary Shelley’s creation, this Spanish horror oddity has nothing to do with Frankenstein. Instead, it introduces the character that would define Paul Naschy’s career: Waldemar Daninsky, a doomed nobleman cursed to transform into a werewolf. The bait-and-switch title was a marketing decision for its U.S. release, designed to satisfy distributors who wanted something with “Frankenstein” and “Terror” in the name. The result is a film that has long confused casual viewers but has delighted cult fans, especially now that Kino Lorber has brought it back in a new 3-D restoration.

The premise is loaded: an undocumented man on the edge of removal bumps into the friend he hasn’t figured out how to forgive. From there, the film doesn’t sprint so much as strings its way through a minefield of deadlines, affidavits, and unspoken history. The stakes are public and timely—immigration court, paperwork that can erase a life with a rubber stamp—but the movie stays resolutely personal. It treats policy as weather: always present, occasionally catastrophic, but most felt in the way people adjust their plans and measure their hopes.

LOS GOLFOS doesn’t ask for nostalgia or redemption; it asks you to sit with a city that never noticed these kids until it needed to punish them. Carlos Saura’s first feature drops you in Madrid’s postwar margins, where a brotherhood of teens drifts between odd jobs, minor scores, and the kind of plans that feel big only because the wallet is empty. The script is deception, raising money so one of them can enter a bullfighting competition, the one “profession” that looks like a ladder out of poverty. The simplicity is the point. When survival is the day’s only plot, even a small goal becomes epic.

The promise here is simple and potent: two delinquents grow into power together and pay for it together. FLAMING BROTHERS doesn’t chase reinvention so much as it hunts for sincerity inside a well-worn outline—loyalty vs. ambition, brotherhood vs. survival. What makes it click, even when it stumbles, is the alchemy between a star in full bloom and a script that’s quietly sketching the bones of themes its writer would later obsess over.